GeoTech Center Announces Winners of 2012 National Geospatial Technology Skills Competition

The top three:

Bill Vosti, San Diego Mesa College (1st) (round 2 video)
Joshua Nolan, Gainseville State, Georgia (2nd)
Laurance Armour, Central New Mexico Community College (3rd)

Other finalists

Jennifer Lewis-Fowler, Central NM Community College
James Norton, Bismarck State College
Cassie Tambly,  Gainseville State, Georgia

I had to agree with the other judges (I was one of them) in selecting Mr. Vosti's presentation. His Bermuda Triangle and Hurricanes - Correlation? An ArcGIS Analysis was the most memorable and he seemed genuinely interested in his topic.
 

Something I Didn’t Expect to See at EsriUC

Traditional Arabic Coffee Service in the Map Gallery on Tuesday afternoon.

Google Earth Does Landsat, Too

We’re working with the USGS and Carnegie Mellon University, to make parts of this enormous collection [Landsat archive] of imagery available to the public in timelapse videos of the Earth's surface. With them you can travel through time, from 1999-2011, to see the transformation of our planet. Whether it’s deforestation in the Amazon, urban growth in Las Vegas or the difference in snow coverage between the seasons. 

- Lat Long Blog

Digging into the ArcGIS Viewers

I was lucky enough to talk to Jeff Jackson who demonstrated the new line of ArcGIS Viewers during the plenary. First off, he agreed with me that the Viewers moniker is perhaps not the best because in fact these configurable, native software packages can do a lot more than just view data. They can, as he noted, do editing (perhaps not out of the box, but with developer additions and or in later releases) and whole lot more.

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ArcGIS Online is Not the Answer to Every Question

I am the first to admit the communications from Esri over the past year or two regarding ArcGIS Online has come down to a single idea. ArcGIS Online is the answer to every question. It addresses data silos, simplifies service publishing, makes map and app creation easy, provides great basemaps, offers free and subscription accounts, unites enterprises and more. The plenary at Esri UC seemed to reinforce this idea. Jack Dangermond’s off-hand comment during the morning session, “You don’t have to buy this, but you should” seemed to seal the vision.

But when you dig a bit deeper and talk with Esri staffers involved in user implementations, they are bit more circumspect. Further, if you fear that committing to a subscription account means you will be left to fend for yourself and burn through your first stack of credits, that’s not the case.

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