Autodesk Hooks up With Pitney Bowes Software (No, Really!)

With no warning from either side comes the bizarre news that Autodesk, specifically the infrastrucure/BIM part is hooking up with Pitney Bowes "to help infrastructure owners and architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) organizations make more informed decisions and drive greater efficiencies across the plan, design, build, manage lifecycle of infrastructure." 

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“Give me the Data” ... PBBI’s Geosk Launches

"Customers aren't saying, 'give me the data in this format; they are saying give me the data!'," says Scott Robinson, Pitney Bowes Business Insight's (PBBI), Director, Global Data Products.  "As we start this concept of making the data on demand ... we are going to market with the notion of Geosk as a fulfillment platform."

It's always been a dilemma for most geospatial professionals to have immediate access to data. Unlike the 1980's when data was delivered on tape or even the early 90's when data was delivered on tens of CD's, today it is unacceptable not to have immediate access. With cloud storage offering better options to host larger data sets, business models are emerging that allows users to take down data on demand.

DigitalGlobe's ImageConnect, GeoEye's EyeQ, and Esri's ArcGIS Online are all offering options for taking down data on demand. But PBBI wants to take it a step further by putting an emphasis on content management. "The area that we think as potentially big opp. Is in content management…where is data that we purchased; where is that project data that we did; where is that content that we purchased, said Robinson."

PBBI's technology stack is comprised of WeoGeo forming the backbone with Safe Software's FME serving to extract data as needed by the client. The ability to deliver data in exactly the right format and extents was key. Clients want to immediately know what data is available and can they see it. PBBI's objective was to cut the cycle times for getting data to the customer.  In addition, Robinson sees PBBI on a metadata journey to provide clients with value and currency because he believes it forms the backbone of search.

With Geosk, officially launched last week, their data as a service (DaaS) platform, PBBI is taking their library of data and offering a one-stop shop for demographic and business data. But Robinson sees some hurdles ahead.  "The challenge will be how we evolve this. Today it is a download model; can it evolve to support a web app and not deal with any locally stored data." Robinson thinks this is the next wave and the ability to accessing hosted data and rent it. Today the ability to "cookie-cut" only the data you want from a certain area in place now as is per unit pricing. Licensing is always going to be a challenge but PBBI thinks it has thought the problem through and believes it has a leg up on the competition. 

10,000 Letters for #SpeakUpforGeography and other Education GIS News

The recent campaign to send 10,000 letters to Congress via the Speak Up for Geography effort succeeded! As of Friday night, Nov 18, the end of the window, I saw "10,181 letter sent so far." Whether that will get the Geography is Fundamental Act passed and funded by Congress is unclear.

- Speak Up for Geography

GIS Day (while not explicitly sponsored by Esri alone - sponsors include "National Geographic Society, the Association of American Geographers, University Consortium for Geographic Information Science, the United States Geological Survey, The Library of Congress, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, and Esri") tends to have many Esri sites involved. But a UK PBBI site (with PBBI sponsorship) hosted an event, too.

The good folks at the Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council sure did.  They hosted a very successful event at the council offices with PBBI acting as a sponsor.  The event was kicked off by Phil Coppard OBE, the Barnsley Council Chief Executive and also included presentations from members of the GIS team including Andrew d’Andilly and Riley Marsden.  Topics covered included Ordnance Survey data usage, applied examples of GIS usage in the council and a preview of the new Barnsley Property Account application (yes, this application is using MapInfo Stratus, of course!).  PBBI contributed to the agenda by hosting a side track of technical sessions on MapInfo Professional and MapInfo Manager. 

- PBBI Stratus Blog

Ed Parsons of Google spent time with Steve Liang 's class at the University of Calgary last week. Of note in Liang's writeup:

On Tuesday, November 15, Ed attended my Design and Implementation of Geospatial Information Systems class at the University of Calgary as a guest lecturer. His talk was informal, which gave students plenty of time to interact with him. They were curious to hear how often Google updates its street view data, how it handles privacy issues, and about the relationship between black helicopters and Google Earth. One student asked Ed if he needs an MSc degree to get a job at Google, and was told that everyone - including the receptionists – are expected to have a postgraduate degree. Apparently, Google requires every employee to be an independent thinker, to be self-managed and motivated, and to be able to identify and find solutions to any problem. The training experienced through a master’s degree helps to develop these skills.

Ed also described Google’s chaotic management style - bosses give few instructions to their employees, and challenge them to determine their own responsibilities and tasks to follow. The company is willing to tolerate such ambiguity and chaos because that's how innovative ideas are developed. Ed said that on his first day at Google, he was given a box that had one Macbook and one piece of paper listing the necessary information for him to set up his IT account. That was it. It was his responsibility to figure out his daily responsibilities. This was a fascinating insight into a company that I am sure many of my students would love to work for.

- Cybera Blog

Takeaways from PBBI Road Show

Update: PBBI has requested I change all references to MapInfo 11 to "“MapInfo Professional v11.0.”  I have.

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The Boston PBBI road show held Tuesday and hosted by Mitchell Geographics of Maine was packed. We filled every seat. No, I don't know why. Nearly everyone I spoke to had attended in past years, so there must have been some newbies in there somewhere!

We saw presentations on MapInfo Professional v11.0, AnySite and Spectrum. Here's what I took away from each one:

MapInfo Professional v11.0

Geosk, MapInfo's implementation of WeoGeo which offers up most (and soon all of) MapInfo's data products for "clip and ship" delivery is live today Sadly, the Internet connection was weak and a full demo was not really possible. The common question seemed to be "Exactly what data is in there?" suggesting the attendees are not too familiar with the company's data catalog. Also demoed: MapInfo Manager the new data cataloging/metadata tool. 

AnySite

This is a tool for site selection and territory management.  At the event I understood that the Gadberry Group had taken over all devleopment efforts. I read online that Gadbry Group will host a replacement online offering as of the end of the year. It'll be called Magnify. I'm confused now as to exactly who is doing what. (name, links to partner corrected)

Spectrum

Spectrum is the company's "extract transform and load" tool to perform data hygiene, geocoding and the like. We saw how to develop a service using a visual developement environment (I thought of FME Workbench). I heard WSDL, REST and SOAP in the same sentence, something I'd somehow avoided for the last year or so. As Will Mitchell, president of Mitchell Geo, correctly stated, this tool is not for everyone, but clearly it is for some. Yep, some folks were taking furious notes and their eyes lit up. 

The only bad news: everyone noticed that Moshe Benyamin, the product manager we've seen every year, was not present. We confirmed this week (via LinkedIn he took a new job. He's now Product Management Director at Autotask (not Autodesk). It's an IT company. Best of luck, Moshe!

MapInfo Manager 1.2 Near Release

MapInfo Manager version 1.2 is now complete and will be available shortly. New features and enhancements include harvesting of PostGIS, harvesting of non spatial formats, greater flexibility, security and localised into Danish and Finnish.

Still wondering what MapInfo Manager is?

MapInfo Manager enables organizations to build, maintain and manage centralized catalogs of spatial data enabling easy search, access and utilization of data –enterprise wide. Open standards based MapInfo Manager is suitable for a wide variety of potential users. Tightly integrated with MapInfo Professional, MapInfo Manager is part of the PBBI Enterprise Location Intelligence suite.

- PBBI Stratus Blog