Ubisense looking for Senior Project Manager and Technical Manager

Just a quick post to mention that Ubisense is looking for a couple of people to join our geospatial team in the US. We've been growing rapidly and have a lot of exciting things going on. First is a Senior Project Manager.  Ideally we'd like someone with experience managing complex geospatial projects in utilities and/or telecommunications companies, and preferably but not necessarily experience with GE Smallworld. This would ideally be in Denver but location is somewhat flexible - a fair amount of travel to customer sites would be involved with this role.

We're also looking for a Technical Manager based in Camden, Maine, to manage development of some innovative mobile products for the gas industry that we're working on there (this group was formerly part of InMaps, who we acquired recently).

For more details check our web site (second item down, and last item, currently).

Crowdsourcing my State of the Map keynote talk

A couple of months ago I gave a talk at the monthly OpenStreetMap meetup in Denver and I decided to try crowdsourcing the content (in the best OpenStreetMap tradition), and it worked out very well. I received a good amount of interesting content from several folks (thanks everyone!). I rashly agreed to do a keynote at the upcoming State of the Map conference in Denver (rashly since I'm chairing the FOSS4G conference right after that, and am more than a little busy with that, not to mention my day job :O !!). So I thought I would do the same thing again and appeal for ideas on things I should include in a tour of what's new and cool in OpenStreetMap.

You can send me links to stories, slides if you have them, or anything else that you think would be useful. If you did a presentation on something cool and interesting at SotM EU but can't make it to Denver, I'd be happy to mention it over here. And even if you are presenting something over here, I'm happy to include a slide or two as a "trailer" for your talk. Of course I can't promise to include everything, depending on how much material I end up with (and I do have some of my own of course!), but will do my best.

In general I'm interested in hearing about things that you think are (reasonably) new and interesting in the OpenStreetMap world including:

• Cool applications using OpenStreetMap data 
• New (or improved) tools for creating / editing OpenStreetMap data 
• Examples of businesses or government organizations using OpenStreetMap 
• Anything else you think is interesting! 

Please just drop me an email, or comment below. I will give credit to all contributors, of course!

How FOSS4G had a profound impact on my geospatial technology path

As some of you will know, the FOSS4G 2011 conference is coming up in Denver and I am the conference chair. I have only been to one previous FOSS4G, which was in Victoria in Canada in 2007. That event had a profound impact on my perspective on the geospatial industry, and on the software platforms I've chosen to implement geospatial applications on since then. And it has saved my companies a lot of money! So I wanted to share some perspectives about my experience at FOSS4G and what I've learned about open source software, to explain why you should come to FOSS4G, especially if you've never been before.

Back in 2007 I had just left my job as CTO of Intergraph and was weighing up what to do next, and looking at ideas for a geospatial startup company. I'd spent 20 years in the geospatial industry working with closed source products, and knew very little about open source geospatial products. Towards the end of my time at Intergraph, I'd been getting quite a few questions from sales guys, in Canada in particular, about the fact that their customers were showing interest in open source software, which was free, and how should they sell against that?  So I'd done a bit of research and had become interested in particular in PostGIS, the open source spatial database, as a possible platform for applications I was looking at in my new (yet to be created) startup, Spatial Networking. The fact that it was free was obviously attractive to a new startup owner, especially as I was looking at a system that (I hoped) would need to be deployed on many servers to cope with large numbers of users.

Open source software tends not to have such flashy marketing material as closed source software, so after a bit of digging around online and not finding all the information I was after, I got in touch with Paul Ramsey, who is one of the main people behind PostGIS. He suggested I should come up to FOSS4G to find out more. I did and was really impressed by the whole experience, both the event in general and what I found out about PostGIS - you can read my writeup at the time here. As I said in that writeup, there was much more energy and buzz than I had seen at other geospatial conferences I was used to attending.

I went ahead and used PostGIS at Spatial Networking and on other projects, including my current project Ubisense myWorld. I continue to be very impressed with PostGIS - it does all the core things you expect a spatial database to do (I had a lot of previous experience with Oracle Spatial and other systems), and it's FREE! I have never hit a bug during my time using it.

So what have I learned about open source geospatial software in those four years? First of all let me say that I have no strong predisposition to open or closed source development approaches, per se. I am happy to chose either open or closed source products depending on what I need in a given situation. What I do have s strong predisposition to is FREE. Obviously a product needs to meet your requirements, but assuming it does then free is rather attractive compared to having to pay for something. This is especially true in a cloud environment, where you may scale up to running many servers, and traditional per server licensing costs can really hurt you financially.

People in the closed source world often raise concerns about support in the open source world. My experience hasn't borne out this concern. With PostGIS, I've never needed support, it just works. With MapFish, another open source product we're using for myWorld, we needed a few enhancements. Some were addressed by the community within a month or two, others we were able to do ourselves as we had access to the product source code. I very much doubt that we could have got enhancements made in a mature closed source product in that timeframe. There are also more and more options in the open source geospatial world to pay people to do enhancements or fixes for you. Again it's a bit dangerous to make generalizations, you can get good support or poor support on different closed source products, and you can get good support or poor support on different open source products. But my experience with the open source products we've chosen has been very good.

I think that after price, perhaps the aspect of open source that I value most is longevity and predictability. Many times during my career, I have seen projects suffer because a vendor has decided to stop development of a product (or feature). I have also seen dramatic changes in terms of service or costs of online services. Google App Engine is one example of the latter - many people put significant effort into developing applications that were running for free, then Google changed the pricing model and people found themselves facing large costs they hadn't planned on. With an open source product that has a strong community behind it, there is much more long term stability. You know it's not going to go away tomorrow. Even if some developers leave, others are there to cover for them. And in the worst case you have access to the source code so could continue to maintain it yourself (though that's a very unlikely scenario as long as the community of developers has a certain critical mass). I have been moving more components of myWorld towards open source because of this predictability.

So anyway, if you are still paying for geospatial software you owe it to yourself and your company to come to FOSS4G and find out what all this open source software is about. There is a parallel universe out there with software products that have great capabilities and are FREE! It's also worth saying that in general there is good interoperability between open and closed source systems, so it's not an all or nothing proposition. In general open source web and database products are very strong, and they may well be able to complement your investment in existing applications.

This is the first time that FOSS4G has been in North America for 4 years, and it is not likely to be here again for another 3, so this is a rare opportunity if you are based here to meet a wide range of people developing and using these products. So I hope to see you in Denver in September at FOSS4G!

To finish up, check out this video featuring members of the organizing team talking about why you should be there:

FOSS4G 2011 Denver from Tyler Mitchell @ OSGeo on Vimeo.

Speaking at OpenStreetMap Meetup in Denver tomorrow

As mentioned previously, I'll be speaking at tomorrow's OpenStreetMap meetup in Denver tomorrow, at the cool new MapQuest offices downtown. My attempt to crowdsource the presentation got a great response, and I got lots of suggestions for interesting content. I plan to have something for everyone, along the following lines:

• A quick intro to OpenStreetMap for any newcomers
• Some tips on using the Potlatch 2 map editor, which provides some cool new features - this should be good for both newcomers and experienced mappers
• Examples of how government agencies from various parts of the world are using OpenStreetMap
• Cool new tools for developers using OpenStreetMap, like Leaflet and Kothic
• Some interesting applications using OpenStreetMap
• Last but not least, how OpenStreetMap was used to show that you can in fact walk across Dublin without passing a pub (pubs have always been a mainstay of OpenStreetMap!)

We'll also have some discussion about the state of OpenStreetMap in Denver and Colorado, and brainstorm on things that we might want to focus on before State of the Map and FOSS4G are in Denver in September! You can get full details on the meetup and sign up here.

Looking for content for "State of OpenStreetMap" presentation

I'm doing a couple of upcoming presentations on OpenStreetMap, the first one next week at the very cool MapQuest office in downtown Denver, so I encourage you to come along to that if you're in the neighborhood ... and this may well evolve into a presentation for State of the Map in Denver too!

So in the best OpenStreetMap tradition I thought I'd try a little crowdsourcing to help me pull this together. I'd be interested if you could send me links (or other info) about things that you think are (reasonably) new and interesting in the OpenStreetMap world including:

• Cool applications using OpenStreetMap data
• New (or improved) tools for creating / editing OpenStreetMap data
• Examples of businesses or government organizations using OpenStreetMap
• Anything else you think is interesting!

Please just drop me an email, or comment below. In fact if anyone has presentation slides covering interesting stuff that would be relevant, those would be great too. Happy to give credit to all contributors, of course!

A couple of discussions on location privacy and the iPhone

So my recent posts analyzing the iPhone location data log have gained a lot of traffic and attention over the past few days, from places including the Toronto Star, the Wall Street Journal, TUAW, PC World, MacDailyNews, Apfeltalk (German), Cisco, Pete Warden at O'Reilly, Business Insider, and more.

This led to me being invited to participate in a discussion on the Brian Lehrer Show yesterday on radio WNYC, the NPR affiliate in New York, together with Jennifer Valentino-Devries of the Wall Street Journal. We had a good sensible discussion, in contrast with a lot of the hysterical reporting that has been going on.

Today I will be taking part in a longer discussion on the KQED Forum discussion show in San Francisco. Also participating will be Congresswoman Jackie Speier, Jim Dempsey from the Center for Technology and Democracy, and Kara Swisher of All Things Digital. This will be at 10am mountain time, there should be a recording here sometime after that.

Apple issues Q&A on "Locationgate", and addresses key issues

Apple rather belatedly issued a Q&A on the whole "LocationGate" saga. This confirms what I said about the data being a cache of cell tower and wifi locations. The fact that this was kept for up to a year was a bug. Within the next few weeks they will reduce this to 7 days, they will not back up the cache any longer, and they will turn off the cache when you turn location services off, which addresses the issue reported by the Wall Street Journal and widely re-reported.. These are all good actions to take, and address the key issues in my opinion. It does reinforce the importance of developers being careful about location security, and Apple was slack in this case, even though the potential risks were much less dire than widely reported.

Note that in the short term if you are concerned, you can encrypt your iPhone database backup just by checking a box on the front page in iTunes (after plugging in your iPhone). If you do this, the current location log cannot be accessed by someone who hacks into your computer.