Expedition 2009 - DMTI Conference

Last week, I have the privilege of attending Expedition 2009, DMTI’s annual conference. There was so much to do and see, I will highlight the points that I found the most interesting.

CH2M HILL
Michael Underwood, Senior Vice President
http://www.ch2m.com/corporate/
The focus of this presentation was Spatial Information Management. One of the things that stood out to me with this presentation was the use of solar mapping in San Francisco and other US cities. With the San Francisco solar Map, users can see where solar panels are installed in businesses and residential addresses (http://sf.solarmap.org/). In addition, when the user searches for an address, an estimate of the solar potential of the building is provided. The system will even estimate the cost to install solar panels including state and federal incentives and tax credits.

Bell Canada
Michael Molner, Director
http://www.bell.ca/home/
Mike Molner spoke about how having an accurate dwelling database can drive marketing and sales, decrease time to market, and reduce costs. The focus of the presentation was using accurate dwelling data and matching this data to customer data and then to socio-demographic data. What I found interesting about this approach is that instead of focusing on where the customers are, the focus is based on the dwelling information. Since dwellings are more stable than customers, this approach to marketing can decrease marketing costs and more effectively determine gaps and opportunities.

Microsoft
Mark Relph, Vice President, Developer & Platform Group
One of the things I found very interesting about Mark’s presentation was planeteye (http://www.planeteye.com/), which uses user submitted content (photo) which are geocoded. This enables the photos to be available on a map. PlanetEye uses geotagged photos from users as well as geotagged photos from users to create a comprehensive view of many points of interest.

Another interesting website, Photosynth (http://photosynth.net/Default.aspx), can show places and events to users in a quality that just like being there. Users upload photos from an event and several overlapping images are merged together to give viewers a total picture of objects or events. On the website now, there is a photosynth of President Obama’s inauguration and one of the pyramids.

Microsoft has another interesting application called Mesh (https://www.mesh.com/Welcome/default.aspx). This site allows you to sync files between devices. So if you have a presentation on one computer, you can use this application to make sure the most up to date version of the presentation is also on your phone, laptop, and home computer.

Finally, worldwide telescope (http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/Home.aspx) allows users to tour the best imagery of space from the comfort of your computer. Users can tour the constellations or the planets very quickly and easily.


Interesting Web Sites:

These sites are from other presentations that I attended throughout the conference.

http://www.ilookabout.com/
Streetscape from iLOOKABOUT produces geo-coded images of residential and commercial images to give users the illusion of visiting a location from the comfort of their home. The company started by providing virtual tours for real estate but is now taking photos in major markets in Canada. While the product looks similar to google streetview, the technology behind it is quite different.

http://www.arduino.cc/
Makers of open source hardware which allows customers to create their own data. Purchasing a small board from Arduino, users can hook up the hardware to control lights, electronics, or other sensors thereby creating their own sensors. Once the components are hooked up, users can have sensor information sent to them via email. The premise is to allow users to control the physical world from anywhere!

http://diycity.org/
The premise of this group is to make city data easily accessible to anyone. In addition, the challenge is to engage residents as participants and owners of the system as opposed to passive users. One of the interesting projects in Beta right now is DIY traffic. DYI Traffic is an application that alerts users to local traffic issues as they occur. The application will send SMS updates and allow users to query the system for updates on a specific street. In addition, users can contribute their own data.

http://www.pachube.com/
Allows users to connect, tag and share real time sensor data from anything around the world. When I went to Toronto on the map, there were two sensors – the dollar exchange rate, and energy consumption rates. When I looked in Cleveland, someone had set up a meter for the light in a basement. While some of the information is novelty, the potential application of this type of site could be large.

http://www.firelocator.net/
Pitney Bowes has created a wildfire information portal to map the location of wildfires. When the user clicks on a fire, details about the status of the fire are presented. There is a lot of additional information that can be added to the map.