Six months ago the location-based augmented reality game Pokémon Go was released. Developed in partnership by Niantic and Google, it is really a data mining type of game developed for iOS and Android devices, where players can nab the historic Pokémon in their own local environments. The marriage of geospatial and augmented reality is a gamechanger for the geospatial industry, evidenced by just how many people can be reached with over 100 million Android downloads in the first month of its entry onto the market.
The recent presidential election in the U.S. has created so much uncertainty that it is hard to know what the future of any industry will be. For the first time, I feel there is no point in making predictions for the New Year for the geospatial industry, unless one is an insider with special knowledge of the winds of change.
Amazingly, 80 percent of all business data contains a location component, yet most organizations are not using it or don’t know how. On Nov. 15, Boundless expanded its open GIS solution into an ecosystem of geo-aware open source data, content and expertise that makes the latest GIS data easily available to developers and analysts in both public and private sectors.
It’s difficult not to be inspired when attending the Bentley Year In Infrastructure Conference, with so many talented professionals gathered to show off their infrastructure projects.
Innovation in Rail and Transit Winner: Bandedamark – New Line, Copenhagen-Ringsted, Copenhagen Capital Region, Denmark. Image Courtesy of Bentley Systems
While the election plods on, behind the scenes there is a lot of geospatial technology being used to come up with various polls, real-time election maps, and determine election polling places that are helping people get to the polls and assist in the results reporting. Candidates, local and state governments are all trying to leverage the latest geographic and mapping solutions to better inform and motivate citizens, thereby changing election outcomes.
Hexagon Safety & Infrastructure acquired GISquadrat GmbH of Vienna, Austria. The acquisition is aimed at enhancing Hexagon’s geospatial, cloud and mobile solutions for governments and utility providers in Europe as well as bringing in more than 300 customers and thousands of users into the Hexagon fold.
Network attacks of all kinds are on the rise, and it is imperative that organizations deploy a proactive, defense-in-depth strategy that addresses all layers of the network.
LGS Innovations recognizes the importance of network-level software integrity as a component of the larger network security ecosystem. With a dedication to the evolution of enterprise support born from extensive experience deploying secure, mission-critical switching solutions, LGS Innovations offers CodeGuardian™: a solution that hardens network devices at both the software source code and binary executable levels to enhance overall network security.
Through a partnership with Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise (ALE), worldwide enterprise communications organization, the LGS CodeGuardian solution has been applied to ALE’s OmniSwitch family of products, to harden these network devices at both the software source code and binary executable levels within. David Lau, software engineer manager, Product, Solutions and Applications, said the company has a long heritage with Bell Labs. They recently purchased Axios, a traditional networking group.
What was the most exciting attraction in the Exhibit Hall at the Esri User Conference 2016? Hard to say, as the 14,000+ attendees flocked to see the plethora of exciting exhibits from third party companies, and of course the numerous demonstrations of Esri products and services. Drones, imagery, field solutions, utilities, navigation, spatially enabled business apps, data management, all vied for an audience at the conference. Esri’s Drone2Map was a huge hit, and Collector for ArcGIS was a product that garnered an enormous amount of attention at its demonstrations and technical workshops, offering the promise of providing mapping to professionals in the field workforce that would in turn, improve the accuracy and currency of spatial data.
The question: what do we do with all this data? Is one that really runs parallel with the theme of this year’s Esri User Conference held in San Diego, entitled, “GIS Enabling a Smarter World.”