Dear ESRI Business Partner: Your Revenue Model Died Last Week
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...
View ArticleCooking Up a Geospatial Business Model In A Web World
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...
View ArticleWhy We Haven’t Found the 21st Century Business Model
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...
View ArticleWorld Bank Empowers Citizen Cartographers to Enrich Google in Developing World
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....
View ArticleThe Profit Motive: Why Geospatial Open Source Needs More Naked Commercial...
It was a post of narrow import: QGIS now has more native SQL Server 2008 support. While I was happy to note the participation and support of folks I both know and like, I was nonetheless slightly...
View ArticleIt’s Never Been Harder to Make Money in GIS: The Sobering Economic Backdrop...
So ESRI buys the cloud-ish start-up GeoIQ: why should anyone but the twittering class care? Because it’s the latest sign there are exactly two pathways to profitability in traditional GIS: be niche,...
View ArticleSoftware Can’t Transform Organizations That See Data Merely as a Thing to Be...
All words are prejudices. -Nietzsche The first problem with Data Management is that it’s called “Data Management.” In the NFL there is a certain type of quarterback about which the best that can be...
View ArticleThe Tired Debate About Open-Source-in-the-Enterprise Dies an Overdue Death
The obituary appeared in the Wall Street Journal this week (ungated link). And the lead sentence is all you need to read: The use of open-source software is becoming more prevalent at big companies for...
View ArticleThe Flawed Economics of Closed Government Data
How much should citizens pay a county for a digital copy of property records and aerial photos? Sciotto County, Ohio says $2000. Actually it hired Woolpert to figure it out for them, and they said...
View ArticleWhy We’re Smarter on Sunday: Sports Analytics & Business Analytics, Part I
We all remember when we first fell in love with tabular data. For me it was the list of baseball batting averages of every major league player that was published in the Sunday newspaper. Still in...
View ArticleData Insight, Reputational Risk, and Bill Belichick: Sports Analytics &...
Can everyone immediately cite your worst professional decision? If you’re 3-time Super Bowl champion and coaching mastermind Bill Belichick, any moderately savvy NFL fan would blurt out “4th and 2“....
View ArticleThe Massive Potential of Verizon Mapquest
Last week’s announcement of Verizon’s purchase of AOL (which includes Mapquest) was greeted mostly with attempts at humor, with references either to AOL trial offer CDs or the “You’ve Got Mail” movie....
View ArticleMapquest + Mapbox: A Win-Win With A Huge Unanswered Question
In a rare confluence of a languid blogging pace with the tempo of events, my last post on the Verizon purchase of Mapquest was quickly followed by news that Mapquest would be contracting out its map...
View ArticleJS.Geo: Web Mapping at a Crossroads, and the Crossroads is in Philadelphia on...
Web maps are too important to be left to the mapping industry. Google figured this out before anyone else. Uber’s recent purchase of Microsoft’s Bing Maps assets and the sale of Nokia HERE geo assets...
View ArticleTimoney Group’s “Hot” List for 2016
We here at Timoney Group headquarters in Denver aren’t above a SEO-pandering listicle–we’ve done it before–and you clicked, so we’re all good. If you follow tech closely, much of what follows won’t be...
View ArticleGeographically Balancing Supply and Demand: Car Sharing in Denver
How do you geographically match supply and demand in the new sharing economy? For lodging, the old way was to have a fixed number of hotel rooms whose prices rise as the beds fill up. The new way is...
View ArticleThe Travelling Salesman Problem Is Not a Routing Problem, It’s A Monetization...
Creative destruction is awesome until it comes for your livelihood. Having made a few dollars over the years building custom routing applications, I had two distinct reactions when testing out the...
View ArticleBracing For The Satellite Pixel Glut of 2023
It’s a question as old as capitalism itself: does Supply create its own Demand? With Serious Money flooding the Earth Observation sector–Billionaire money, Former Treasury Secretary/ Wall Street money,...
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