The Fulcrum Focus

One fire (or flood) away from failure
The statistics behind data loss are alarming: 70% of today’s businesses would fail within 3 weeks if they suffered a catastrophic loss of paper-based records due to fire or flood.1

QR codes are not just for company promotions and marketing anymore, businesses can use them for things like Asset Inventory, Asset Tracking, Maintenance Records and Logs & Ticketing. The Fulcrum barcode field allows users to quickly scan any type of barcode and QR code and pull up records with the scanned information. QR Codes are better in many ways over barcodes, mainly because they are faster to scan and can hold more information. Here’s how to quickly get started using Fulcrum and QR codes.

Using Photo Metadata in Fulcrum
When looking at photos, it often helps to glance at the metadata behind your photos. Accessing this information can give your photos more context. For example, how close was the captured photo to the record location? Here’s a quick tip, to access the metadata of a photo you want to click “Image Data” (top left corner) while looking at a photo. This will display a map, make/model of the capture device, device OS, Fulcrum version, dimensions, date, latitude/longitude coordinates, altitude, compass heading, and distance to the record.

As we just wrapped up a great 2016, it’s important for us to plant some flags for 2017. We’re constantly evolving and improving our platform, so clear milestones ahead of us can be both immensely helpful to guide our team toward shared goals, and also give customers insights into where we’re headed strategically with Fulcrum.

Recently, we’ve started taking the time to write some automated tests for the user interface of our Android application. The goal, as with most tests, is to prevent regressions when we push out new features and make changes to the app. There’s quite a few frameworks you can use, and we’ve made good progress using Espresso. There have been some hurdles though; one of the biggest bumps was figuring out a way our tests could work with the new permissions model on Android Marshmallow.

As we wrap up another exciting year, we’d like to take a moment to recap and review some of our highlights over the past 12 months. When we closed out 2014, I anticipated this was going to be an exciting year, but could never have predicted just how much we could have accomplished!

Time Visualizations
One of the many interesting analytical possibilities with data captured in Fulcrum comes from the temporal nature of everything collected by teams in the field over time. Because all data captured in Fulcrum automatically records timestamp information when created or updated, this data could then be plotted to see collection patterns through the course of your projects, to see spatial distribution and the ebb and flow of data capture.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are becoming ever more commonplace in the mapping business for collecting cheap aerial imagery on demand. Once an expensive hobby for tinkerers, UAVs have rapidly become a truly disruptive technology in the geospatial industry. The ability to quickly send an inexpensive and nimble platform of sensors into the air to survey your surroundings, and receive realtime feedback, has opened the door to countless opportunities for data collection and analytics.

The holiday countdown has begun! We understand that finding gifts for map geeks can be quite tricky. So, the Fulcrum team has compiled a list of the top cartography gifts that your map geek is sure to love. Ranging from $15 to $1,500, we hope you can find something within your price range that will be treasured for years to come.

Fulcrum for field biologists
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.

We’re excited to be attending the excellent Geography 2050 Symposium this week in New York City. Set up as an open symposium by the American Geographical Society, the objective is to offer a platform for discussion around the challenges facing planet, with a focus on mapping, geography, and spatial sciences. After an excellent show last year, this year’s focus is “Exploring Our Future in an Urbanized World”, with a set of topics relating to urbanization and the growth of cities.

On October 8th, I had the privilege of presenting at the annual JS.Geo conference. The event was held in Philadelphia this year and Fulcrum was proud to join the impressive list of sponsors. This inexpensive, one day conference on all things Geo and JavaScript provides a refreshing alternative to the traditional conference format. You can review the #jsgeo hashtag to follow attendee reactions on Twitter and check out the speaker slides here.

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In order to view your data on the map on the Fulcrum mobile apps or on the web, you’ll need to have some spatial component to it. To do this you can import a shapefile or a CSV file with latitude and longitude columns.

Earlier this year we launched calculation fields, and we’re constantly impressed with the ways our customers are using them to add value to their field surveys. I want to demo a neat technique you can use to embed proj4js into a calculation field to gain access to custom GIS projections.

A while back we launched integration with Zapier, a service that allows you to connect web services together for things like push notifications, emails, and data automation.

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.

What a week! Last week was the fourth annual Denver Startup Week. Denver has a thriving entrepreneurial community and is quickly becoming one of the best places in the U.S. to start, build and operate a business. #DENstartupweek showed me how strong the community of tech, marketing and startups are in my city.

As most developers are probably aware, Google’s new update to the Android platform has officially been released! Android 6.0 Marshmallow will start rolling out to devices next week, with the Nexus devices getting the update first. So in the meantime, what is the new “Runtime Permissions” feature in Marshmallow?

Next week Bryan and I will be attending the International Construction and Utility Equipment Expo (ICUEE) in Louisville, KY. We’ll be spending all three days (9/29 – 10/1) showcasing how Fulcrum can be deployed for field environments to increase productivity, workflow, and data quality.

How do you choose which navigation app to use? For me, I compare the strengths of the leading navigation apps available. There are a plethora of options in each app store to choose from, but I focused on the three apps that maintain the best data sources available. This means the data they use is reliable and maintained on a global scale. The three turn-by-turn navigation apps below provide users with a free mobile app, as well as access to edit the data behind the map.

Nearly every one of our users is a business customer, and the data resident on their mobile devices is protected company property. We take security very seriously, and want all of our users to have the tools at their disposal to keep their work safe. The objective of this article is to shed light on a few techniques available already on your iOS and Android devices to help protect your data that’s floating out in the world with your staff as they’re using mobile devices in the field.

Having your up-to-date Fulcrum data available in your own database enables countless opportunities for custom integrations and seamless workflows. Databases power most CRM, GIS, and Asset Management systems, so configuring Fulcrum to write directly to these database tables allows you to leverage all the benefits of Fulcrum for field data collection without having to modify your existing systems or workflows.

Many of our users have advanced data collection requirements, with multiple items potentially connected to one another with parent-child relationships, extensive pre-populated lists, or imported records from external sources like asset management databases.

After you have collected excellent data in Fulcrum, how do you go about styling and embedding that data online or on your company’s website?

How weather information adds context to field inspections
Adding weather data to field inspection records gives insight about the environmental conditions at the time of the inspection. Weather conditions can have a significant impact on the results of the inspection, particularly in outdoor settings where wind, rain, and temperature can affect the performance of equipment and the behavior of materials. For example, a roofing inspection may reveal a leak during a rainy day, but not during a dry day. Similarly, a soil inspection may reveal different results depending on the moisture content of the soil. By recording weather data at the time of inspection, inspectors can provide more accurate and detailed reports, which can help identify potential issues and recommend appropriate solutions. The integration of weather data into field inspection records can also provide a historical record of weather conditions, which can be used for future analysis and research.

These days we all have far more accounts and passwords than we know what to do with. Managing a set of over 100 unique usernames and passwords for online services like banking, productivity, hosting, social media is becoming untenable even for casual Internet citizens. As a high-octane user of web services, I have over 500 unique accounts for different things, hundreds of which I rarely use, but occasionally need. This combined with the risk of having an account compromised with sensitive information make the need for a hyper secure password strategy for any online accounts. The trouble is that to be truly secure, you should use strong passwords, vary them from site to site, and reset or update them from time to time.

Computing costs with calculation fields
Since we released calculation fields in Fulcrum a few months back, our users are building them for all sorts of interesting uses for collection in the field. A common use for calculation fields is to build formulas for working with cost numbers—for totaling individual item costs, computing tax amounts, and using total cost results to drive additional form inputs using conditional logic.

In a couple of weeks we’ll be out at the American Public Works Association 2015 annual conference in Phoenix, AZ. Hundreds of organizations around the country use Fulcrum for public works field data collection in water management, transportation signage, safety audits, asset inventory, construction site management, and more.

Fulcrum users often inquire if and when the Fulcrum mobile apps might support GPS tracklog functionality. We are focusing all our energy into building the best platform for structured data collection, and as such, this feature is currently fairly low on the priority list. One of the reasons we have not prioritized this is due to the fact that there are several excellent solutions already available for handling this.

There’s been a boom in the last couple years of big tech companies trying to reach to the periphery of the globe and bring Internet access to people without connectivity. Facebook is launching giant solar-powered drones with lasers, Google is floating balloons with antennae into the stratosphere, and smartphones are cheaper than ever.

This week we are attending the Institute of Transportation Engineers’s 2015 Annual Meeting, talking with the leaders in civil engineering design, traffic studies, planning, and design about methods for improving the data capture process. Field-based data is critical to get the latest information on transport infrastructure.

Does your company depend on email for team communication, collaboration and/or project management? Do you find email frustrating to keep up with? Do you wish your team could use something easy, faster, and more efficient?

Using with geojson.io
We are always on the lookout for quick and simple tips & tools for working with map data. One of our favorites since it was released back in 2013 is geojson.io. It is a fantastic web tool for quickly sketching out map data using the portable GeoJSON format. It also supports other common standards like CSV, KML, shapefile, GPX files from your GPS, and even saving data directly to GitHub repositories.

What happens after you have set up your app and collected information in the field? What is the best way to explore your data in a consistent and comprehensive manner? How do you make data more enjoyable to study?

The Fulcrum team creates 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.

Here at Fulcrum, we often have people traveling for work to conferences, trade shows, presentations, and lectures. Upon their return to the office, they have to turn in the much dreaded expense report for approval and reimbursement. In my opinion, there isn’t anything worse you can do than making the employee do it over and over again because it didn’t include the complete trip details. If you use Fulcrum, I’ve created an expense app to create a hassle-free expense tracker.

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

UPDATE: This blog is from 2015, and it shows the old way of pushing data from Fulcrum into ArcGIS Online. Today, we recommend using Shared Views and the Feature Service output. See this post from January 2021 for details.

If you use Fulcrum to conduct facility inspections, perform building safety audits, or any number of construction-related applications, you’ll find plenty of places where you’ll want to make notes of measurements and dimensions. Today we wanted to highlight a handy mobile app for iOS that lets you document measurements clearly and consistently, and makes it easy to upload those to Fulcrum to include with full inspection data and Fulcrum reports.

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.

One of our core objectives with Fulcrum is to make it easy to work with your data once you’ve surveyed data in the field. There are several ways to get at your data after collection is complete, whether you’re performing QA/QC with the web-based map view, exporting raw data to several different file formats for export, or using our API to build your own custom tools. One of my favorite methods for working with my data is using what we call data shares, which allows for piping a live, on-demand version of an app’s data as CSV, GeoJSON, or KML formats.

Our latest update for Fulcrum on Android got some design updates and improvements to match Google’s Material Design specifications for layouts, look and feel, and interaction. You’ll see right away in version 2.13 that the app list is now presented as a drawer that slides out from the left. The form user interface has also gotten a facelift to conform to the Material standards.

Last week I attended an event with the US Geospatial Intelligence Foundation 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’s 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.