The Fulcrum Focus

To recap, a couple of weeks ago we attended the Central Florida GIS Workshop in Orlando, a regional event bringing together GIS staff from many Florida city and county agencies, as well as those from consultancies and mapping companies. There was a great lineup of talks and presentations highlighting many local Florida projects. The event […]

Modern Civil Engineering should include technology! An increasingly rapidly changing digital world demands a furious pace of innovation in our engineering environment. SMEC, or Snowy Mountains Engineering Corporation, is one of the leading engineering and development consultancies in the world. Providing multidisciplinary consulting services in engineering, project management, environmental science and development activities, SMEC has […]

While Fulcrum photo fields make attaching pictures to records a ‘snap’, the flexibility of having a single field for multiple photos can be somewhat challenging when dealing with exports. In this short blog post I will describe a few techniques I have found for managing this one-to-many relationship challenge. Fulcrum exports a zip file that […]

One of the coolest features in Fulcrum is building offline map layers for mobile mapping. Access to a local map tile cache untethers you from the need for network connectivity to get reference map data when in the field. Using the map design software TileMill, along with some geo data or imagery, you can make […]

We just completed a substantial upgrade to the Fulcrum web platform, making our hosted service even better for our ever-growing global user base. Fulcrum data is now replicated in real time to multiple datacenters in separate geographic regions, increasing redundancy and making data even more safe and secure. As your teams are syncing up data […]

In our previous post, we talked about our experience this round at JIFX, the experimental event series organized several times a year by the Naval Postgraduate School to bring industry, academia, and government together in a field testing environment out at Camp Roberts, CA. The structure of the JIFX series is unique in its ability […]

We are back in the office following a great week in California for our second experience at Camp Roberts for Joint Interagency Field Exploration (JIFX). The objective of JIFX is to bring together people from industry, government, and academic institutions to field test hardware, software, and ideas to explore the potential of new capabilities in […]

Many organizations using Fulcrum have requested to ability to have more control over how members can interact with both the web and mobile applications. When we recently reorganized the management and administration portions of the Fulcrum web app, we also added the ability to create custom member roles to do just that. ‍ Custom Roles […]

This Friday, Alex and I will be headed to Fort Worth, TX for the 78th Annual National Association of Counties (NACo) Conference and Exposition. We will be exhibiting in booth 728, so if you’re attending, be sure to stop by! As I’m sure most NACo attendees understand, GIS and data collection play a very important […]

The ability to add offline maps has been one of the many useful customization options of Fulcrum for quite a while. In the last few months we have expanded on this, giving users the ability to add multiple layers on Android devices. Just like with base maps, all layers must be in MBTiles format. If […]

Digital PDF templates A couple of weeks ago, we showcased Fulcrum’s report-generation capability, enabling users to generate printable, shareable PDF reports either from their desk or from mobile devices in the field. All of the advantages of digital field data collection can be maintained, while still affording organizations the ability to do things like print […]

Last month, FEMA Blue 1 attended a 2013 Joint Interagency Field Exercise (JIFX) hosted by the Naval Postgraduate School in Camp Roberts, California. NPS conducts a biannual RELIEF conference that fosters innovation and cooperation toward disaster response and is attended by representatives from academia; private industry; state, local, and federal government; non-profits; and international organizations. […]

Connecting people to safe drinking water in Liberia with Fulcrum Having recently used Fulcrum to map over 15,000 potential new customers of the water utility in Liberia’s capital Monrovia, the World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Program is now using the collected data to help connect more people to safe drinking water, and is working on […]

Generating reports from anywhere A couple of months back, we added a feature to the Fulcrum platform that allows you to generate reports from records captured in the field. Using your custom apps created with the Fulcrum app designer in your web account, after collecting data in the field, you can generate a PDF-based report […]

We recently rolled out several major enhancements to the data view on the web. Among the enhancements are a new improved table view, a split table/map view, and a new record editing interface. We’ve gotten a lot of feedback about improving quality assurance (QA) workflows on the web, and this is the first major step […]

Last week, Tony and I spent the week out at Camp Roberts in California, testing Fulcrum in the field with FEMA for disaster relief needs as part of the RELIEF field experiments. FEMA RELIEF The objective of RELIEF is to bring together people from industry, government, and academic institutions to field test hardware, software, and […]

Fulcrum has enjoyed considerable growth in the past six months and we’re excited about that, considering that we are just getting started and many more innovative features are on the roadmap for 2013 and beyond. What we didn’t anticipate or predict a year ago was the growth of our international user base, especially on the […]

Humanitarian aid and assistance agencies are working all over the world to help developing nations prepare for and respond to disasters. We are proud to share that Fulcrum is actively being used by such organizations. Recently, the Ugandan Red Cross Society has been hard at work in eastern Uganda conducting field surveys to get a […]

When we released the first generation of Fulcrum for Android nearly a year ago, we had no idea that it would quickly become the primary platform for our users. It became clear that our Android client needed to be the best it could in order to enable our users to collect data easily and efficiently. […]

Fulcrum is an extremely powerful tool for mobile data collection, especially since you do not need to have any knowledge of or experience with GIS or data collection to be able to effectively use it. It is very easy to learn how to use Fulcrum, but with the limitless customization possibilities, we understand it may […]

Harmful algae blooms have become an increasingly public issue along the entire Gulf Coast. Each year Florida’s open coastal waters and estuaries are blighted by these microscopic plant-like cells in seawater, brackish water, and also freshwater. Most notably is the red tide, causing massive population kills in fish, invertebrates, shellfish, and birds. Not only does […]

We love hearing feedback from our users, and were very pleased to see Brandon Freeman’s excitement about Fulcrum when he reached out on Twitter. Brandon is a Civil Engineer with TREKK Design Group, and has been using Fulcrum for multiple projects. User Highlight: Brandon Freeman, TREKK Brandon has been utilizing Fulcrum for a while on […]

In our latest round of updates, we introduced the ability for administrators to control and assign records to users within the operation workflow of their organization. When a record is assigned to a user, only that user will be able to download and modify the record on their mobile device. This can be useful for […]

Over the past month you have probably noticed a few updates to Fulcrum. Our dev team has been working hard to bring you new features and improved functionality to make Fulcrum an even more powerful toolkit for mobile data collection. Check out what’s new… Import and Merge Data Many users have existing tools for editing […]

Earlier this year we rolled out a complete redesign of our website with a new look & feel, cleaner interface, and more comprehensive App Gallery. Once that endeavor went live, we immediately took aim at doing the same thing for our web app. Togetherness We usually like to avoid the passage of time being the […]

Our environment and the infrastructure that lies within is ever changing making it a challenge to keep GIS data current and veracious. Decision makers rely on up-to-date input of data to make evaluations that could have profound impacts on people, communities, businesses, etc. Fulcrum provides a collection and editing tool for data collection for field […]

One of the powerful features of Fulcrum is the ability to go completely offline and still be able to collect data. To augment this capability, we wanted to be able to access offline tile basemaps to use as reference when collecting data in the field. Using the MBTiles map format for Fulcrum offline maps lets […]

When we started building Fulcrum, offline capability was one of the core features we built into the software. We’ve put a lot of work into making the mobile app work completely offline, including offline basemaps, a feature I’d like to discuss in this post. Creating offline basemaps is a complex subject and worthy of several […]

Fulcrum 1.4 for iOS is now live on the App Store, and it includes some nice updates to make it even more powerful for field data collection applications. There are quite a few performance enhancements overall, making the map view much faster when rendering lots of data in a single view, and stability improvements to […]

In the last few months we’ve had a lot of interest from developers wanting to build connectors and integrations from their own apps to the Fulcrum platform — to do things like publishing maps from data collected in their Fulcrum accounts, and import data from their own databases to update in the field. We just […]

We’re excited to announce that Fulcrum for Android is now available on the Google Play store. This fantastic platform for creating your own custom mobile data collection apps is now open to a much wider market of data collectors. The market for Android devices has grown astronomically in the past year, and ever since we […]

Over the last few months, we’ve had a lot of inquiries about building an iPad version of Fulcrum, so that data collection teams can make efficient use of the larger form-factor displays for more involved mobile data collection projects, instead of being limited by the iPhone’s small size and interface. We’ve just released a universal […]

Fulcrum API public release We just wrapped up the first public release of our API, opening up the Fulcrum platform and mobile app to developers that want to integrate Fulcrum into their own platforms or databases. The API has existed from the beginning of Fulcrum’s development as a communication endpoint for the mobile app, and […]

Mobile apps have had profound impacts on the lives of users and consumers. Smartphone and tablet apps have become the social norm for accessing news, social network feeds, and essentially tethering individuals to their interests. Businesses today, driven by competition, pour enormous investments into the development of mobile apps to be operational on the frontier […]

Before getting hired at Spatial Networks, I worked as an intern for several months in local government doing various GIS related tasks. Now that I know about Fulcrum, I can say that it would be a wonderful tool for use in municipalities, especially for projects similar to those I worked on. It simplifies every aspect […]

Our latest version of Fulcrum for iPhone has just gone live on the App Store, and it’s bringing some great new functionality to the product. We’ve been making big strides to get Fulcrum to the place where it’ll be a fantastic data collection platform for teams working on gathering customized data out in the field. […]

We’re making rapid progress in all areas of developing on Fulcrum and we are excited to see the level of interest from around the world.  We’ve got potential partners wanting to develop private-label apps powered by Fulcrum as well as a growing collection of DIY users taking the power of Fulcrum in directions we had […]

Later this week we’ll be at the Esri Federal GIS Conference showcasing Fulcrum, along with some other Spatial Networks capabilities and data to a host of federal agency representatives, NGOs, GIS professionals, and others. The federal marketplace is replete with organizations that have a need for mobile data collection tools. With smartphones ubiquitous, cheap, and […]