Geobusiness 2016

Geobusiness is the annual event consisting of free to access trade show and paid conference. From my experience is the biggest event of this type in the UK, focused on gathering, storing, processing and delivering of geospatial information. Last year one had seen 2 000 visitors from 47 countries and this year was posed to beat this.
Most of attendees focus on exhibition with a large array of industry’s house names, smaller SMS and startups and a lot to offer. This year industry’s main interest has been UAV and conference organisers responded by hosting a dedicated UAV + GIS section.

Keynotes

Morning keynotes kicked off with Tom Cheesewright’s pointing out that the precise positioning is essential to synchronisation of virtual and real world. Following discussions from Ed Parsons from Google, Gary Gale from What3Words and prof Gianvito Lanzolla from Cass Business School highlighted changing demand for the geospatial industry and how demand is driving it forward.

Ed has discussed toothbrush test . Technology will pass it if its ability to make your life better makes it ubiquitous. His argument was that spatially enabled information is exactly that. As he pointed out a lot of unicorn startups (Uber, AirBnB, Deliveroo) use it as a platform without hiring any geospatial specialists. He also painted future picture with user centric maps and discussed how problems can be solved by scaling and machine learning approach.

Prof Gianvito has shown, from business perspective, how digitalisation and connectivity changed economy and affect future infrastructure showing changes in revenue and business models.

Geospatial disruptor

What3Words is a cartographic disruptor replacing the coordinate system with combination of three words. THose define cell in global 3x3m grid and can be used to easy pinpoint location for non-geospatial experts.
Solution looks neat, its easy to program - it only takes only 10MB of storage space, can be translated to other languages easily and its a great enabler.
Gary demonstrated array of social based products, solving problem of inadequate addressing systems for 75% of the world and helping with something as simple as fixing water leaks or power breaks. More advanced examples included https://pollinateenergy.org/ or the Favelas post service.

Main Takeaways?

• Industry is definitely moving more digital - a lot of product offering has been predominantly tablet/mobile based with slick design. UAV has been especially strong and a lot of hardware producers seems to be re-positionig themselves in expectations for the big rise in this part of the market. I expect they are correct.
• There are ongoing problems with privacy and different view on monopoly between Europe and States.
• Counties still perceive spatial information as source of power and are unwilling to share. Google has ongoing debate with South Korea and India’s Geospatial Information Regulation Bill proposal has created controversy.
• Addressing logic is very difficult to programme.
• Google is mining its map pictures for text (40 billion lines to be exact) to better understand the nature of local business.