The Fulcrum Focus

Haiti is home to mesmerizing beaches, tropical flowers, great food, and beauty reflective of the sun’s love affair with the Caribbean. Unfortunately, it is also home to hurricanes, earthquakes, torrential storms, flooding and the many issues that follow disasters, particularly in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

We received some exciting news here at Spatial Networks headquarters recently: Fulcrum is now FirstNet Listed and available via the FirstNet App Catalog!

If you’re a firefighter, you need a hose. If you’re a surgeon, a scalpel. As NetHope prepares to help assess and respond to the devastation of Hurricane Dorian, we need a full complement of digital tools to aid the work in emergency situations.

The part of the world which I call home is a place in California that most people only pass through, or fly over, on their way between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Recently however, I had the good fortune that NetHope was conducting its Bay Area Disaster Response Training (DRT) right in my “backyard,” in San Luis Obispo County, CA.

It was extremely hot and dusty as the caravan of humanitarian aid workers from Team Rubicon pulled up to a farmhouse in Matarara, Mozambique – 40 miles west as the crow flies from Beira, but a nearly 8-hour journey overland due to road washouts and poor conditions. Team Rubicon had arrived to as part of the Cyclone Idai response after the storm ripped through Mozambique and caused monumental flooding throughout the country.

In 1996, I went to work for Cambric Corporation in Salt Lake City, Utah as a deputy project manager for a telecom operations outside-plant (OSP) data conversion project. The client was Bell Canada, and we had three primary subcontractors, based in India, that were responsible for the vast majority of the labor in converting legacy analog engineering design and “as-builts” drawings in to a full AM/FM/GIS for roughly 255 telephone exchanges covering the eastern provinces of Canada. I was largely responsible for managing the production schedules, operations and quality control of our Indian subcontractors. This required a fair amount of time on the ground in India providing guidance, oversight, supervision and management of nearly 1,000 project team members for more than 18 months.

Health disparities have become common conversation amongst medical professionals, politicians, and communities at large. It’s a known fact that the poorer you are, the more affected you are by the worst health indicators. Understanding this fact makes the fix sound simple: perhaps move to a new neighborhood or increase your income — that should fix these issues. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.

Fourth of July in Southern California was different this year. I’m sure most were prepared to enjoy family, friends and traditional fireworks. They most likely had made their last grocery store runs and mapped out their entertainment plan, when out of nowhere the plans were literally shook up. An earthquake measuring 6.4 in magnitude shook at 10:33 a.m., causing a swift change to the Independence Day celebrations in Searles Valley and surrounding areas. In classic Cali fashion, some felt the shaking happening and kept moving afterward thinking it’s normal California stuff since they have become accustomed to experiencing these tremors.

There’s a lot more to construction work than just — well, constructing. Contractors and project managers are also responsible for meeting deadlines, construction standards, and safety regulations.

Today’s businesses have vast amounts of data, and decision-makers must use it to solve pressing problems. However, due to the high data volume and limited time for analysis, it’s crucial to cut through the noise and focus on what matters. Location intelligence streamlines this process by visually representing your data, making it easier to understand. Viewing data in a visual context, such as on a map, significantly enhances comprehension.

If your field teams are still conducting inspections and surveys with paper and clipboards, it’s time for an upgrade.

As the Fulcrum Community Advocate, I had the pleasure of attending the National VOAD (Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster) Conference in Nashville, TN. It was a life-changing and definitely a life-saving experience for me.

I just arrived back home in St. Pete after an awesome and productive week in San Diego for this year’s FOSS4G-NA conference. It’s North America’s version of the go-to event for those of us at the intersection of geospatial and open source. OSGeo and the local organizing committee hosted it at the Marina Village Conference Center in Mission Bay. Overall the event was a phenomenal week full of great content, new (and old) friends, time with customers and partners, and a chance to see what’s next in the industry.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) conducts upwards of 32,000 inspections each year, but that number is expected to rise in the near future. Earlier this month, the U.S. labor secretary said he expects jobsite inspections to increase once the new crop of OSHA agents hired in fiscal year 2018 completes training.

About Geodexy

When I joined Spatial Networks we were in the very early stages of building a data collection tool, primarily for internal use to improve speed and efficiency on data project work. That product was called Geodexy, and the model was similar to Fulcrum in concept, but in execution and tech stack, everything was completely different.

If you work in construction, you’ve probably noticed smartphones, tablets, and other new technology solutions appearing on job sites over the last few years. If you’ve been in the industry for a long time, you might even find them annoying: Why create complicated new processes when the old ones work just fine?

The systems that provide our world with power and electricity require enormous amounts of utility data and compliance monitoring to function effectively. Energy and utility companies must constantly monitor, analyze, and respond to events that affect these complex networks to ensure their customers have electricity. What’s more, the production and distribution of energy are subject to numerous regulations, making utility data and compliance requirements crucial for operations to be documented in meticulous detail. The ability to streamline and integrate data coming in from multiple sites is critical to staying ahead of these demands.

In 2016, the U.S. Census Bureau launched The Opportunity Project, “a process for engaging government, communities, and the technology industry to create digital tools that address our greatest challenges as a nation”.

The toxic red tide bloom that has plagued Florida since November of 2017 seems to finally have dissipated. Last week, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission reported that the red tide organism, Karenia brevis or K. brevis, is no longer present in water samples.

Fulcrum records location data with each parent record, child record, and media attachment, ensuring high location accuracy. The collected data relies on the configured location provider in your mobile device’s operating system. Typically, this provider is the onboard GPS sensor, which sometimes works in conjunction with other sensors and radios in the device.

We’re excited to be headed out to the SaaStr Annual conference in San Jose, CA next week! This year there’ll be over 300 speakers and 12,000 attendees, all there to share ideas, collaborate, and hear success stories from some of the biggest players in B2B software.

As we look back at 2018 in review and all that the Spatial Networks team has accomplished, I’d like to share a number with you: 130,021,386.

I’ve always said: Ask me to run an office, and no worries, I got it! Then this task fell on my lap — a great combination of departments’ needs and wants, all to be managed by me. I needed to tag and inventory our assets. Sure, I think. Let’s use Google sheets and track the inventory. If only there was an asset management solution that I could use to take the information off a barcode and correlate it to an existing asset. Oh, wait — there is!

Our semi-annual Fulcrum All Hands events are always energizing and fun-filled, but last week was one for the record books. With 54 full-time employees, it was our biggest ever (there were 33 at our last Fall All Hands!) – and if you saw the barrage of photos on our social media accounts, you already know it was epic.

One of the fastest ways to prevent the spread of deadly diseases like Ebola is to catalog instances on a map. This enables emergency planners to monitor the scope of an outbreak and allocate resources to prevent loss of life. Maps also help community members and aid workers locate clean water, medical facilities, latrines, burial sites, and safe travel routes. Being able to share this information quickly between agencies is vital to coordinating an effective response to an outbreak, and apps with mobile medical forms that share data in real time or near-real time can be an invaluable tool. The engineers at Fulcrum have created apps for tracking Ebola and cholera in response to the current outbreaks in several African countries.

The good news: The current demand for new homes, buildings, and facilities in the United States is higher than it’s been in years, and the construction industry is booming. “For better or worse, business is good for us,” Goliath Construction Consulting founder Tyson Conrad told U.S. News and World Report. “They’re beating down the door.” The bad news? There aren’t enough skilled workers to keep up with demand.

Every year since 2014, the American Geographical Society (AGS) has hosted Geography 2050, a multi-year strategic dialogue among thought leaders from academia, government, business, and the nonprofit sector.

From conserving natural resources to reducing business costs, there are lots of reasons to switch to paperless fieldwork — but many companies have yet to do it. Maybe it’s because they’re attached to their familiar paper processes, or perhaps they’re simply reluctant to enact change.

Spatial Networks is once again proud to announce our support for the annual Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) conference. FOSS4G 2018 brings together the largest gathering of developers and users of open source geospatial software in the world- and this year it’s all happening in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, one of Africa’s fastest growing cities!

One of the biggest benefits of using mobile forms is the time savings. So naturally, once you’ve made the switch from paper, you’ll want to get your field teams up and running as quickly as possible. In this post, we’ll show you an easy way to get your employees trained on Fulcrum and collecting field data in no time.

Offline data collecting from the field is an essential task across many industries, and recent advances have made it easier than ever.

Professionals across many industries — utility, engineering, and construction, especially — are giving up their antiquated pen-and-paper processes and switching to mobile forms, and for good reason. Taking inspection forms that have been filled out in the field and manually entering them into a computer is a slow and cumbersome process that takes otherwise productive hours out of the workday. With mobile forms, the information is entered just once on-site and gets synced to the cloud, where it is immediately available to clients and stakeholders. Even better? Switching to mobile forms is easy! With Fulcrum, you can create a custom mobile inspection form in 15 minutes or less. In this post, we’ll show you how.

As we mentioned in a recent post, adding a spatial dimension to your field data vastly increases the value of your efforts, whether you’re collecting information for the purpose of tracking sales or fighting malaria. And all geospatial data collection starts with a basemap.

In the last few posts, we’ve talked about the benefits of collecting and analyzing field data. Information gathered from the field gives businesses and organizations a unique advantage. It provides a foundation for more informed decision-making and helps them allocate resources more effectively.

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!