A GeoVating success story

It’s a few months since the GeoVation Awards.

Did you know? Plaques for Handel and Jimi Hendrix stand side by side on 25 and 23 Brook Street, Mayfair, London,

Dave Coughlan was one of the winning finalists with his Plaque Guide concept, now with funding from GeoVation he has got his site up and running and if I may say so it is pretty neat. I admit a bit of bias here as my friends at Geo.me, another GeoVation finalist, helped him to build it.

With help from some of the press wizards at OS Dave has been in the news a bit and even got interviewed by the beeb (look out for that one in the next few days). Now what he needs is a bit of help filling in the 600 odd plaques to complete London before moving on to other cities in the UK and even spreading his net wider. Rumour has it that this could be an engaging way for school kids to explore local history and personalities,  the thought of junior crowdsourcers learning, mapping and helping the project sounds like a lot of fun to me. I wonder how long it will take to complete London?

So GeoVator No. 1 is off and running, congratulations to Dave Coughlan, the GeoVation Team and Judges (good choice guys). Next up will be the big launch coming from the Geography Collective and Mission Explore, I think they still have some places at the launch if you are interested contact them. I am also looking forward to hearing what MaxiMap have managed to achieve with their award in the near future.

Not a bad start for GeoVation, I am pretty chuffed to have been involved in helping get it off the ground.

The next GeoVation Challenge “How can Britain feed itself?” has started, if you have an idea hop over to the Challenge

Geobabble, football, blinded by the light

Who says you cannot mix football and geo? Certainly not Alun Jones and the team at GeoInformation Group. Today the guys behind the UKMap hosted a day of geostuff at the Emirates, yes that right geobabble at the home of my beloved Arsenal. How good is that? I will tell you – it was exceedingly good Mr Kipling.

It was very strange to come out of the Arsenal tube station (others please note we are the only football club to have a station named after them, there is something about “place” in that but not for today) at 8.30 in the morning and walk up to the ground with no one else around. Usually there are at least 50,000 others there.

There were nearly 200 people in attendance for a day of presentations from the varied sponsors (look at the GI website for more details). Big respect to GI Group for putting these events on all round the country for free and also to the sponsors/presenters for not going down the yawny sales push route. OK polite stuff over ……… now the georant!

This was a conference of largely public sector (aka Local Govt) users listening and long term industry people presenting. Just about every presenter had to get in several references to Google, at least one mention of Bing, a slide with the OpenStreetMap logo and a map screenshot, a picture of an iPhone, a mention of the power of the crowd or was it the cloud, a bit of StreetView and liberal use of the words open and free. I am sure you get my drift. Now you might think that is a good thing, and so would I, but I got the sense that most presenters were in the “oh shit, look what’s coming!” mode rather than having any ideas about how they were going to embrace these changes and create new value for their clients (or are they soon to be ex-clients?). Without being perjorative, oh heck why not stir it up a bit – you don’t become cool just by quoting the names of the companies that could be eating your lunch in the next few years. Hence my reference to blinded by the light (startled rabbits and headlights in case you are still not with me).

(c) Michael J Hunter http://www.michaeljhunter.com/

Now you might think that was an uncharacteristically acid rant from me. Truth is I was pissed off. There I was to do my AGI Foresight summary – GI in 2015. I had savagely edited a 40 minute talk down to 20 minutes and long before my slot came up, just before the end, every point that I had wanted to make and all of the opens, frees, GYM’s etc had been flogged to death and no chance to reshape the deck.

On the positive side my message that there is a perfect storm blowing through geo brought about by the conjunction of social, economic and technological change and  that geobusinesses and geoprofessionals need to adapt or die had been well and truly hammered home.

So my summary of the challenges facing UK Geo was:

“So what are the key challenges for the UK GeoCommunity? The foresight report offers quite a long list, these are my personal choices:

• Discarding the location-specific baggage and enter the mainstream
• Building a skill set that enables us to provide context and understanding as geo goes more and more mainstream, we will need people who can answer the questions “so what does that mean then?” or “where in my business process can I improve outcomes through the application of location and how?”
• Finding ways of ensuring consumers can manage and understand the issues surrounding location privacy

• Finding business models that respond to the challenge of free
• New entrants will seize the opportunity to fuse the geoweb and social media – established incumbents will need to react or die;
• Developing the role of location information in socially significant applications, such as participatory democracy, mega city planning as well as consumer applications;
• And last but not least finding ways to communicate with the 50% of end users who don’t understand map”

And you can read through the whole slide deck and notes here

A great event GeoInformation, thanks very much for inviting me to speak. Got to catch up with a load of old friends and managed to show geo.me to quite a few people with very encouraging responses. Feels as if geo.me may be a right time and right place adventure, but more of that later.

The back channel was fairly quiet at this event, not a lot of geotwitterati in attendance but there are a few particularly good ones from Martin Daly which you can scan through here

geo.me

Over the last two years I have become convinced that there is a big opportunity to build a professional quality business on top of the API’s provided by Google, Bing and of course OpenStreetMap to serve mainstream clients in public sector and commercial markets who want more than a quick mashup. Sort of neo stuff for some more traditional clients.

So amidst all of the networking, consulting, conferences and other activities I have been on the lookout for a geostartup that had a solid technical capability and a realistic business model. Yes you can probably guess I believe I have found just such an opportunity. I have joined geo.me Solutions as their chairman and an investor.

geo.me have a very neat platform that makes it simple to publish client’s content on any of the major mapping services and leverage the unique capabilities of each service, I have dubbed it a geoContent Management System (have to see whether geoCMS catches on). They offer some very elegant interfaces and ways of visualising data which are particularly interesting as all of this free and open data becomes available and the challenges of “derived data” diminish (hopefully).

It’s fun to be working with a geostartup and I cannot think of a better time to be launching a cloud based geo-business – exciting times ahead.

As a taster have a look at this UK General Election Map which shows geotagged tweets with the hashtag #ge2010 or any of the other trending election tags which are near to you, it also has the latest OS OpenData constituency boundaries and some feeds from the Guardian’s Politics API. Not finished yet and probably never will be but it will interesting to see whether the twitterati are in any way indicative of the broader electorate as the results start to come in on Thursday night.