General

For field biologists, collecting data in the field is just another day at work. Traditionally, most field biologists carry around notepads or clipboards to take notes, document habitats, and make measurements. In addition, they need to carry cameras and GPS devices for taking photos and videos of flora and fauna in the wild, and plotting these locations.

Recently I joined the board of the Homeowners Association in my neighborhood and discovered what many others have discovered about their HOA: a lot of frustration around management of the community and the lack of support the residents receive from the board. According to the Community Associations Institute trade association, it is estimated that HOAs govern 24.8 million American homes and 62 million residents. This leaves about twenty percent of Americans living in a community managed by an HOA.

The first in our series of customer spotlights, Blaine Hackett is the Director of Business Development, GIS for RESPEC. Blaine has been working with Geographic Information Systems since 1990. He received his B.S. in Geography from the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse and Masters of Geographic Information Science from the University of Minnesota. He has worked in diversified GIS environments including state and local government, consulting engineering and planning, non-profit and Fortune 500 companies. Our team sat down with him and picked his brains on data collection methods, the GIS industry and the future of geospatial technology.

Nowadays, we use our smartphones to find and evaluate everything from local music venues to hot spots to eat lunch. But how does my search engine know when to serve up a list of sushi restaurants when I’m downtown, but serve up a how-to guide when I’m at my house? And what does it take to appear and stay visible in those local searches? Today, I’m taking you through a tour of the local listings ecosystem, from schemas to search snippets, to show you the several important factors and elements that go into appearing and ranking in local search queries.

Geography 2050 is a symposium to gather the brightest thinkers that live and breathe geography, either as a core business or a peripheral part of their core expertise, and discuss the potential markets, changes, and potential for where we’ll be in the field of geography by the year 2050.

Nearly all our users run businesses and rely on their mobile devices to store protected company data. We prioritize security and provide tools that help users safeguard their work effectively. This article explains techniques on iOS and Android devices that help users protect data while employees work in the field.

These days, we all have far more accounts and passwords than we know how to manage. Managing over 100 unique usernames and passwords for banking, productivity, hosting, and social media has become overwhelming. As a frequent web user, I personally have over 500 accounts, many of which I rarely use. Occasionally, I still need access to those accounts, adding complexity and increasing risks of sensitive data exposure. A hyper-secure password strategy for online accounts is critical to protect against account compromises and related threats. Strong, unique passwords, regularly updated, are essential, but no one can realistically manage this without assistance. Password management tools like 1Password simplify organization, enhance security, and ensure strong protection for all online accounts.

There’s been a boom in the last couple of years of big tech companies working to bring connectivity and geocoding solutions to the farthest reaches of the globe. Facebook is launching giant solar-powered drones with lasers, Google is floating balloons with antennae into the stratosphere, and smartphones are cheaper than ever.

The Fulcrum team creates a virtual company culture in a number of ways. One of the popular ways to toast one another is through GeoBooze, our Fulcrum + Slack-integrated drinks sharing form.

Two weeks back I was in Washington, DC at the GEOINT Symposium, the major industry event for the geospatial intelligence market, put on by the excellent USGIF. Each year there’s a growing number of companies with a primarily commercial focus, showcasing their tech for government users, which shows that the focus of the government community is more and more shifting toward off-the-shelf and consumer tech each year.

Thomas Steele-Maley is the Director of Innovation at GEMS World Academy Chicago, and is working on bringing mobile learning to K-12 education.

With the ongoing widespread flooding and tornadoes affecting the southern United States, I’m compelled to write this post. It is directed towards the emergency managers and incident commanders in affected towns and counties and is meant to provide you with guidance on how to expedite disaster declaration using simple off-the-shelf technology. One of the chief goals of emergency managers should be to decrease the amount of time it takes for survivors to receive the assistance they require. This was my goal for five years while I worked for FEMA as a Geospatial Coordinator. Fulcrum will continue to offer our services to any emergency manager who needs assistance.

Our latest update for Fulcrum on Android introduces design updates and improvements aligned with Google’s Material Design specifications. These changes affect layouts, look and feel, and interactions to ensure a more modern, consistent user experience. In version 2.13, you’ll notice the app list now appears as a drawer sliding out from the left. Additionally, the form user interface has been redesigned to conform to Material Design standards, improving overall visual consistency.

Last week I attended an event with the US Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF) intended to showcase various cloud-based technologies for the GEOINT (geospatial intelligence) market, with speakers from HumanGeo, Agilex, DigitalGlobe, and more. The objective was to give quick lightning talks on cloud-based platforms enabling GEOINT capabilities, as part of the USGIF Innovation Task Force series.

Guest blogger J Allard is CEO and Founder of Project 529 and a Core Team member of the Portland Police Bureau Bike Theft Task Force. This post was originally published May 18th on bikeportland.org.

Guest blogger Danny Sheehan is a geographer and data science student with the Built Environment and Health Project at Columbia University.

House of Hope story

My name is Megan Smith and I am an outreach worker with the House of Hope CDC. House Of Hope is a nonprofit that provides a spectrum of housing and supportive services to people experiencing homelessness, with the mission of preventing and ending homelessness in Rhode Island. Toward this end, my role consists of collaborating with community partners to engage individuals not well-served by the current homeless service provision system. We’re specifically focusing on those who are staying on the streets and are experiencing significant mental health and substance use challenges.

Each year, more than twenty student researchers in the MSc Engineering Geology program at the Technical University of Munich take advantage of the Fulcrum for Education program to study and map landslides in the Austrian Alps. As GPS and GIS technology replaces paper maps and handwritten notes, these students are being trained to use modern field data collection tools and techniques in their landslide mapping courses.

Recently, we’ve been expanding and redesigning our App Gallery search functionality, making it much easier to locate relevant apps for specific industries. In order to make new users aware of how Fulcrum could be used, we populate the Fulcrum App Gallery with sample apps. By doing this, we have found that almost all new users start with one or a few of these apps to get started, and on occasion, some improve them for their own use. The use cases of Fulcrum continue to surprise and delight us.

Collecting rich media along with your survey forms is one of Fulcrum’s hallmark capabilities, allowing you to add detail to your collection workflow by using pictures and SpatialVideo. Today, we are introducing audio capture, allowing teams to record audio logs on their iPhone, iPad, or Android devices. This feature lets users attach audio recordings to data records captured directly in the field for improved documentation. It is especially beneficial for users recording field notes by speaking into their device for later transcription. Audio capture is also useful for inspections in tight spaces or when quickly logging observations without typing. This feature saves time and adds significant flexibility to Fulcrum’s already robust and versatile feature set.

Historic preservation

Historic building preservation is a big deal in our cities these days. There’s an entire movement focused on the rediscovery and re-use of our urban cores. With any city of significant age, a key step to making the most out of our existing infrastructure is understanding, preserving, and in many cases reusing our historic sites in new and interesting ways.

This time last year, I was a FEMA employee working in the field of GIS. I was pondering at that time how to develop mobile GIS data collection software that worked on an iPad or iPhone and could be deployed into the field with the Public Assistance teams (their current process involves paper and GPS units, and a lot of data entry done in hotel rooms). This mobile app would need to be extremely easy to use, be able to feed data into a database, and the data be viewable on a live map. This was a challenging proposition, but one that excited me.

We have a lot of Fulcrum customers that work in the fields of engineering and architecture, and when designing and constructing facilities of any size, it is imperative to be compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act design standards. In researching ADA compliance, I used the New England ADA Center’s ADA Checklist for Existing Facilities form to build a custom ADA Fulcrum app. The New England ADA Center is one of ten members of the ADA National Network, and publishes the checklists. I found their checklists to be extremely comprehensive. Because Fulcrum is so flexible, it took me about 30 minutes to build most of the Priority 1 checklist. You can see how easy it is to use in the video below.

Recently, we at Fulcrum came across the AccessLand initiative to provide open data and APIs for “our nation’s parks, forests, monuments, campsites, cabins, and tours.”

Fulcrum’s SpatialVideo collection capability can be a valuable addition to data collection workflows, including mapping of rights-of-way, assets, pipelines, electric lines, environmental monitoring, and more.

I recently demonstrated to a Fulcrum customer how to georeference a floor plan of a mall for indoor use when conducting inspections of malls around the country. This same process can be used with Fulcrum for creating small offline maps. I’ve chosen not to use QGIS or ArcMap, but instead am using inexpensive or free software that anyone can learn to use in less than an hour.

Fulcrum customers worldwide are using the platform to collect a huge variety of data in the field, and the dynamic, adaptable nature of Fulcrum allows the flexibility to build the exact tool for the job. Today we’re introducing a new feature to extend this even further: Calculated Fields.

While recently writing some software in JavaScript, I noticed a pattern. I would create an object and then call init() on it. The instance needed some setup before I could use it. As I reflected on this approach, I realized how small decisions like naming and structure impact code quality over time.

Our latest updates include some great form validation enhancements for even better quality control over your data. These enhancements include supporting custom validation patterns for text fields by defining a regular expression (regex), as well as the ability to define min/max limits for certain field types.

Looking back, 2014 year in review was an exciting year for Spatial Networks and Team Fulcrum! Looking back at our accomplishments over the past twelve months, it’s clear that Fulcrum has really matured into a stable, feature-rich platform, which is fast becoming the go-to solution for structured geographic data collection. We have a dedicated and diverse customer base who are using Fulcrum all across the globe, in ways we never could have imagined and 2015 is looking to be another exciting year!

Every day we find new customers using Fulcrum for wildly different applications for field data collection. Nothing is more exciting as an engineer than to see something you’ve built being used to solve real challenges, all over the world. However, as a fast-moving, agile software team faced with an enormous variety of use cases—sometimes with directly opposite requirements—you can’t build everything (nor should you).

Like many companies who employ off-site team members, Spatial Networks brings everyone together a few times a year for a week of handshakes, hugs, good food, and better beer. Amazingly, some code usually gets shipped as well. Our most recent visit was punctuated by a long awaited change of venue as we moved into our new, custom-designed space, leaving behind an office that never quite felt like home. These visits are important for a variety of reasons, but here are a few that stand out to me each time we have a meeting of those working remotely. Here’s a recap of what got done:

Fulcrum update – In-App Barcode and QR Code Scanning

Fulcrum is already flush with data types that you can build into your own custom data collection apps for field surveying. Many Fulcrum users have deployed Fulcrum for asset inventory and evaluation projects, with service technicians or inspectors tracking asset locations and conducting quality inspections.

Last month we sent out a customer satisfaction survey to Fulcrum account owners in order to better understand what our customers enjoy about Fulcrum, what they dislike, and how we can make their experience better. Suffice it to say, we learned a lot.

The latest updates to the Fulcrum Android and iOS mobile apps include some great new functionality that we are excited to announce. While every update includes subtle improvements, behind-the-scenes performance enhancements, and bug fixes, this release includes some great new features for truly personalizing your mobile apps, including new custom app icons.

A couple of weeks ago, Bryan and I were out in Flagstaff, Arizona for the annual meeting of OFWIM, the Organization of Fish and Wildlife Information Managers. Over the last several months, we’ve been doing a webinar series for OFWIM’s membership; a group which consists of technical staff, researchers, and GIS analysts working at federal, state, and local levels on issues related to fish and wildlife mapping and data management.

In the past few weeks my colleagues have showcased examples of building applications on top of Fulcrum, utilizing our open source libraries and the Fulcrum API:

Before joining the Spatial Networks team, I worked for five years at FEMA as a Geospatial Coordinator. I spent my days collecting disaster-related data, analyzing it, and publishing informative maps. Senior leadership at FEMA and state governments then used these maps to support decision-making.

So the hotly anticipated Apple Watch is now a reality. Many thought Apple might do something drastically different, but they didn’t — their device looks surprisingly similar to prior art in the space from Google and Samsung. It’s a watch with a few productivity functions beyond timekeeping, has almost none of its own onboard sensors (save the HealthKit and activity tracking sensors), and not-too-impressive battery life. The physical constraints of the wristband form factor don’t provide space for making significant innovation beyond the territory of their competitors at this point. If they made it super slim, it’d have less battery life and no sensors. The face can’t be too big, but needs to be big enough to interact with buttons and text. To do anything cool you need radios and sensors, which make it bigger. Marco Arment covers these engineering and design tradeoffs in his excellent write up.

Jason and I were in Portland, OR last week for the annual FOSS4G conference. FOSS4G (Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial) is the largest global gathering of developers, users, decision-makers and observers focused on open source geospatial software.

Many Fulcrum users are working indoors, conducting facility inspections of inside spaces. Within large facilities there may be multiple floors and hundreds of rooms to visit to inspect equipment, perform quality checks of plumbing and electrical, or observe the quality of build-outs for future repairs. Even though these types of work happen indoors without access to accurate GPS signals, you can still use Fulcrum’s mapping capabilities to create facility maps and geolocate your data on a reference background.

The latest updates to the Fulcrum web interface include some exciting new features and enhancements. The most prominent change is the new “App Dashboard” page. We’ve streamlined the main Fulcrum landing page, moving the administrative tools to the new App Dashboard page and making the core tools more prominent. Clicking on the app name now takes you to the App Dashboard page, where you can access the administrative tools along with a high level snapshot of activity within that particular app.

We’ve been hard at work the last few months creating an amazing new capability for field survey in Fulcrum using video capture, on both Android and iOS platforms, and now we’re announcing a new feature!

Patrick and I just returned from a week in Tunisia at the GCT 2014 Conference, where we met regional GIS organizations. We also connected with mapping companies from across Africa, discussing advancements in geospatial technology and industry applications. Throughout the event, we spoke with professionals specializing in aerial imagery, remote sensing, surveying, and field-based incident reporting. Many industries showed strong interest, including electric, gas, and water utilities, as well as rail and transportation. Law enforcement, tax assessment, and several other sectors were also heavily represented in discussions on geospatial solutions.

This is a guest post from Mitchell Sipus, interdisciplinary Community Planner specialized in designing creative solutions for the world’s most complex environments, including this project for qualititative and ethnographic research in Ethiopia.

We just released an update to add several new tools for visualizing data in the Fulcrum web interface. Layers, which includes what was previously referred to as maps, will greatly enhance the data review experience through the Fulcrum web app. We also added a few tools to make finding locations in the web app easier and faster.

One of the best places to go for exploring the data collection possibilities of Fulcrum is our App Gallery, which includes many pre-built app templates for different types of field surveys, across dozens of industry sectors. Today I’ll be discussing three of our latest featured additions to the gallery catalog to demonstrate the flexibility of Fulcrum to meet a wide variety of requirements: traffic sign inventory, erosion control monitoring, and construction safety.

New app-building tools

We just released an upgrade to add some nice new tools for building apps in Fulcrum. When creating digital surveys for field inspections or checklists, the data types you use to create your data collection apps are key to data integrity, as well as speed and efficiency while working in the field. This new update adds two new field types to the App Designer: a time selector field and a checklist field, for quick “Yes/No” style questions. We’ve also added a much-requested ability to do range validation on numeric field types (e.g. “value should be between 1 and 10”).

You may have heard more about stormwater recently than you’ve ever heard about it before. Stormwater has been in the news quite a bit – particularly in the region of the Chesapeake Bay – because of tighter government regulations, new fees, and because stormwater is one of the largest sources of pollution in the Bay and its contributing waterways. Stormwater runoff picks up oils, sediment, and litter from impervious surfaces (such as parking lots) every time it rains. If this pollution isn’t captured by stormwater management infrastructure (and much of it is not) it makes its way into the Chesapeake Bay.

I was recently invited to give a guest lecture presentation on mobile data collection for a ‘GIS In the Sciences’ course at Rensellaer Polytechnic University in Troy, NY. This course introduces upperclassmen from various majors to the fundamentals of Geographic Information Systems. My presentation was 5 weeks into the course, so the students already had a pretty good grasp of the basics. They were familiar with using QGIS to display, edit, and analyze their geospatial data.

Before joining the Spatial Networks team, I spent the last six and a half years working as a GIS Analyst/Developer for a full service engineering firm on projects spanning the globe. One of the cool things about working in the Technology Solutions group for a multidisciplinary consulting engineering firm is that you get to be involved in a wide variety of projects across many different disciplines. Engineers are involved in everything, from transportation projects to environmental impact assessments, utility network design to water and wastewater system modeling. In my experience, this level of variety in a GIS job is rare.