MapBrief™

During the late 15th century heyday of Portuguese exploration, King John II forbade the open distribution of any map or navigational chart pertaining to New World discoveries under pain of death. Locked in a global land-grab race with neighbor Spain, cartographic intelligence was critical to expanding political power and exploiting the riches of the spice [...]

With the extra reflection that comes with any new year, I’ve been pondering a peculiarity of the presumably exciting geospatial industry: no one likes their business model.  Forget the giddy enthusiasm of 4-5 years ago, with the promised federal cutbacks at DoD/Homeland Security, along with the in-progress shrinking of state and local budgets, many shops [...]

In the aftermath of last week’s post describing how ESRI’s push into the Cloud will have a major impact on how third-party integrators and consultants will make money, there was some interesting back-channel conversation dealing with what exactly are the components of a geospatial business model and what they might look like in a more [...]

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The Cloud was supposed to be mostly hype, and the part that wasn’t had something to do with Google.  If this year’s ESRI Users’ Conference was overly focused on ArcGIS Online, you reasoned, it was merely the new shiny bauble in Redlands.  If its president seemed a little [...]