A couple of weeks back I was invited to talk to the graduate class at the Arup University. Arup offer a great study program for their staff that leads to an MSc in GIS, this was the final part of the program when the students come from around the world for a final week of workshops and talks. I thought I would be talking to about 10-15 students, in the event Ewan had publicised the talk within Arup and there were about 70 people in the room plus 4 offices videoconferenced in from around the world. These were GI techy folk, in the language that we are not using any more this was deep paleo territory, it was good that I had prepared a bullet free slide deck with some video to snazz it up.
3 years ago I was on their side of the fence and rewatching this presentation made me think about how different life would have been if I had not had the resources and opportunity to leave MapInfo when I did. Most of the stuff I talked about will be well known by many readers but 3 years ago it either didn’t exist or was barely heard of, certainly the majority of people working in a mainstream GI company were not thinking about this stuff and did not see it as impinging on their business or careers – I bet they do now.
The guys at Arup had really ace AV for my talk, so if you are interested, sit back and enjoy the show (the Q&A at the end wasn’t miked up very well but you can work out the questions from my answers). There are bigups in here for OpenStreetMap, itoWorld, Ushahidi, the Copenhagen Bicycle, Waze, Google (of course) and a littleup for geo.me
Thinking outside of the bounding box from steven feldman on Vimeo.
Isn’t Vimeo wonderful? Doesn’t even blink at a 45 minute video while youtube lets you upload the whole lot before telling you it is too long! #bloodyfail
Thanks to Ewan Peters at Arup for inviting me.
One thought on “Thinking outside of the bounding box”
Thanks for coming Steve. It was a great talk, I can echo your thoughts. It was certainly interesting so see the reaction to the more “neo” side of the technology. It is certainly amazing how quickly location technology is moving to the mainstream (at last) and how the challenge is to keep up. It is a challenge but there is a great toolkit know. One thing I noticed from our 3 day workshop is that you need to do alot more now as a geo professional to get a “wow” than last year. Much of the technology is now treated as a “given”. There needs to be more analysis and value extracted. This next year will be interesting.