The Fulcrum Focus

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 spatial 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 list of interesting cartography gifts that your geogeek 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.

This week we’ve got some interesting links from around the web — tips on using Slack more efficiently with a large group, personal time management, and notes on the latest powerful update to Workflow (the excellent iOS app).

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.

Cory and I are in Toronto for this year’s GIS-Pro conference hosted by URISA. URISA always puts on a good show with a wide array of speakers, this time with heavy representation from Canadian cities and towns, as well. URISA’s Ontario, Alberta, and BC chapters came together and built a great program for planners, GIS analysts, and management, with plenty of talks on best practices and what’s new in GIS.

This Halloween season, let us make one element of your life less spooky: webhooks! Webhooks can be pretty daunting to the average hacker. Luckily, with the correct tools, one can overcome the intimidation that webhooks may present.

Fulcrum is a hacker’s dream. If you know your way around the command line and through Javascript functions, you can automate and integrate numerous processes.

Being “productive” requires the right thought process. Your mental state is much more important that the tools you use for getting things done, though many productivity resources are overly focused on the toolbox (rather than how the tools are applied). This week we’ve got a few links on ways to think differently about “knowledge work”. Enjoy!

With each new smartphone or tablet that hits the market, the manufacturers are always striking a balance on hardware design to squeeze more life out of the batteries in our devices. Using bigger batteries and upping the power usage efficiency keeps makers just ahead of the curve. New apps, notifications, and ever-increasing usage make it challenging to even make it through a full day with any life left.

It seems like machine learning is either hitting its stride as a real “thing” these days, or is at a particularly high point in the hype cycle. The advances happening in this AI / ML space are fascinating. I think the Big Tech Companies are onto something with real-world applications that are neither pie-in-the-sky science fiction or vaporware. This week we’ve got a few interesting things in that vein.

This is part 2 in a series about feedback loops and reducing the time between response and action. In this part, we’ll cover how using various features in Fulcrum can improve the quality of the data you collect and decrease the amount of time spent cleaning up and correcting data.

What’s new in workflow
Here are some of the interesting things the Fulcrum team has found from around the web related to workflow, data, and analytics. Enjoy!

At no other point in history has geography played such a critical role in virtually every aspect of our lives. From the long-standing traditions of map making and understanding how the physical environment is organized, to the contemporary explosion of GIS, GPS, and other geospatial analyses and techniques, Geography now permeates every aspect of our daily lives.

This is a guest post from our partners at RESPEC, an integrated consulting and services firm with over 230 full-time employees and annual revenue over $30 million.

On August 24th, we rolled out some significant updates and additions across all of the major components that make up the Fulcrum platform — iOS, Android, and the web application. You can always find a summary of the updates on our Release Notes page, but since this is a big one, we wanted to take some time to review some of the new features that are now available.

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.

Later this month we’ll be at the International Association of Assessing Officers (IAAO) Conference, talking in-depth about what appraisers and assessors can do to automate their field data collection processes. We talk with hundreds of customers with diverse arrays of projects, and so frequently the underlying pains in dealing with data are the same, regardless of industry. My talk will cover some thoughts on best-practices to designing data workflows, actionable things you can implement to make your fieldwork more efficient, and how to maximize costly field resources (your people) to create “evergreen” data you can use over time.

Last month, our longtime partner, CartoDB, rebranded as CARTO and launched their latest product — CARTO Builder. This rebranding and new product launch signify their commitment to the field of Location Intelligence. While the CartoDB Editor made it easy to visualize map data, CARTO Builder provides additional tools for simplifying data analysis and building out data dashboards. Manually-constructed SQL queries and coded applications have given way to widget-based application development. Data exploration and analysis can be accomplished in an intuitive way, without ever having to write any code.

“All purposeful behavior may be considered to require feed-back. If a goal is to be attained, some signals from the goal are necessary at some time to direct the behavior.” —Norbert Wiener, father of Cybernetics & Control Systems

While our engineers are hard at work building a flexible platform that suits the needs of our diverse user base, we often receive feedback from users exploring the software (or potential customers) and requesting very specific features, totally unique to their workflow.

This is part 5 in our series on spreadsheets and data visualization. In this part we’ll cover how to do more with data once it’s in Google Sheets, such as integration with other services, BI tools, and more. Be sure to also check out part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4 of the series.

In the days of pen and paper collection, data was something to collect, transcribe, and stuff into a file cabinet to be stored for a minimum of 5 years (lest those auditors come knocking). With advances in digital data capture — through all methods including forms software, spreadsheets, or sensors — many organizations aren’t rethinking their processes and thus, haven’t come much further. The only difference is that the file cabinet’s been replaced with an Access database (or gasp a 10 year old spreadsheet!).

I recently came across an essay entitled The Servitude Bubble, by Umair Haque, regarding technology and the booming “Sharing Economy”. It’s an interesting read, with the author driving home the point that the tech industry is currently investing too much time and talent building and unleashing eyewateringly, painfully, mind-numbingly trivial apps which are largely based on creating armies of servants.

Geolocation data in UTM
We posted a while back about a technique for capturing and converting coordinate systems on-demand using calculation fields. That method used the excellent proj4js library to take given latitude / longitude pairs for a Fulcrum record, and calculated the correct values for the projection of choice. This post gives a quick similar method for doing the same thing, but for the popular UTM coordinate system (Universal Transverse Mercator).

This is part 4 in our series on spreadsheets and data visualization. In this part we’ll cover charting and exploring your data with Google Sheets. Be sure to also check out part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 5 of the series.

Using Fulcrum to prevent elephant poaching
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.

Fulcrum and Tableau
Just as Fulcrum specializes in being a data collection tool, Tableau shines as an analytics and visualization platform. The last time we posted about Tableau, Katrina showed us some basic data processing steps to get a Fulcrum CSV Data Share into Tableau. In this post we’ll go through another method, using GeoJSON/CSV Data Shares with a Tableau Web Data Connector (WDC).

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 form building tips, in no particular order, that can assist new users when building their first form.

Calculation fields are powerful for form customization and used heavily by many Fulcrum users. Since their launch last year, we’ve seen adoption take off and customers are now using them in thousands of different ways.

This is part 3 in our series on spreadsheets and data visualization. In this part we’ll cover sharing and publishing to the web from Google Sheets. Be sure to also check out part 1, part 2, part 4, and part 5 of the series.

With the release of our newest feature, Data Events, our development team has been building all sorts of useful examples in our Data Events developer docs. There are more being added everyday as we find new and novel ways to use Data Events. We’ve just scratched the surface of what is capable with this feature. As users share insights into their use cases, we’ll be glad to add more field-tested examples. Here are three Data Events that you may find helpful:

Sometimes making software is like landscaping. As seasons change and time passes, different areas show signs of weathering and damage. Some overgrowth sets in and unexpected foot paths are tread. Certain areas aren’t getting enough water while others get far too much with nothing to show for it. It’s an unyielding ebb and flow of different parts vying for attention, upkeep, and enhancement. At Fulcrum, we battle with this on a daily basis. Our focus is constantly shifting from freshly shipped features to issues caused by unforeseen use cases and an endless list of other variables and gotcha-juggling scenarios. In these past few months, however, we’ve been able to focus our complete attention on pulling every weed we could from one of our Web App’s core components, the Record Editor, and reconstructing it for better usability.

Everyday, professionals throughout many industries go through the laborious task of taking forms and information collected in the field, manually entering them into a computer, and adding that field data to a spreadsheet for future processing. This data entry process can take many otherwise productive hours out of a workday, and if data is submitted with errors or omitted information, this can lead to an even larger amount of time to correct. All of this wasted time leads to unnecessary extra costs in the form of man-hours, travel time, fuel costs, & paper storage.

Today, we are proud to announce Editor, the latest iteration of Fulcrum’s web-based data viewing and editing tool. Since the early days of Fulcrum, we’ve always had a tool to view your collected data on a map, browse the data to see what’s being collected, make edits to it, and export to our many supported formats. To enable even greater flexibility in your QA and reporting processes, we needed it to do more. So we’ve fully rebuilt the Editor from the ground up with a few key focuses in mind: speed and performance, better filtering, and customizable downloads.

Engineering is the art of building things within constraints. If you have no constraints, you aren’t really doing engineering. Whether it’s cost, time, attention, tools, or materials, you’ve always got constraints to work within when building things. Here’s an excerpt describing the challenge facing the engineer:

Next week I’ll be in Raleigh for the 2016 AASHTO GIS for Transportation Symposium. The conference is an opportunity for government transportation departments, private industry, technology creators, and analysts to discuss the latest in GIS mapping for transportation and traffic purposes. We have hundreds of users with Fulcrum deployed for transportation use cases including asset management, construction monitoring, inspections, traffic studies, and more. It gives us a great chance to hear about the latest industry challenges.

Data Events allow users to perform specific ​actions​ when certain ​events​ are triggered. Actions can include things like custom alerts and validation messages, setting field values, choices, labels, descriptions, requirement & visibility settings, HTTP requests and more. Event triggers include things like record loading, editing, validating, saving, value changing, and more.

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 GIS 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 process.

Some great new spring funding opportunities in the GIS world were just published on the Grants.gov website. We republished a few of them here, so feel free to take a look and share with your colleagues. If you know of any new opportunities you’d like to share with our readers, send us a message at info@fulcrumapp.com.

According to IFAW in their 2013 report, Criminal Nature: The Global Security Implications of the Illegal Wildlife Trade, worldwide industrial trade in illegal wildlife is estimated to be $19 billion. That”s equivalent to the price Facebook paid for WhatsApp, or nineteen times what it paid for Instagram. What makes this even more problematic to reconcile, not to mention counter is that this illegal activity is commingled within legal wildlife trade, estimated to be over $323 billion, globally. What further compounds the concerns about illegal wildlife trade is that this $19 billion supports the same bad actors over the same smuggling routes, the same logistical and finance supply chains and leveraged by other criminal organizations and terrorists to procure, transport and sell illegal narcotics, weapons, counterfeit merchandise and most disturbing, the trafficking of humans for modern slavery & prostitution. Each of these illicit activities are also multi-billion dollar global industries, interwoven into the fight against illegal wildlife trade.

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 assessors community.

We are constantly on the lookout for mobile apps that will help Fulcrum users accomplish more with less. One such app that caught our eye is RoomScan. This app allows you to map out floor plans using your iPhone in just a matter of minutes (no Android version as of yet). RoomScan functions differently than other floor plan apps on the market. If you have a need to capture floor plans or indoor maps quickly and accurately, this app would be a great companion to Fulcrum. Once your floor plan or room plan is generated using RoomScan, the plan can be added to your Fulcrum app and saved to a record as you would an image.

Keeping your fleet on the road with Fulcrum
If you operate a motor pool in your line of work, you probably realize how challenging it can be to maintain good records of your vehicles. Some people use paper forms and spreadsheets but find this to be limiting and time consuming. Many companies just don’t actively manage their fleet at all, hoping that the drivers will perform maintenance when needed. If you operate a fleet of vehicles and you use Fulcrum, here is an app you may want to deploy to your staff.

You may have noticed we recently released some new features and gave the app builder side bar some organization and colors. This post outlines each of the new features and goes a little into some upcoming releases that are currently in development and testing.

Animal and plant communities are profoundly affected by climate change. During periods of warming or cooling, the first ecosystems to be effected are the ones that are located near the geographic edge of their range, for example the ‘islands’ of of spruce-fir forests that sit atop the Smokey Mountains of North Carolina. These ecosystems can act as a ‘canary in a coal mine’, an early indicator of what is to come later, on a much larger scale. The Boreal Wetlands of the Adirondack Park are such ecosystems. This vast array of bogs, fens, and other wetlands are some of the southernmost of their kind in North America. Impacts of climate change will be observed there first, and may provide clues about what changes in plant and animal communities we can expect in the future.

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.

If you have ever wanted to mirror or screen share your smartphone or tablet screen to a computer or television, this post is for you! It doesn’t matter if you are on a Windows computer or a Mac or if you are using an iPhone, iPad, Android phone or tablet, the steps for screen sharing below work on all of them, and are easy to set up. The two easiest options available are QuickTime (Mac only) or Reflector (Mac & Windows). We use both here at Fulcrum and have come to rely on them for our web demonstrations, help videos, and training.

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.

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.