I got back to London from San Francisco yesterday morning after a week of geo-intensity; Where2.0, meeting a load of geo people, an earthquake and WhereCamp. This was the first time I’d been to Where2.0 – in previous years I listened to talks on the excellent IT Conversations as well as various illicit podcastings. So I was pretty excited to be taking part. There was a stark contrast between the really interesting stuff and the kind of interesting stuff being talked about. Companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, who have contributed massively to recent developments in the geo sphere, just didn’t have that much to say. Google’s presentation focused on StreetView, which is nice but not-that-amazing, Microsoft showed us some very impressive looking shots from Virtual Earth, which is nothing new, and Yahoo! talked about Pipes and mentioned their involvement with OSM. Meanwhile, Sean Gorman (founder of Fortius One) gave a lightening talk about their new service, Geo Commons. ESRI weren’t there. They should have been.
Geo Commons is to desktop GIS what Google Docs is to Office suites. The site lets you upload a dataset in Shapefile format (support for other formats is planned in the near future), to which you add a description and tags. Through a slick drag and drop interface, you choose the fields that you want to display, before creating a heat-map using the GeoIQ (also by Fortius One) web API – a service that is well worth playing around with. If it wasn’t for the need to work to pay my rent, I’d by making heat maps all day long.
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With GeoCommons, Fortius One have captured 70% of the most fequently used functionality of desktop GIS. As the site matures, we can expect to see them capturing 90%. You don’t need to pay a huge license fee, or have a degree in GIS to start making meaningful maps any more. If I were ESRI or Mapinfo, I’d be worried. I’d opensource or my main Desktop GIS (which in the case of ESRI Arc-Map is just a shell), or at least start making it available freely and then sell custom plugins and extensions (things like Spatial Analyst, or Network Analyst) to the people who need it. If they don’t, their safe customers will start to look elsewhere for free alternatives.
What’s even better, is that the Fortius One team really understand what matters. Free beer. The emerging gap between the incumbents and the neo-geographic newcommers was superbly displayed during the Open geo-data BOF hosted by GeoCommons, who provided a kit-bag rammed full of free beer. We were still talking an hour into our one hour slot and got turfed out by Microsoft, who had the room booked for their “exploring Virtual Earth” BOF. Geo-Commons’ free beer was countered by the bar that Microsoft set up outside the room they were holding the session in, which came along with a MS employee whose job was to guard their beer. You can only drink from the teet of Microsoft if you sit through their entire session. Meanwhile, the neo-geographers who included GeoCommons, OSM and ShapeWiki representatives shared their Free beer with passers by.