The Fulcrum Focus

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.

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 ensuring that each team member is doing their job, divide work between users, or to ensure that confidential data is only seen by qualified users.

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…

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.

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 technicians up the chain of command to administrators behind the desk. Whether your interest is in adding information to your database or just verifying what already exists, Fulcrum is the solution.

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 users create their own custom base layers to use as a backdrop, and the format is portable, fast, and gaining traction as an industry standard. MBTiles maps can be generated using TileMill, a free map design studio app created by our friends at Mapbox. They provide excellent documentation on how to build gorgeous maps.

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 blog posts on it’s own, but I wanted to talk about MOBAC — a tool that allows you to create Fulcrum-compatible MBTiles basemaps from some common online sources like MapQuest Open, [OpenStreetMap],(http://www.openstreetmap.org/) and CloudMade.

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.

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 published our Fulcrum Ruby API gem on GitHub, giving Ruby developers an easy set of tools for interacting with the Fulcrum API in their applications. We’re currently using this gem in some of our own apps and projects, and thought it would be great to open it up to other developers.

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.

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.

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 we’ve added some new functionality to allow complete writing and reading of data to and from your Fulcrum account via the API. We’ve also extended the documentation pages to cover the API endpoints, with examples and descriptions of how to use each. All that’s required to get started on hacking with the API is to login with your Fulcrum account and go to your user profile page. You’ll see a link at the bottom to the settings where you can generate an API key.

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 of the possible. It is expected that by 2014, more than 30 billion application downloads would occur and result to nearly $40 billion annual revenue.

During my tenure as an intern within a local government entity, I was engaged in numerous Geographic Information System (GIS) tasks, laying the groundwork for my appreciation of efficient government data collection tools. Reflecting on this experience, I recognize the potential impact of a platform like Fulcrum for municipal operations, particularly for enhancing projects akin to those I contributed to. Fulcrum stands out as a transformative tool, streamlining the entirety of data gathering processes while also being more cost-effective compared to traditional GPS equipment.

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 not imagined just a few months ago.  This is all very exciting.  On top of that, we’re rolling out the latest iPhone version later this month (the iOS Universal edition as well).  We’re a tad behind on Android but I’m confident it will be at parity with iOS by mid-year 2012.

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.