Freezing whereyougonnabe and moving on to new things

I have been trying to raise investment funds for Spatial Networking for some time now but despite some interest still haven’t closed anything, unfortunately – it’s a tough time to be raising money. After weighing up all my options, I have decided to stop new work on whereyougonnabe (for now at least) and move on to some new things. I continue to believe that we have a good idea and have developed some valuable technology, and that there will be a strong market for future location and location aware calendars at some point – and it is quite possible that the work we have done in this area will be revived somehow.

However, one of the factors in my decision is that there are also a lot of other really interesting things going on in the geospatial industry right now that I would like to get more involved in, and it’s hard to do everything :) !! I have been working on several things in parallel with whereyougonnabe over the past year or two, including my role as Chief Technical Advisor at Enspiria Solutions, being on the Advisory Board of PublicEarth (both of which are ongoing activities), and working with Netezza on the launch of their spatial capabilities last year. I also did some interesting work with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation last year, to help start what is now the AgCommons project.

Some of the main areas that interest me right now include:

• The disruptive transition from the previous generation of GIS to the “neogeography” systems, which is well and truly under way – I will blog more about this shortly
• The growth in free and open source geospatial software
• The huge potential of crowdsourced data, most notably OpenStreetMap
• In a somewhat different direction, the Smart Grid, which is something I have been working on at Enspiria and which will be bringing major changes to the electricity industry, an industry I have worked in a lot during my career

So I’m on the lookout for interesting opportunities in these areas (or others). I am quite interested in additional advisory or part time roles that I could pursue alongside the existing part time work I’m doing, which would give me some flexibility to dabble with some other interesting technology ideas on the side. But I’m also open to considering the right full time role. If you'd like to discuss possibilities please get in touch!

I’d like to thank my fellow developers Glen Marchesani and Nate Irwin for all the effort they have put into whereyougonnabe – and as I said, even if it goes dormant for a while, it may re-emerge in some form in the future! We are still weighing up whether to keep the current whereyougonnabe system up and running for a while, or take it down, and will notify users what we decide within the next few weeks.

I’ll be talking at GeoWeb next week about what we’ve done with whereyougonnabe, why I continue to see it as an interesting space, and some lessons learned from the whole experience.