Presenting at the CIO Forum in Perth

Just a quick note to say that I will be giving the keynote address at the upcoming CIO Forum event in Perth, Australia, organized by WALIS (Western Australia Land Information System) and the Australian Computer Society. It's on March 12 and I'm talking on the subject of "The Geospatial Technology Revolution":

Geospatial technology has been transformed over the past few years from a specialised back room technology into an increasingly pervasive element of mainstream IT, which is driving many new and innovative applications.

This presentation will examine current and future trends that are impacting the geospatial industry, including developments in wireless communications and mobile devices; web-based applications, data and services; location tracking technologies, both global and local; and the impact of offerings from major IT companies including Microsoft, Google and Oracle, as well as the growth in open source solutions.

It will look at how the new generation of geospatial and location technologies can benefit both organizations that already use geospatial technology, and those that don't (yet).

If you're down in that part of the world please stop by!

Best Man for the Best Job!

Slightly off topic here, but for a bit of fun I have applied for "the best job in the world", as Caretaker of the Great Barrier Reef Islands. It's a pretty long shot as they are anticipating 30,000 applicants, but it was a fun exercise to do the video! And at the moment I'm in the top 30 "most popular", but it seems pretty dynamic. So I encourage you to please vote for me here (i.e. rate the video, 5 stars is the maximum). Of course geothought readers will be more than welcome to come and visit! And there is a bit of a Google Earth animation in the video, so it's not entirely without geospatial content! And there will be a little more geospatial stuff on my accompanying Best Man for the Best Job web site shortly.

Update: today (Feb 22, midnight UTC) is the closing date for applications, and the islandreefjob.com web site is suffering under the strain. So if you try to vote but don't get through, please give it a try some other time - I imagine things will be back to normal either this evening US time or tomorrow. And in the mean time, you can see my application video here (but can't vote there).

Webinar next week on data warehouse appliances for Location Intelligence

I have posted previously about Netezza, who make data warehouse appliances, which can perform certain types of complex spatial analysis from 10x to 100x faster than traditional systems - I did some consulting for them last year. On Thursday next week I am speaking in a free webinar hosted by Directions Magazine and sponsored by Netezza, on the topic of data warehouse appliances for Location Intelligence. My talk will include the following topics:

• One enterprise DBMS?
• Data warehousing concepts
• Data warehouse appliances
• New possibilities for geospatial applications

On the subject of "one enterprise DBMS" I get to re-use the following slide, which I first used a (slightly different) version of back in 1993 or so when talking about Smallworld's VMDS database ... it's good to have a little material that can last that long in these times of rapid change :) !

The other main speaker will be Shajy Mathay from reinsurance company Guy Carpenter, who have been doing some very interesting things with Netezza - Shajy gave a very interesting presentation at the Netezza User Conference and I look forward to hearing what he has to say.

If you're interested you can get more information and sign up here.

Did You Know?

Interesting 5 minute video on the pace of change in the world. One example is the length of time it took various products to reach a market audience of 50 million:

• Radio - 38 years
• TV - 13 years
• Internet - 4 years
• iPod - 3 years
• Facebook - 2 years