General

The term “data collection” may sound esoteric, but the practice is actually quite broad. Data collection is a vital process that every business conducts regularly, even if they don’t call it that.

Collecting field data can be a complex process, requiring time, money, and people. That’s why logistics are important. A successful project design will save you from wasting time, energy, and resources, and ensure the most reliable data possible.

In our last post, we explored how and why businesses gather and use information from the field. In this post, we’ll dive deeper into some of the different methods for collecting data.

As more security breaches and data thefts by hackers come to light, consumers are demanding increased transparency and responsiveness from companies that process or store their data. In response, the European Parliament approved the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to protect EU citizens and residents from privacy and data breaches.

What is field data? Data that is captured in the field is some of the most valuable information available to a company. It provides a clear picture into what’s happening at a job site or point of transaction, giving managers and other executives the insights they need to make informed business decisions.

We recently wrapped up our spring “All Hands” week, the semi-annual event when the entire staff descends on SNI headquarters in St. Petersburg, FL, for presentations, planning, and team-building. (And So. Much. Eating.)

Globally, more than 2.3 million people die each year as a result of occupational accidents or work-related diseases — that’s more than 6,300 deaths per day.

Successful enterprise asset management is key to reducing costs and increasing productivity and profitability for any organization.

 Field data collection is by no means limited to the confines of terra firma! NOAA Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary has been successfully using Fulcrum to help city, state, and federal agencies in offshore data collection, accessing, and sharing marine enforcement data across California.

Successful data collection starts with a good survey. How you design your questions will have a tremendous impact on the way data is collected, processed, and analyzed. We’d like to share some of our best advice on building a proper field data collection survey.

You have probably noticed that many companies have switched from paper to mobile forms, whether it was while checking in at the doctor’s office on a tablet or signing for a package with a stylus.

We’re out at the SaaStr Annual again this year, a yearly gathering of companies all focused on the same challenges of how to build and grow SaaS businesses. SaaS really came into its own as a style of software in the early to mid-2000s with the rise and expansion of the internet as a new vector for delivering software to users. Salesforce was probably the earliest and best-known example of a new model of hosting software on behalf of customers (now known as “the cloud,” then it was an “ASP”). While it’s no longer considered new to deliver software as a hosted service, the benefits of Software as a Service, such as cost savings, scalability, and ease of use, are still surprisingly poorly understood by many buyers of software.

As a geospatial intelligence and technology company, Spatial Networks is dedicated to advancing geographic literacy in education. This commitment aims to enhance students’ understanding of our rapidly changing world.

When we initially launched our integration with DroneDeploy on its App Market, we had other plans for expanding it. Our goal was to make drone imagery more accessible for fieldwork and ground-truthing through Fulcrum.

What is human geography

Human geography has been around as long as, well, humans. But our study of “human geography” as a concept is relatively new, especially among the geospatial/GIS community.

Since we introduced Fulcrum in 2011, the team at Spatial Networks has worked continuously to improve the platform and scaling Fulcrum to become the industry leader in field data collection, as well as to mature as both geographers and software developers. We like to think we’re succeeding on both counts.

At Spatial Networks, we strive to be your go-to source for geospatial data and the industry leader in mobile data collection technology. We continue to improve the Fulcrum platform and help our customers all over the world discover new ways to save time and money and streamline their business processes.  With another exciting and productive year in the rear-view, it’s time to take a look back at Fulcrum 2017 highlights while we review the last 12 months here at Spatial Networks!

At our core, Spatial Networks is a geography company. From building geospatial technology products to collecting, organizing, and analyzing geodata, we eat, drink, and breathe geography. It’s sobering to learn that, for many of our customers, Fulcrum often provides their first exposure to the wonderful world of Geographic Information Systems (GIS).

We just concluded our 2017 All Hands week, a semi-annual event where every Spatial Networks employee meets up at the company’s headquarters in St. Petersburg, Florida for a fast-paced week of projects, teamwork, and planning for the future.

Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria caused widespread destruction across Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. Now, engineering faculty and students from several U.S. universities are using this disaster as a learning opportunity.

Earlier this month, we held our first-ever user conference, Fulcrum Live 2017. At this event, we hoped users could come together to share their experiences and learn from new ways organizations are using Fulcrum to streamline business processes. Judging by the feedback we received, it was a resounding success! It took our team many months to plan and coordinate the event, so we are grateful to those that came. We had nearly 100 attendees descend upon the city of Boston for a day of talking, storytelling, networking, and enjoying great food. We especially want to thank our speakers for taking the time to share their stories with the audience.

Most people understand that the ability to use a piece of software doesn’t equate to the ability to build that piece of software. Using a computer has been an essential skill in the modern workforce for some time, but the ability to make a computer useful by programming it to do what you want is an entirely different skillset. Computer programming is a language and like any language is best learned when you are young. So why aren’t we doing a better job of combining kids and coding – the primary language of the tools that we work with?

Fulcrum Live is an all day event co-located with the International Conference for Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G). Join Team Fulcrum, our partners, and user community on Tuesday, August 15th in Boston, MA for a full day of presentations, case studies, technical talks, and networking! Located at the Boston Seaport and World Trade Center, this fast-paced single day event runs the day before the FOSS4G sessions and is free for conference attendees!

Poachers beware! Counter-poaching organizations have a new app at their disposal to identify, track, and destroy elephant poaching networks thanks to Fulcrum.

In the software business, a lot of attention gets paid to “shipping” as a badge of honor if you want to be considered an innovator. Like any guiding philosophy, it’s best used as a general rule than as the primary yardstick by which you measure every individual decision. Agile, scrum, TDD, BDD — they’re all excellent practices to keep teams focused on results. After all, the longer you’re polishing your work and not putting it in the hands of users, the less you know about how they’ll be using it once you ship it!

We are thrilled to support the FOSS4G 2017 Conference as a Gold Sponsor this August in Boston! The annual Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) brings together the largest global open-source geospatial software global community. This event gathers developers, users, decision-makers, and observers for a week of immersive learning and networking.

As we just wrapped up a great 2016, it’s important for us to plant some flags for 2017. We’re constantly evolving and improving our platform, so clear milestones ahead of us can be both immensely helpful to guide our team toward shared goals, and also give customers a 2017 Fulcrum roadmap about where we’re headed strategically.

This year was a great one for Fulcrum. Since 2011, it’s been our mission to make communications and data capture more seamless between the office and the field, and the growth in diversity of our customer base has proven that it’s a challenge worthy of solving — that organizations in many verticals are faced with poor back-and-forth process with field operations.

With Black Friday behind us, it’s officially the holiday gift giving season! Do you want to give a unique gift to your favorite maphead or geo geek? We know that finding gifts for map geeks can be quite tricky. So, a few of us on the Fulcrum team have compiled a holiday gift guide that your geo geek is sure to love. Ranging from $15 to $300, we’re sure you’ll find something within your price range that will be treasured for years to come.

Last week at Columbia University, hundreds of scholars, policy makers, environmental researchers, and geographers sat down to discuss how geography can be used to solve major world problems at this year’s Geography2050 Conference. The theme for the conference, “Envisioning a Sustainable Planet,” focused on the use of GIS tools, data, and novel approaches to aid in the protection, preservation, and conservation of our planet for future generations.

This is part 3 in our series about feedback loops, improving data quality, and reducing the time between response and action. In this part, we’ll identify ways to directly improve feedback loops and highlight various tools which can help you communicate information into actions that will help you achieve your goals.

I had the opportunity to represent Fulcrum at the inaugural DroneDeploy Conference in San Francisco, CA last week. One of the goals of the conference was to “focus on real-world drone deployments across industries driven by people”. The conference had people in attendance from an array of industries including end users, software providers, and developers interested in folding aerial survey data into applications.

Being productive requires having the right thought process, as your mental state plays a crucial role. In fact, it is even more important than the tools you use to accomplish tasks. However, many productivity resources focus heavily on the toolbox itself, rather than on how to apply these tools effectively. This week we’ve got a few links on ways to think differently about workflow productivity. Enjoy!

Geography has never played a more critical role in our lives than it does today. The long-standing traditions of map-making and understanding physical environments remain essential to how we organize our world. Additionally, modern advancements such as GIS, GPS, and geospatial analysis now permeate nearly every aspect of daily life.

Coleman McCormick speaker notes – IAOO 2016

Thanks for visiting! These are the notes and links from my talk at IAAO 2016 — Automating Field Data Collection. Below you’ll find links referenced or mentioned in the talk, the slides for download, and contact info to get in touch.

In the days of pen and paper, organizations collected, transcribed, and stored data in physical file cabinets. These cabinets retained information for a minimum of five years to comply with potential audit requirements. With advancements in digital data capture, organizations use forms software, spreadsheets, or sensors to gather information. However, many have not updated their processes significantly, limiting progress in effective data management. Now, the physical file cabinet has been replaced by outdated spreadsheets or an aging Access database. Organizations often accumulate large amounts of legacy data, justifying costs based on operational requirements. Due to the complexity of data management, organizations frequently re-collect the same data unnecessarily. This redundant collection results in added expenses without delivering any real benefits to the organization. Once entered into corporate systems and used initially, much of this data becomes forgotten and unused.

I recently came across an essay entitled The Servitude Bubble, by Umair Haque, regarding technology and the booming “Sharing Economy.” The author makes an interesting argument, emphasizing that the tech industry focuses excessively on trivial app development. Moreover, these apps primarily create systems that rely on armies of servants to perform menial tasks. Haque refers to this trend as the “Servitude Bubble,” highlighting its growth in on-demand labor services for the privileged. Additionally, he argues that this phenomenon represents a significant waste of human potential at its worst.

Recently IFAW sponsored the tenBoma project, an effort to improve reporting, tracking, and enforcement to counter wildlife crime in Kenya. Fulcrum is playing a key role on the ground to help the Kenyan Wildlife Services (KWS) catalog events associated with poaching activities. For the last several months, KWS personnel have been using Fulcrum for on-the-ground event tracking and counter-poaching investigations. During a recent trip to Voi, Kenya, near the Tsavo East National Park, I had to pleasure of working with KWS personnel and a team from Agile Analytics Group to assist in workflow development and field collection process. During the trip we refined the Service’s workflows, and how Fulcrum could better be used to support operations.

We’ve worked very hard to design Fulcrum so that it’s as easy as possible for our customers to use. In doing so, we’ve managed to “hide” a lot of the complexities around form & database design that many other platforms expose their users to. By dragging and dropping fields in our form builder, users are essentially creating a complex database without even being aware of it. Here are five important digital form building tips, in no particular order, that can assist new users when building their first form.

Engineering is the art of building things within constraints. Without constraints, you aren’t really doing engineering. Constraints can involve cost, time, attention, tools, or materials. Avoiding “feature creep” is crucial — it adds unnecessary complexity. Here’s an excerpt describing the challenge facing the engineer. The engineer’s task is to identify, understand, and interpret design constraints. It is usually not enough to build a technically successful product; it must also meet further requirements.

Speaking at conferences is a great way to think about what you know in your industry and how you can share that information. A couple weeks ago, I was invited to speak at O’Reilly Fluent Conference in San Francisco, where I talked about web map libraries and emerging geo industries technologies. Here are some few discoveries and thoughts I had about the experience.

When working with our customers, we talk a lot about pain. That is, the sorts of pain your business deals with right now that we can help resolve. We make software for business productivity, so people come to us with some form of pain, hoping that we can help them get to the bottom of it and fix their problems. We focus on understanding the root pain points of business worfklow processes.

Last week I attended the GIS CAMA Technologies Conference in Savannah, hosted by URISA and IAAO. The event was a meeting-of-the-minds for tax assessors, property appraisers, and the GIS / technical staff for the industry writ-large to discuss the latest in tech and trends for the property assessment community.

Climate change profoundly affects animal and plant communities. During periods of warming or cooling, ecosystems near the geographic edge of their range experience the impacts first. For example, the ‘islands’ of spruce-fir forests atop the Smokey Mountains of North Carolina face such early effects. These ecosystems serve as a ‘canary in a coal mine,’ offering an early indication of larger-scale changes that may follow.

Jason Wheatley is the Geospatial Technologies (GIS) Manager for Century Engineering, Inc. in Hunt Valley, Maryland. He has worked in both the public and private geospatial industries since 2004. He received a B.S. in Geography, as well as a M.S. in GIS and Public Administration from Salisbury University (Salisbury, MD). The Century Geospatial Technologies Group (GIS Group) provides technology consultant services to clients within federal, state, local governments, as well as the private sector throughout the Mid-Atlantic Region.

This month in our continuing series of customer interviews, we talked with one of our long-time customers in the manufacturing industry. Manufacturing companies are a growing user base for mobile data collection applications, and Fulcrum is a great match for manufacturers because it offers an integrated mobile solution that speeds up quotes, customer service, and order management. Real-time data capture is what differentiates the leaders from the rest. Mike Merrill is the NDE Coordinator & Field Service Tech at Turbine Master. He has worked there since 2000 and has seen many changes that technology offers to workflows. Our team sat down with Mike and asked him about his data collection methods, the turbine industry, turbine inspections, and the future of data collection technologies.

Many of our customers are using Fulcrum for different types of consulting projects, meaning they’re delivering on projects on behalf of someone else — as a subcontractor to a prime contractor, to a city or municipality, or to another government agency. I wanted to take a moment to review some of the many advantages of the Fulcrum platform for consulting engineers, business analysts, field services companies, or software developers, and give a little background on why so many choose Fulcrum as a basis for completing their projects.

One fire (or flood) away from failure

The statistics behind data loss are alarming: 70% of today’s businesses would fail within 3 weeks if they suffered a catastrophic loss of paper-based records due to fire or flood.1 And with more than 4.6 million episodes of catastrophic business data loss happening each year2, could your business survive such an event? And what could you do to prevent the problems of catastrophic data loss from interrupting your business? Today I’ll discuss the true cost of a paper-based business workflow and how digital forms mitigate the risks that come from relying on physical forms and paper record keeping.

As we wrap up another exciting year, we’d like to take a moment to recap and review some of our highlights over the past 12 months. When we closed out 2014, I anticipated this was going to be an exciting year, but could never have predicted just how much we could have accomplished! Read on for Fulcrum’s 2015 year in review.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are becoming increasingly common in mapping, offering affordable aerial imagery on demand. Once an expensive hobby for tinkerers, UAVs have quickly transformed into a disruptive force in the geospatial industry. The ability to deploy a cost-effective, agile sensor platform for real-time surveying has unlocked vast possibilities for data collection.

The holiday countdown has begun! We understand that finding gifts for map nerds can be quite tricky. So, the Fulcrum team has compiled a list of the top cartography gifts that your map geek is sure to love. Ranging from $45 to $2,000, we hope you can find something in our holiday gift guide for map geeks that is within your price range that will be treasured for years to come.