If you could do geospatial analysis 50 to 100 times faster …

… than you can today, what compelling new things would this enable you to do? And yes, I mean 50 to 100 times faster, not 50 to 100 percent faster! I’m looking for challenging geospatial analytical problems that would deliver a high business value if you could do this, involving many gigabytes or terabytes of data. If you have a complex analysis that takes a week to run, but you only need to run it once a year for regulatory purposes, there is no compelling business value to being able to run it in an hour or two. But if you are a retail chain and you need to run some complex analysis to decide whether you want to buy an available site for a new store within the next three days, it makes a huge difference whether you can just run one analysis which takes two days, or dozens of analyses which take 30 minutes each, allowing you to try a range of assumptions and different models. Or if you’re a utility or emergency response agency running models to decide where to deploy resources as a hurricane is approaching your territory, being able to run analyses in minutes rather than hours could make a huge difference to being able to adjust your plans to changing conditions. There may be highly valuable analyses that you don’t even consider running today as they would take months to run, but which would have very high value if you could run them in a day.

If you have problems in this category I would be really interested to hear about them, either in the comments here, or feel free to email me if you prefer.

Update: I wanted to say that this is not just a hypothetical question, but I can't talk about any details yet. See the comments for more discussion.

My GPS wins prestigious French neogeo award!

I was very honored to find that my Toyota Prius GPS navigation system received the award of "Le meilleur GPS de l’année" (best GPS of the year) from the French blog neogeo in their prestigious "le TopOfThePop Neogeo 2007" awards :). Je veux dire merci beaucoup, je suis très honoré!

The post has a pretty eclectic set of interesting links from la FrenchKissingMap to How I explained REST to my wife (or Comment j’ai expliqué REST à ma femme).

Upcoming gigs

I have quite a few speaking engagements coming up, which have rather crept up on me, so I thought I'd give a quick summary.

Frugosapalooza, Denver, February 19: FRUGOS is the Front Range Users of Geospatial Open Source, and their one day "unconference" last summer was one of the best events I went to last year. Sean Gillies and I will both be speaking, but there will be plenty of time for networking and drinking :). We will even be honored by the presence of James Fee who is flying in from Phoenix for the event.

Panel for Joe Berry's GIS class, Denver, February 28: Joe has lined up an interesting panel for his class, and this event will be open to the public. Matt Ball will be talking about the role of GIS for sustainability, Bill Gail of Microsoft will be talking about the merging of real and fantasy in GIS, and I'll be talking about disruptive change in the industry. Tina Cary will be moderating.

FME User Conference, Vancouver, March 6: as I've mentioned previously, my friends at Safe Software kindly invited me to give the keynote at their worldwide user conference, and they recently put out a press release about this. A good thing about doing keynotes is that people have to say nice things about you for their advertising ;) ... you don't get too many keynote announcements saying "we've hired a really dull speaker with nothing interesting to say".

GITA Geospatial Infrastructure Solutions Conference, Seattle, March 11: I'm moderating a panel on "Mashups - Consumer Toy or Enterprise Tool?". We're still finalizing speakers for that one but I'm anticipating another good lineup.

Location Intelligence, Santa Clara, April 28: I'll be moderating the lightning talks on the opening afternoon of the conference, on the theme of Social Networking, Local Search and Location-based Advertising. I have cut short my attendance at the New Orleans Jazzfest by a day to do this, which tells you I expect it to be a good event :) !

Spatial Networking wins exit poll!

As I mentioned previously, last night at the Boulder Denver New Technology Meetup I gave the first public presentation and demo about what we're up to at Spatial Networking. There was a good turnout of around 200 people and I got a lot of questions and interest, so was pleased with how it went. And in the official exit poll, Spatial Networking was the clear winner :) ...


New Tech Meetup: Who Was Your Favorite? Exit Poll from gwenbell on Vimeo.

You can also read a writeup of the meeting at the Colorado Startups blog. And yes, I will explain much more about what we're up to here very shortly!