Wednesday, July 1. 2009

Citysearch wants you to know...

This from Mike Francesconi at Citysearch:

Citysearch and IAC are on the hunt for a killer, local mobile/web application for our site Sidewalk.com. We recently announced the launch of our “right here, right now” contest to find a brilliant idea for a local mobile/web app that focuses on making life easiern.

The creator of the winning application will win a $10,000 grand prize, and possibly, the opportunity to develop and manage a new business venture with up to $1 million dollars in funding and receive an equity stake in the new Sidewalk.com venture, and access to the Citysearch publisher network allowing them to instantly monetize traffic.

Check out all the details on the contest at sidewalk.com and follow our updates at twitter.com/sidewalkdotcom

Thursday, June 25. 2009

CartoVista No Flash in the Pan

I got a demo the other day from Dany Bouchard, President of DBx GEOMATICS, a  Quebec-based company, about their product CartoVista. If I translated this correctly, the product means, “map view” and that’s exactly what the product does. It is not a desktop GIS but renders data from other sources using Adobe Flash to provide rich data visualization. If you didn’t know better you would think you were looking at a business intelligence software dashboard (charts, graphics, data window, etc.) that has been augmented with a map window. The strength of this product is clearly its ability to do thematic mapping in a much more visually appealing and cartographically pleasing (albeit in a digital sense) manner.

The company is a Pitney Bowes Business Insight (PBBI) business partner so it works very easily with .TAB data. However, the product does a very slick job of updating each data window (chart, graph, etc.) as the user selects or zooms to a particular region. Labeling of data is very good and the dynamic analysis tools are extremely useful. Version 2.0 of the product is just now being released and it features customization using Flex and Java Script. The image below provides an example of some of the data windows you can open to display your data but it doesn’t do it justice. You need to see the product in action. You can download and evaluation copy. Try it out.

Monday, June 22. 2009

Real Estate, Real Estate, Real Estate….Wait…Parcels, Parcels, Parcels

First American Spatial Solutions (FASS) will be announcing this week that they have taken a huge step in creating the largest private, national parcel database. The product released today is called National Cadastre. The new product captures “parcel information and points” from more than 120 million parcels in approximately 2000 of the over 3600 counties in the U.S. (see image at right; click for larger graphic). In conjunction with the company’s PxPoint geocoder, clients can now achieve highly accurate parcel-level geocoding.

Now the big question. Why has a private company decided that they wanted to create a nationwide cadastre? Isn’t this something that the national government should have spearheaded? Or, have the problems associated with the fiefdoms of local government necessitated that only a private company could have got it done? When they first started, there were many questions about why FASS was doing this, according to Scott Little, executive vice president. Some agencies acted defensively and questioned FASS’ objectives. One of the things that FASS has been doing over the last two years is working on multiple committees in the government considering a national cadastre. Recent discussions have changed over time where it is now a very positive relationship once it was understood that FASS’ parent company could maintain and update the information over time.

How do you maintain a national cadastre?
FASS has individuals working to collect data in every jurisdiction in the country. That’s been the case for many years as sister company, First American Title, has become the premier title company in the country. First American has been collecting and maintaining parcel data in local communities well before the company even thought about turning these data into a spatial solution. For many years, applications in title searches, flood data, tax information, and other data associated with property ownership have been captured. According the Little, the infrastructure has been in place through its corporate affiliates. FASS is now able to bring spatial and database capabilities as a value added service to both its internal affiliates and outside clients.

How do you price parcels?
Pricing is another normal process within First American. In the mortgage and insurance markets, those industries have daily requests for information related to valuation and risk.  Pricing related to value added information is nothing new to a company that regularly deals with thousands of daily transactions.

Applications
Apart from the typical applications in insurance, banking, real estate, and tax, the availability of a national parcel database could have the same impact as we saw when global satellite imagery was released through Google Earth. We just don’t know what some entrepreneurs might do when certain spatial data become available. But, we are about to find out.

Wednesday, June 17. 2009

Intergraph Integrates Full Motion Video and GIS

One of the more interesting pieces of technology that Intergraph is bringing to market is called Motion Video Exploitation. The basic operation is to take georegistered, full motion video (think UAVs like Predators) and embed the video onto a map. This is not showing video in a separate window; this product actually “fuses” the video onto a map. It brings DVR-like technology to support viewing and analyzing motion video from within the GeoMedia environment. The user can annotate the video from reports; correlate annotations to the time of specific events; auto enhance motion video for analysis (i.e. contrast, brightness, stabilization, etc.); automatically segment georeferenced motion video using vector input as a guide and convert the segments into mosaic images; create a buffer zone around the area of interest for automatic segmentation; and mosaicking.

This is a pretty cool product and its ripe for military and intelligence applications. It’s in an “alpha” stage now and it will hopefully be in "beta" by the GEOINT conference in San Antonio in October.

World Events, “Numbers” Validate Intergraph’s Wise Vision and Strategy

Today, I and other trade press members had a chance to sit down with Halsey Wise, CEO and Reid French, COO of Intergraph. What I came away with was that Wise’s strategy and leadership to “laser focus” the company in areas where he believed the company could be successful have paid off. And that’s not based on my opinion; let's take a look at the numbers: from 2003 he’s taken the company from $17 million in profits to $180 million (2008) and now has $240 million in cash reserves. It’s not often that a CEO get’s to look back at their body of work and validate their plan. More often than not, CEO’s are fired if quarterly results don’t match up. Many things have helped Wise to succeed but he was brought in to make the company more profitable, which he did, and then he took it private. Whether that was part of the plan or not, I don’t know, but getting out from under the quarterly pressure of delivering ever-better numbers to analysts allowed him and the company to let the vision play out.

Now seeking to enter the next phase or “After Next” part of the “Now-Next-After Next” plan that he began back in 2004, this strategy benefits from two world events that are in play. First, national security issues and two wars still occupy significant portions of government budgets, especially during the Bush years. Second, the global economic recovery efforts are pouring money into infrastructure projects and with Intergraph’s strength in process, power, and marine (PP&M), and focus on security, government and infrastructure (SG&I), the lightening rod issues of smart grid, and “shovel ready” projects are a match.

Another success factor has been Wise’s tactical move to rely almost entirely on a direct sales model and to de-emphasize a partner channel.  From a technical standpoint, where many Intergraph solutions rely on some systems integration efforts, this approach has worked. Wise noted that his competitors have tended to rely more on a third party channel of smaller companies and with the software industry in a downturn, many of these smaller firms are the first ones to get hit in a recession.

The company has not been without its disappointments and challenges. It, too, has had to lay off people recently and it still must follow through on its plan to take some of the best pieces of software code to eventually create a common architecture for its products. But Wise has taken the company through reorganization and "right-sizing" and continues to emphasize the strategy of sticking to specific vertical market specialization. And, many of the employees with whom I spoke this week say, “it’s a different company.”

SDI and Intergraph

The topic gets more attention in Europe because of the INSPIRE initiative than it does in the U.S., but discussing how software will support projects related to developing a spatial data infrastructure (SDI) are driving some of Intergraph’s product development. Much like the emphasis the company put into supporting the birth of the Open Geospatial Consortium from a policy and standards position, and also the adoption of Oracle Spatial as preferred data management platform as a marketing wedge with the competition, Intergraph is pushing hard to promote an architecture that will support SDI. To be sure, the move is related to Intergraph’s continued focus on open standards. However, some of the specifications of INSPIRE have been written into the laws of the European Union such that countries must follow these standards. So, the company made sure they staked out their position and emphasized this to its user conference attendees