Wednesday, August 12. 2009

The Story of an ArcPAD Extension (developed in 3 months)

This from Marc Cheeves coverage of the ESRI UC and Survey and Engineering Summit in The American Surveyor:

For years, ESRI has pleaded with software manufacturers to create a direct link from ArcPad to the ESRI geodatabase, ArcServer. To that end, he mentioned the new JAVAD GNSS ArcPad extension for handhelds. ArcPad is one of ESRI's field tools, and is used to gather GIS locations.

At the recent ESRI Developers Conference in Palm Springs, Javad Ashjaee met with Dangermond and Jones. On a napkin, they developed the workflow, and in three months, Javad's software engineers--along with an ESRI software engineer sent to Moscow from Egypt--kicked out the new extension. ESRI is very excited about this development because it means, for the first time, office people can benefit, real-time, from what is going on in the field.

Two things strike me about this story. First, if ESRI was really begging for a connection from ArcPAD to the ESRI geodatabase, would that not be a good reason to speed up development of that promised API? Second, some things do start on a napkin and with the right people can get to "market" (at least for a demo) in 3 months.

Tuesday, August 4. 2009

Podcast: In the News - State Stimulus Sites and User Generated Corrections

This week two news items peaked our interest: Good Jobs First, a Washington research center, released a report giving mediocre grades to state websites that aim to be transparent about the distribution of federal stimulus dollars. One of the criteria considered? Maps. Second, is there a trend in local news related to sat nav? Is there a move away from "two techs capturing data" stories to how users can get involved with collection and update?

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Monday, July 27. 2009

GCN Tackles FusionX/Fusion Core Solution

FusionX was announced at the last November (press release), and renamed and relaunched at the ESRI User Conference (press release) as Fusion Core Solution, but neither ESRI nor Microsoft seemed to do much outreach on the offering, aimed at Fusion Centers. GCN has a write-up with this interesting quote suggesting why it came to be:

“We tried a year and a half ago to integrate ArcGIS with Microsoft SharePoint but failed,” Brian Egnitz, GIS program manager for the Massachusetts State Police, which hosts Massachusetts' Commonwealth Fusion Center.

- GCN

Tuesday, July 21. 2009

Podcast: First Half of 2009: State of the Industry

We are halfway through 2009. Directions Media editors have been to about a dozen user and specialty conferences in the U.S. and around the world, including ESRI's huge event last week. What themes are emerging? What can we tease out about the future? Our editors try to make sense of five key themes they've identified.


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Monday, July 20. 2009

Top Tweets from Friday #ESRIUC

Some of the more interesting tweets from Friday at ESRI UC:

UC is over. Recovering from exhaustion. Now the real work begins....but where to start?
@geoparadigm

Continue reading "Top Tweets from Friday #ESRIUC"

Friday, July 17. 2009

#ESRIUC: A good show for exhibitors?

Most every user conference and other major conference that I've attended this year...and I've been to many of them (GITA, PBBI's user conference, Intergraph's user conference, ESRI FEDUC, Map World Forum [India], Geodiffusion)...has experienced the pinch of the recession. The attendance has been reduced by as much as 30% in some cases putting extra pressure on exhibitors to thoroughly evaluate the return on investment of their sponsorship both now and in the future.

With respect to the ESRI User Conference this past week in San Diego, I heard mostly glowing reports from the exhibitors with whom I spoke. While the number of attendees "seemed" less, especially during the Map Gallery on Monday evening, the numbers both reported and rumored of the attendance was still exceptionally high...probably on the order of 12,000+. That number was perhaps flat or a little below from previous years. But this year, flat is good.

I thought one exhibitor put it well: "The noise was gone" referring to the fact that the leads they received "exceeded expectations" and were of a high quality. This was echoed by several exhibitors. Another exhibitor told me, "I gave my team a goal of 500 leads and by Wednesday we had 560." So, all in all, the investment in the UC paid off this year.

And for some reason, everyone was jumping on the bandwagon of giving rides in GPS-enabled vans. Topcon, Trimble, and NAVTEQ were canvassing attendees to show off their technology. (see images below)

Hard-working NAVTEQ marketing guy