The Geospatial Index

Tue (Matt) Le-Quang is a Data Reporter at VnExpress.net. He spent time with us today analysing and mapping the upgrade of Vietnam's administrative boundaries. Quoting from his publication VnExpress (Google Translate): "After the reorganization of 34 provinces and cities, the number of commune-level administrative units in Vietnam decreased by 67%, from 10,035 to 3,321 units. Of which, Hanoi merged the most units with a reduction rate of more than 77%."Tue has made a web app about this here. There has been a bit of debate over it the past half decade, such as this 2020 piece from VnExpress. Most recent English coverage I can find is this. The country used to have 63 provinces, now there will be 28 with 6 extra cities as their own areas, for a total of 34. A pertinent quote from that article speaks of large savings for the taxpayer: "This restructuring is projected to reduce the workforce by approximately 250,000 people, including 130,000 officials, civil servants, and public employees, as well as 120,000 part-time workers at the commune level. The reform is expected to save more than VND190 trillion (US$7.3 billion) in the 2026–2030 period."This brings up the work of Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson in Why Nations Fail and The Narrow Corridor.Work for which they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics along with Simon Johnson. These books are riveting. They describe, as the title of the first says, how destruction of, or failure to maintain, institutions causes a nation to fail. The second book, The Narrow Corridor, is intended - in Daron's words from the second video above - "…to provide a framework that is applicable across ages and across countries for thinking about what supports prosperity, what supports democracy and what supports liberty. The key idea ... is what supports robust participation from the people and we need the state to play a pro liberty, pro prosperity role. In particular to create inclusive markets which have the right legal system, provide equality of opportunity, the right regulations against the powerful actors."It is so inspiring to see their work quoted by a citizen of, and reporter from, Vietnam in the midst of state action to navigate the country into The Narrow Corridor. Thank you to Tue for giving us the privilege of this report and for all the diligence providing insight to the readers of VnExpress through geospatial apps. Clearly he is a talent, and a credit to the education system of Vietnam.

The podcast is picking up the pace in terms of meeting my heroes. UN Mappers is an open spatial data volunteering programme run by the UN. Michael Montani stepped through the part of the UN he works for and some conflicts or disasters his team is currently helping on. We were also given a look at the UN's operational web map and some commentary on the unique cartographic style that they have to use. We then discussed what the UN's mapping team cannot do, and the place this creates for a worldwide volunteer effort. To get involved, he instructs us to go to HOT OSM Tasking Manager and search for tasking by the UN Mappers organisation. We were also given details on the comprehensive and multilingual geospatial training offered by the UN to prepare volunteers to make quality contributions. It was a strong show of force regarding what the UN can do to cause a broad benefit for the world in a particular skill area. The conversation then turned to how to maintain an enthusiastic, engaged base of contributors. He located volunteered geographic information in the broader realm of citizen science, indicating there is a general set of techniques here to create a rabid corps of contributors. What I appreciated the most is their Mapper of the Month award of the best mapper, called out on Instagram. Here is the latest one.Of course, I asked about how the UN is approaching the emerging trend of foundation models and AI. Have a listen for his response. So, what an amazing moment to have had the chance to talk with such a motivated, good natured individual as Michael Montani. Many of us will have wondered what it might be like to work for the UN, surely one of the world's most significant geospatial organisations. In this hour with Michael we have a clear understanding of how they assist in conflicts and disasters, what their operational map looks like and how they go beyond the capacity of their own team by mobilising a volunteer geospatial army. We are privileged to have had Michael's time.

At the beginning of the year I conducted an exhaustive review of all the #LAfires geospatial responses. This turned into a series of podcast episodes culminating in a discussion with Jamon van den Hoek. A theme was synthetic aperture radar (SAR) to detect building damage. There were some side quests related to near real time earth monitoring for commodities trading, key company profiled was Ursa Space. So now the floods are upon us. The Camp Mystic tragedy on 4th of July took the lives of 27 souls asleep in a summer camp lodge by Guadalupe River in Texas. Necessarily, I am conducting a review of useful geospatial products and services that help respond. I've already done this in a terrific episode with SwissRE, regarding a recent acquisition of theirs, Fathom. Fathom is a flood modeling company based in Bristol, UK. They were recently acquired by reinsurance heavyweight Swiss RE. Hence they are a welcome addition to the list of publicly traded companies profiled on this podcast. Gavin was precient in spending time discussion his team's flood modelling work across the US. Now we have an example in front of us about the consequences of ignoring them. Why? Shockingly, Camp Mystic managed to wrangle an exemption from the 100 year flood polygon and what that means for insurance and positioning buildings. Quoting from Wikipedia:“Between 2011 and 2020, FEMA re-shaped its Special Flood Hazard Area to exclude 30 camp buildings following appeals from the camp, possibly due to insurance or increased regulation concerns.[19] The Special Flood Hazard Area marks the region most at risk for once-in-a-century floods. In 2025, at least 12 camp structures were considered to be within the Special Flood Hazard Area, with more being partially within the area.[19]”[19] https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/12/us/texas-flooding-fema-flood-map-camp-mystic Starkly speaking, humans have a terrible history of adjusting safety behaviour through loss of life. I know this from myriad examples during engineering projects in several countries in a career since 2011. The number of stories I have heard leaders tell of lives lost on the job during project kick off to cause adherence to safety standards is almost at a level of desensitization. So, here we are, more lives lost, including 20 or so innocent young girls on a summer camp. So, it is time to consider what our discipline can do, which is a hell of a lot. We can attend to for example True Flood Risk, the topic of this episode. It is an inspirational story of entrepreneurship based on someone barely avoiding flood damage to their home. This is because the ground floor height of the founder's home was just higher than the neighbour's. The neighbour got flooded, her house did not. Based on this simple observation, a measurement idea emerged and it has ballooned into a business from there. The usual insurance service is there. A great story. Listen in. Another outcome of this tragedy is this viral LinkedIn post of mine. I said: "I mean it's time for our discipline to get to work. This type of analysis can be done at nation scale immediately and Overture Maps Foundation's building footprints used to detect which people are next in the firing line. An LLM connected to the pipeline could then automatically write political and media campaign material and strategies to pressure funding out of governments. ⚙️

Michael Ferrari is Chief Scientific and Investment Officer at AlphaGeo. We focused on how resilience varies across geographies and what this means for long term regional investability. Accompanying this discussion is their web app. This is confronting. If you change the time slider to "End of Century", most of the world is red, indicating significant physical climate risk.Particularly alarming is when you change the toggle to "Resilience Adjusted Risk". This intensifies the red color in some parts of the world - Sub Saharan Africa, India, Pakistan, Yemen, Papua New Guinea and along the coast from French Guiana to Venezuela. This indicates that these countries have low resilience and limited capacity to combat the effects of climate change. There are implications here for population migrations, as illustrated by AlphaGeo here with regard to Africa. The conversation then turned to another app, produced in collaboration with Washington Post. Here one can input your location in the US and you will be given useful information from the perspective of a property investor on long term risk and resilience. Parag Khanna is the CEO. He has given several interesting TED talks such as how megacities are changing the map of the world.Perhaps the most fascinating idea of all though from Parag is Periodic Table of States, details here. For this analysis it all comes down to stability and they rank Eritrea as worst with a score of 2.36. They rank Switzerland best at 21.77. Overall, a fascinating crash course from Michael on the kind of spatial finance I like - using geography to inform investment decisions. It was a case of meeting my idols. I am glad we were able to hit it off and am keen to see what develops.

Border Professor Henk van Houtum published Free The Map in 2024. He sent it to me whilst I was still living in London last year. Shows how long this has been in the making as I've since migrated to the States. Kind of fitting, given the book frequently mentions the EU migration crisis and problems with EU Frontex maps showing how many come from where. As a key intervention, the book recommends 'counter mapping'. An example of this for the Frontex mapping is Frontex: EU's Deportation Machine.We began by talking about differences in freedom through passports, here is a link to Passport Index. We also talked about MAGA geography, with this great map from Representative Robert Garcia.Speaking of geography, I wrote this poem years before meeting Henk. This is interesting because it reflects his points and was based on raw experiences I'd had at the time traveling through Southeast Asia. A big stimulus for Henk's arguments are these three maps, Fragile States Index, Corruption Perceptions Index and Freedom Map. We are invited to consider a different perspective on the world and he puts the concept of counter maps before us in response. Examples of counter maps that step outside the gridded world of state cages start with Paul Butler's Facebook map from 2010.This shows how little boundaries seem to matter, there are vast numbers of connections across national borders. Another great counter mapper is Python Maps. This individual publishes examples like world rivers colored by their hydrological basin. This is an important type of border that the national borders template map of the world offers no detail on, or importance to. Another from the same source shows CO2 emissions. Here there is a huge amount of emissions in the sea - a location where national border's don't apply. An effective counter map. We can continue with Al Jazeera's map of the world's oil and gas pipelines. The eye is invited to forget national borders exist. An interesting example from Science-Metrix Inc is scientific collaborations 2005-9. This reminds us of the Facebook map with plenty of connections outside nations, but also several tight clusters of nations that collaborations occur across. Finally, if we are going to talk about countermapping and general visualisation beauty, we would be remiss to miss Globaia's incredible video welcoming us to the Antrhropocene. Finally, I should mention that this was a deeply emotional episode to record for me. As shown in the Free The Map series of testimonial videos about my time across Cambodia and Kuwait, I needed to have this conversation with Henk in order to start to understand what I have witnessed in these terrible places. It is very helpful to have a book giving voice to what I have as a series of rage filled experiences. It was all summed up on page 39 of the book really. So it is fitting that this page was shown throughout the video. Thank you Henk for taking the time to write this and to remind us that there is so much more to do than be a shill for national borders.

Appropriately, I am publishing today's episode from an airport - JFK. This is because it is about the positioning, navigation and timing vertical, specifically about how GPS can be spoofed and jammed, affecting air travel safety. Also appropriately, the recording with Dana Goward, President of Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation, was occasionally of poor quality. The bandwidth gods have added a bit of ambience reflecting the jamming we talked about. I found Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation through a Wired article - "A GPS Blackout Would Shut Down the World". Yes, I'm at the podcasting stage where I read Wired articles and just reach out to the people/organisations profiled ;-) Wired used a provocative but truthful title which, perversely, we can be proud of. This is because a vertical in The Geospatial Index is Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT) companies. Companies, theory and technology in this vertical have, in Dana's words, produced a silent utility that the whole world has a critical dependence on. Well done to our industry, we are as vital as the water, power, sewer, telecom utilities! The PNT vertical is more well populated than others - 26 companies. There is a flyer in there recently, NextNav. I mentioned them during the episode with Dana and he gave some useful off the cuff commentary on the validity of their offering compared to other more economical solutions. It was a fascinating episode. If you've ever wondered about those maps showing GNSS spoofing and jamming, Dana, a highly accomplished pilot, gave us a lengthy commentary on what they mean and spoke to some geographies where there is a strong risk of this silent utility failing to work properly. A note about running the podcast. It is an experience of talking with some highly accomplished and capable guests. Reading Dana's profile, on gps.gov no less, gives one pause. I got lucky here - I did not read this profile before talking with him. I am glad, because I would have been a deer in the headlights. Some quotes: "...he served as the maritime navigation authority for the United States with 12 different business lines budgeted at over $1.3B/yr, and represented the United States at the International Maritime Organization, International Assn. of Lighthouse Authorities, U.N. anti-piracy working group, and other international forums." He has received a humanitarian award for a coastguard chopper rescue: "...Helicopter Association International's Igor Sikorsky Humanitarian Service Award for his rescue of two fisherman at the height of Hurricane Chantal..." As such, Dana has intimate, professional pilot experience of the risks of GNSS spoofing and jamming. As leader of the maritime navigation authority of the world's largest economy, he has the same degree of knowledge from the perspective of an administrator. This means his call to action as a leader regarding resilience of this silent utility is worth listening to. His charity, Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation, is also worth joining. One has to wonder when the US will become tired of the embarrassment of being behind the Chinese. Even in the domain of navigation system resilience, the States is behind. I am grateful to Dana for identifying the problem as not being money or technology, but a lack of leadership. He has put himself in front of us as the leader on this issue. Let's listen and study what he has to say, we might find the required actions are straightforward to implement: https://rntfnd.org/.

I came across Sergei Nozdrenkov through a post on LinkedIn saying:"Hey friends, I'm looking for a founding engineer and founding AI research scientist to build multimodal foundation models for natural ecosystems, starting with 3D coral reef data." He is the founder of Wildflow. This is a continuation of the nature data theme last touched on with Alex Logan in the episode about ⁠Cecil⁠.Sergei is an overwhelming intellect. It is a source of great hope that someone of his calibre plans to make a multimodal foundation model to assist in the understanding of coral reefs. Usually they're optimising dark patterns on social media platforms or designing weapons. So Sergei is a light of hope and optimism in the emerging foundation models industry. He was so patient. He enthusiastically fielded my initial questions about the basics of foundation models and LLMs before then going into incredible detail on conservation methods for coral reefs. Without hesitation he included asides like a quick explanation of Gaussian Splatting. Oh, and we started at the end of his product roadmap: terraforming. Yes, that's how much we covered. I don't really have much to say except that I present this as assistance to those responding to his call for founding engineer and founding AI scientist. He checks all the boxes for an inspirational, broad minded leader capable of humor. Sergei has seen and done an incredible amount - yet he retains a childlike curiosity and enthusiasm. We have a lot to learn from him.

Upping the cadence here as the backlog is growing again and I need to get things out whilst they're fresh. Today we've got BigGeo on the chopping block, a Canadian cloud based geospatial company. Brent Lane, CEO, was an inspiring speaker because (showing my bias here) he had another story about ringing the bell at the NYSE to tell us about. This is the second time we've had someone on that's done this, the first was Gillian Mollod regarding The Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD). To be precise, in Brent's case it was the closing bell. So it's inspiring to be working through the roster of people in geospatial who've walked the hallowed halls of this institution. Who knew they existed!What is BigGeo? Datalab: A workspace to prepare, manage, and optimize data for analysis, visualization and delivery. Marketplace: A hub designed to showcase, explore, and seamlessly source a wide range of datasets. Datascape: A tool for geospatial visualization, data transformation, and interactive analysis. It is interesting to see Felt there, a prior guest on the show. We finished off with an idea on how to apply it all - a global parking lot dataset sold via their marketplace that can be used as the basis for predicting quarterly earnings for shops like Dunkin Donuts where car presence, detected via earth observation, provides insight on income.Thanks Brent for coming on and showing us another way to ring the bell!

As usual there is a connection through a number of episodes going on here. Back when interviewed Stephanie May, she introduced me to global base maps made by various tech companies. I jumped at the opportunity to continue the theme when I came across Jordan Regenie's write up of his involvement in Bing Maps. He mentioned a company participating in that effort was Compass Data so I dutifully pursued them for an episode and got Hayden Howard. After that he gave me a free ticket to GeoWeek and I jumped on a flight from Atlanta to a SHOCKINGLY cold Denver for a stunned, disoriented walk around the exhibit hall for a few hours talking to as many companies as I could. I came across several ground penetrating radar solutions. This included one on a towball which could detect buried services at highway speeds (Impulse Radar). Impressive stuff. I also saw the other end of the spectrum, pushcarts which are used to produce the fluoro graffiti footpath markings you see about buried gas, power, fibre optic lines (Screening Eagle).I was curious about starting my own business, so I kept investigating. I went to a Georgia Geospatial Association networking event in Atlanta soon after and got talking with the CEO Michael Bellrose of Tri-Global Technologies, a positioning company. He put me in touch with Dan Bigman, CEO of Bigman Geophysical. And that's how some of these episodes happen! Literally a journey across American geospatial to hunt down these conversations for you. It was a good one. Dan told us a CSI type story to start with, about how archaeology and ground penetrating radar can be used for crime scene investigation. It was gruesome, but a good illustration of how our broader discipline benefits society - something which has been a common theme the past string of episodes about SAR for bushfire and warzone damage assessment. Here we continue the radar theme but using different, more proximate technology, requiring someone to push a device over the ground rather than wait for a satellite. Do I want to start such a business myself? Well it is tempting. A second hand pushcart is only about $15,000. With another $5k around that with a website, marketing and a cheap truck one could get to hustling the pavement. Thanks Dan for being my second Atlanta guest as I begin to orient myself regarding opportunities in America.

Brett Clark is Director Global Sales at Blackshark. Blackshark is an incredible company. They are responsible for the global 3D world of Microsoft Flight Simulator. Now they have a system called ORCA™ HUNTR. This is a no-code environment enabling users—with little to no coding or AI background—to train, test, and deploy object detection and classification models on RGB imagery, including satellite, aerial, drone, or even JPEG/video frames. It also offers real-time feedback during training: as you label (“scribble” with a crayon-like brush), it immediately shows model results and entropy metrics, guiding where more data is needed. Listen in for an example of how this system was put into action for the #LAFires response. They used it to detect 300 buildings the county was unaware of. This matters for clean up after fires, because there is significantly more debris and material movement to plan for. Brett was a supremely cool dude. I have interviewed some of the finest operators in sales in geospatial on this podcast. Brett is clearly the best so far.

Conflict Ecology is a geospatial research lab led by Jamon Van Den Hoek, Associate Professor of Geography at Oregon State University. I have been privileged to profile many leaders in our industry through this podcast. None, until now, routinely appear on TV and have the work of their lab used in print media. Jamon is a hero to us all and we are so privileged to have an hour of his time.

Continuing the EO Summit coverage, another attendee was Alex Logan, co-founder and CEO of Cecil. This is a nature data platform which began with trees. They focus on metadata, more here. It was a fascinating discussion. I am new to this space and there is a strong overlap with those in carbon credit and biodiversity markets. What I appreciate the most is the emergence of financial materiality. For example, The Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) is taking care of the US. In the EU things are more advanced, Nature Restoration Regulation. There is also the EU's Regulation on Deforestation-free Products. All of this means an exciting data and app ecosystem is flourishing. For example, I was invited to join Cecil's Slack. A torrent of founders joined, one after the other introducing exciting new software facilitating the progress and insight intended by these disclosure frameworks and regulations. It is also a space filled with optimistic, conscientious people with the right future in mind. I am happy to have found them as these are my people. This is where I come from. This is the future I was brought up to build. Podcasting like this is a high paced, enticing discovery experience. I keep talking with inspiring people. Each episode is a small practice session on a possible future. Thanks for being our guide for nature data Alex, thanks also for sponsoring the Nature Data for Finance meetup on the EO Summit sidelines.

I was privileged to be granted access as a member of the press to EO Summit by the convener, Aravind (https://www.linkedin.com/in/aravindravichandran/). I am now delivering on my duty providing coverage for you here. Adam Maher (https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-maher-17969731/) is CEO and Founder at Ursa Space Systems Inc (https://ursaspace.com/). He participated in the Commodity Intelligence panel at the Summit (https://www.eosummit.com/eos2025/detailed-program). Conveniently, that is also the subject of this episode. So, for those who couldn't make it this is a chance to get a flavor of the event. It was a privilege to have Adam's time and attention. I know from organising this episode that he is a very busy man.Another upcoming guest from the summit will be Alex Logan (https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-logan-cecil/). He will be talking about how they do nature data at Cecil.

Mike Spaeth is Global Vice President at US Artificial Intelligence Institute (https://www.usaii.org/). He has a career in environmental, sustainability and governance analytics at Moodys before moving on to Maxar then Earth Daily Analytics. Here he gained experience in geospatial foundation models. We are privileged to have him on regarding his latest role at USAII where he talked about the possibility of standing up a certification for the geospatial profession in GeoAI.

Gideon Singer is a Solutions Engineer at CARTO. He is another guest from Geospatial Risk Summit. Gideon gave a technical presentation on the first day about processing pipelines in CARTO. It was a sign of how far the platform has progressed since I began using it over a decade ago. Back then it was called CartoDB. In this episode he continues the demonstration of analysis, mapping and presentation in CARTO. This time in the context of broadband network access quality for senior citizens. He was also game for a description of spatial indexing which I didn't warn him about! Another aspect of this conversation that I appreciated was being able to talk about my efforts to animate the Vietnam/Laos/Cambodia War bombing sortie dataset, using CartoDB back in the day. Gideon showed us that he and by extension CARTO have an interest in applications of our profession to map and examine injustice.

Ajay K Gupta is Chief Executive Officer of HSR.Health. This is a company in the Global Top 100 Geospatial Companies – 2025 Edition from Geoawesome (https://geoawesome.com/global-top-100-geospatial-companies-2025/). I voted on the selection panel 2022-2023 but not the year HSR was voted in. Another item discussed was AWS funding for their Anna platform (as it is novel tech). Additionally we talked through Poseidon Plastic Tracking System, an ocean trash programme. Finally, there was discussion of their Heat-Health Risk Index. Toward the end of the discussion Ajay made some comments about how foundation models could help in health applications of geospatial. It was good to see mention of this outside of the usual earth observation applications.Links:HSR.health datasets on AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/seller-profile?id=seller-wkcurkbvz22akCompany website: https://geomd.hsrhealth.org/Related recent whitepaper from HSR.health: Mapping Health Risks: The Role of Geospatial Data in Protecting Communities and Driving Decisions

Upcoming Domain ChangeDue to launching Geospatial FM, I will change the domain from www.geospatial.money to www.geospatial.fm. This will occur over the next few days. Just a heads up. You will still receive emails as normal.Nelson RoqueNelson Roque is Assistant Professor, Human Development and Family Studies at Penn State University. He studies the brain as it develops and ages. He also lectures in cognition. It was a deliberate choice to kick of Geospatial FM with him. If we are to create foundation models to use artificial intelligence for solving in geospatial then we had better be sure what intelligence is. Nelson started by saying cognition is the preferred term. The word intelligence comes with connotations that are to be avoided by those in a healthcare context serving the vulnerable. From the outset, then, it was a productive session driven by two studies he has conducted about an early version of ChatGPT and our incapacity to detect AI generated imagery. This included a live demo where I failed every single test! The episode concludes with an epilogue prompted by this from Matt White: https://matthewdwhite.medium.com/i-think-therefore-i-am-no-llms-cannot-reason-a89e9b00754f. Here he contends that modern versions of Gemini and ChatGPT leveraging chain of thought functionality do not actually involve reasoning. The impression from Nelson is that Matt White is right and no reasoning is going on. This is a good accompaniment to Apple's blockbuster paper doing the rounds which carries the same message: "The Illusion of Thinking" (https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/illusion-of-thinking). It was good then to secure commentary from this research psychologist on the implications of the latest versions of these tools.

Nearmap is a name near and dear to our hearts in geospatial. They were a rocketship as a stock before Thoma Bravo took them private end of 2022 (https://www.thomabravo.com/press-releases/thoma-bravo-completes-acquisition-of-nearmap-ltd). Chris Sams is Government Product Solutions Leader at Nearmap. I met him in January at Geospatial Risk Summit. He has some great commentary on how an earth observation company assists government clients to monitor climate hazards, natural disasters and their impact. He also provides insight on what the DOGE cuts mean for industry. Most importantly, however, Chris is the man who won my impromptu GIS HYPE MAN competition on LinkedIn a while back, showing what it takes to get a role at the best aerial imaging company in our industry.Thanks Chris.

Miles Kauffman, Masters Of City and Regional planning student at Georgia Tech, came on the show to tell us about an Atlanta to Orlando high speed rail study he is conducting. It was such a privilege to connect with him after attending a Georgia Geospatial Association (https://gageospatial.org/) networking event in Atlanta a few months ago then being referred to him by an attendee there. At the beginning of the video, a couple of tram/trolley animations were shown. For Adelaide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tFV4WMZUNc. For Los Angeles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nH9toJw6-k8. Thanks Miles for coming on and giving us hope that there is a future for high speed rail in the American South beyond Florida's Brightline.

Next #GISchat is with Michael Bartholomeusz about NOVI. ✒️ https://open.substack.com/pub/geospatialindex/p/novi-and-a-new-venture-geospatial

Why I am reporting on the NEOM human rights situation and publicly traded engineering consultancies involved. It is an introductory episode for the final stretch of this series. NEOM is a collection of projects in a northern province of Saudi Arabia accompanied by violations of Article 17 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

⛔️ this ep again mentions suicide.Covering all loose ends from my recollections about working at Amec Foster Wheeler in Kuwait. Finally got to a point where I can move on from #GISchat about Kuwait. Discussed: 0:00 - 3:24 - Emotional impact 3:24 - 3:42 - Agenda3:42 - 22:50 - Use of ChatGPT to interpret arterial blood gas (ABG) test results and fully understand the brutality of the context of the assistant electrician being fired. The system also tells us the consequences in general of H2S gas poisoning.22:50 - 32:56 - Use of ChatGPT to support whistleblowers more generally32:56 - 38:23 Questioning a safety item on p. 37 of the 2016 Amec Foster Wheeler Sustainability Performance Report (https://ungc-production.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/attachments/cop_2017/394131/original/AmecFW_Sustainability_Report_2016_lower_res.pdf?1497623860), 38:23 - 42:36 - Using ChatGPT to help on the North Korean workers angle, leading me to UN Resolution 2397 (http://main.un.org/securitycouncil/en/s/res/2397-%282017%29)42:36 - 50:00 - Use of ChatGPT to support whistleblowers more generally, this section also contains the system's useful summary of all that I have recounted.50:00 - 53:58 - What would be expected to happen _to someone left untreated_ who presented with the particular ABG test results this person had.53:58 - 58:56 - Justice regarding the NBTC Camp 4 building fire and respect for the dead.58:56 - 1:09:21 - Wood PLC compliance officer participation in the cover up and validity of an invitation from a colleague to do a secret investigation,1:09:21 - 1:14:54 - National Crime Agency, invitation to make a police report and plan to do so1:14:54 - 1:18:25 - International Labour Organisation and human trafficking charity (believe it may have been Unseen UK), engaging an investigative journalist1:18:25 - 1:27:41 - Financial Conduct Authority, the stock price since I began whistleblowing and risk for pensioners who depend on these firms being properly policed such that their collapse does not put people's retirement at risk. 1:27:41 - 1:28:50 - Short sellers.1:28:50 - 1:32:50 - Princess Bibi Nasser Al Sabah.1:32:50 - 1:37:32 - Emotional impact and concluding thoughts about responsibilities of the safety staff who made these reports to me.1:37:32 - The Map Maker's Border poem recital.

A final round exposing the evidence I collected during my time at Amec Foster Wheeler in Kuwait about human rights, ethics and safety violations. This is in the service of disclosing how safety matters to do with manpower company NBTC Group were handled by Amec Foster Wheeler, superintendent's representative on Kuwait Oil Company projects. Why? In 2024 a fire in an NBTC worker accommodation facility killed 49 men. One safety breach was that a door to the roof was locked, stopping them escaping to safety. I provide this disclosure in order that the public may understand Amec Foster Wheeler did not do enough in 2017 to control the poor safety standards of this company. This was something they were required to do as superintendent's representative. If they had, the chance would have reduced of this building fire killing 49 men 7 years later.

Caution - this episode contains some details of suicides that happened when I worked at Amec Foster Wheeler in Kuwait. If you need it, these are helplines you can call for the top 5 most popular countries for this newsletter:USA: 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.UK: 111 for the NHS.Canada: 988 for the Suicide Crisis Helpline.Australia: 1300 22 4636 for Beyond Blue.India: 9820466726 for Aasra.Continuing the testimony regarding my career in the worst country to be an expat, Kuwait. Until I joined Jacobs later on, I would also have contended it was at the worst place to be a consultant - Amec Foster Wheeler. The story of injustice whilst at Amec Foster Wheeler in Kuwait continues.

Here we look at a missed opportunity to avoid the death of 49 people in an NBTC accommodation fire last year in Mangaf, Kuwait. The missed opportunity was in the firing of a worker in 2017 for calling an ambulance in response to an H2S gas poisoning at GC-30 in the North Kuwait Asset. Instead, he could have been listened to for stating that people are punished for speaking up about safety issues. NBTC, Amec Foster Wheeler, Petrofac and the Kuwait Oil Company could then have changed their safety practices. One is invited to wonder if the building fire killing 49 people 7 years later in 2024 would not have occurred if this change had occurred.We will have one more episode on Kuwait, then move on to Qatar and London, UK.

Caution - this episode contains some details of suicides that happened when I worked at Amec Foster Wheeler in Kuwait. If you need it, these are helplines you can call for the top 5 most popular countries for this newsletter: USA: 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. UK: 111 for the NHS. Canada: 988 for the Suicide Crisis Helpline. Australia: 1300 22 4636 for Beyond Blue. India: 9820466726 for Aasra.Continuing the testimony regarding my career in the worst country to be an expat, Kuwait. Until I joined Jacobs later on, I would also have contended it was at the worst place to be a consultant - Amec Foster Wheeler. We went in to the weeds geospatially finally! Here is a link to the Mapillary track, showing the security workers at the first gate on the road to GC 31. This is AMEC's office at GC-31 - https://maps.app.goo.gl/mwe8FrhLCKyiY8318. This is the other gathering center they were working on in North Kuwait, GC-30: https://maps.app.goo.gl/GAsQJdn1yXNVB8Pu9. For the separate video I made years ago animating the safety and other violations mentioned at these sites: https://youtu.be/9Ko-vrcIgEk?si=-MvPPxkslS-WgWtZ. For the video uploaded years ago about my site visit to verify the circumstances of the fatal car accident at GC-31: https://youtu.be/Deg64MWKSsI?si=rKQUpyxBoDjUCjXo.For a speech I gave in 2019 summarizing all this stuff at Spatial Information Day in Adelaide, South Australia: https://youtu.be/q-xkK3tKlpk?si=AyJcviEJ7F0Xq3wP.

Caution - this episode contains some details of suicides that happened when I worked at Amec Foster Wheeler in Kuwait. If you need it, these are helplines you can call for the top 5 most popular countries for this newsletter:USA: 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.UK: 111 for the NHS.Canada: 988 for the Suicide Crisis Helpline.Australia: 1300 22 4636 for Beyond Blue.India: 9820466726 for Aasra.This is part 2 in a mini series about my career across Cambodia, Kuwait, Qatar and London. It contains reflections on my time in Kuwait working for Amec, Amec Foster Wheeler before it was purchased by Wood PLC in October 2017.I continue to use Nick Haslam's dehumanization continuum diagram as a tool to interpret what I saw. Here is the diagram again but against an animation of the bombs dropped on Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam:https://youtu.be/wrIOj5zWzig

Reflections on doing geospatial in Cambodia. Prompted by Free The Map, a book about change in the way we do cartography. This is in the lead up to an episode with the author, Henk Van Houtum.Dehumanization: An Integrative Review: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6927454_Dehumanization_An_Integrative_ReviewEviction and relocation events 1982-2012 in Phnom Penh, Cambodia: https://youtu.be/-7TEcs3lQFs?si=vL575_mAFsaENPjbKabul Falling, Episode 8, Still Falling: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4EvXclesyIwQGoL9xWHsNWUS Bombing of Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. This is an animation of 1.6+m bombing sorties over Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam in the decade from 1965. It was an attack to stop communism: https://ndthl.carto.com/viz/3d0dbb10-a36e-11e5-91e4-0e5db1731f59/public_mapFree The Map: https://freethemap.org/Making Maps Without Borders, a travel blog I kept about my time in Cambodia: http://v2.travelark.org/travel-blog/gisnoborders/1Sahmakum Teang Tnaut: https://teangtnaut.org/en/

This episode relates to the just concluded Geo Week in Denver. I went yesterday after receiving free entry to the exhibition hall by the guest from today's podcast. Similar to the Iceye episode released during Geospatial Risk Summit 2 weeks ago, this episode is a way to get a feel for the things discussed at Geo Week and who attends.Hayden Howard is Executive Vice President atCompassData, Inc. We return to the theme of global base maps created by tech companies in this episode. It extends the last one of the topic withJordan Regenie. He mentioned CompassData as participating in the Microsoft campaign to create 3D cities and Streetside imagery for Bing Maps. Hayden was decent enough to come on and explain what they did. In their own words, they're a “Leader in providing Global Ground Control Points (GCP) Survey data for remotely sensed data by satellites and other GIS applications.”Hayden also told us a story about how epic these surveys can be - such as going around Australia.A great episode and high time we hit the surveying subindex on the pod.THE GEOSPATIAL INDEXThe Geospatial Index is a comprehensive listing of all publicly traded geospatial businesses worldwide. Why? The industry is growing at ~5.4% annually (after inflation and after adjusting for base rates). This rate varies significantly, however, by sub index. For ~$400,000 to start, this growth rate is $5,000,000 over a working life. This channel, Bluesky account, newsletter, watchlist and podcast express the view that you are serious about geospatial if you take the view of an investor, venture capitalist or entrepreneur. You are expected to do your own research. This is not a replacement for that. This is not investment advice. Consider it entertainment.NOT THE OPINION OF MY EMPLOYERNOT YOUR FIDUCIARYNOT INVESTMENT ADVICEBluesky: ⁠https://bsky.app/profile/geospatial.money⁠LinkedIn: ⁠https://uk.linkedin.com/in/geospatialindex⁠Watchlist: ⁠⁠https://www.tradingview.com/watchlists/123254792/⁠Newsletter: ⁠https://www.geospatial.money⁠Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5gpQUsaWxEBpYCnypEdHFC

Christian Rouffaert is founder and CEO of Teragence. This is a map driven web app showing mobile network signal strength. It enables such modern products as robotic lawn mowers. This is because they rely on mobile data to control and position the robot so it does not munch expensive, pretty flower beds. The conversation also covered the practice of entrepreneurship more broadly. For example, I believe he has given the most detailed answer so far about working backward from customer needs. Christian showed what it means to have a management consulting background in answering this question. The conversation was also useful for providing an outsider's perspective on what is interesting, and not so interesting, about geospatial. Here, Christian offered the perspective that what he and others are waiting for is a Tableau moment for geospatial. Tableau offered an intuitive, graphical interface for general data and information interrogation. Suddenly vastly more people had the power to derive insights where before that was the province of software developers. What will be the Tableau of geospatial? THE GEOSPATIAL INDEX The Geospatial Index is a comprehensive listing of all publicly traded geospatial businesses worldwide. Why? The industry is growing at ~5.4% annually (after inflation and after adjusting for base rates). This rate varies significantly, however, by sub index. For ~$400,000 to start, this growth rate is $5,000,000 over a working life. This channel, Bluesky account, newsletter, watchlist and podcast express the view that you are serious about geospatial if you take the view of an investor, venture capitalist or entrepreneur. You are expected to do your own research. This is not a replacement for that. This is not investment advice. Consider it entertainment. NOT THE OPINION OF MY EMPLOYER NOT YOUR FIDUCIARY NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE Bluesky: ⁠https://bsky.app/profile/geospatial.money⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠https://uk.linkedin.com/in/geospatialindex⁠ Watchlist: ⁠⁠https://www.tradingview.com/watchlists/123254792/⁠ Newsletter: ⁠https://www.geospatial.money⁠ Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5gpQUsaWxEBpYCnypEdHFC

Leo Wang⁠ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/lwang1022/) is founder and CEO of ⁠Lucius⁠ (https://lucius.space/). This is a turnkey solution for satellite constellation operators or imagery resellers to take orders and distribute data. The conversation covered the following topics: 1:14 Introducing Lucius. 1:51 Content creation. 13:13 Imagery sales and marketplaces commentary. 27:13 Platform to store humanitarian satellite data. A key learning is that Lucius charges $USD25,000 a year for their satellite data ordering and distribution platform. Carrying on the point Kevin Bullock made in the episode about ⁠Development Seed (https://youtu.be/MOFS6il0Oj8?si=SkPv5abhwZPgQa79)⁠, a SpaceX launch costs ⁠nearly $USD70,000,000 (https://www.spacex.com/media/Capabilities&Services.pdf)⁠. Here he observed that if just 1% of the cost of those launches were spent on a platform to distribute the data during humanitarian disasters, that would make a strong impact. That is $USD700,000 for a SpaceX launch. Or 28 years to run Lucius. I should start a consulting career! Thanks Leo for contributing to the cause and the appetite for philosophical reflections on how the species uses the power of satellites. THE GEOSPATIAL INDEX The Geospatial Index is a comprehensive listing of all publicly traded geospatial businesses worldwide. Why? The industry is growing at ~5.4% annually (after inflation and after adjusting for base rates). This rate varies significantly, however, by sub index. For ~$400,000 to start, this growth rate is $5,000,000 over a working life. This channel, Bluesky account, newsletter, watchlist and podcast express the view that you are serious about geospatial if you take the view of an investor, venture capitalist or entrepreneur. You are expected to do your own research. This is not a replacement for that. This is not investment advice. Consider it entertainment. NOT THE OPINION OF MY EMPLOYER NOT YOUR FIDUCIARY NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE Bluesky: ⁠https://bsky.app/profile/geospatial.money⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠https://uk.linkedin.com/in/geospatialindex⁠ Watchlist: ⁠⁠https://www.tradingview.com/watchlists/123254792/⁠ Newsletter: ⁠https://www.geospatial.money⁠ Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5gpQUsaWxEBpYCnypEdHFC

We are privileged to have Anke Sielker (https://www.linkedin.com/in/anke-sielker-89690431) on to explain the business of Iceye and some of their unique offerings. They are a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite constellation operator. They are also a charter partner of the ⁠International Charter: Space and Major Disasters⁠ (https://disasterscharter.org/membership-history). This has been discussed in the past few episodes in the context of the LA fires. The focus was on insurance because they are presenting at The Geospatial Risk Summit. This guest is also relevant due to heavy use of SAR to map building damage in the recent #LAfires that have been a theme of recent episodes. Additionally, it came up in the episode with SeerAI where Alex performed amplitude change detection analysis to detect surface disturbance on The Line in Neom, Saudi Arabia. As luck would have it, yesterday he informed me he extended the analysis coverage back to 2020 like I requested in the episode with him, check here:https://seerai.maps.arcgis.com/apps/mapviewer/index.html?webmap=dda6a70dba2344a0afda174d6e5de6cfThe Geospatial Risk Summit is happening right now at Hard Rock Hotel, Manhattan. I confess I am distracted from a panel discussion posting this right now from the audience

For the month to 2025-01-27, a summary of: Growth of pureplay Geospatial Index and subindex breakdown. Growth of adjacent Geospatial Index. Growth of Geoawesomeness Top 100. Contribution analysis. Exposure analysis. Valuations. Job highlights by world region by Vikas: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/activity-7289542933962219520-PnZT/. THE GEOSPATIAL INDEX The Geospatial Index is a comprehensive listing of all publicly traded geospatial businesses worldwide. Why? The industry is growing at ~5.4% annually (after inflation and after adjusting for base rates). This rate varies significantly, however, by sub index. For ~$400,000 to start, this growth rate is $5,000,000 over a working life. This channel, Bluesky account, newsletter, watchlist and podcast express the view that you are serious about geospatial if you take the view of an investor, venture capitalist or entrepreneur. You are expected to do your own research. This is not a replacement for that. This is not investment advice. Consider it entertainment. NOT THE OPINION OF MY EMPLOYERNOT YOUR FIDUCIARYNOT INVESTMENT ADVICE Bluesky: ⁠https://bsky.app/profile/geospatial.money⁠LinkedIn: ⁠https://uk.linkedin.com/in/geospatialindex⁠Watchlist: ⁠⁠https://www.tradingview.com/watchlists/123254792/⁠Newsletter: ⁠https://www.geospatial.money

This continues discussion around effects of The International Charter Space and Major Disasters. This was mentioned 2 episodes ago by Andrew Schroeder of Direct Relief. Development Seed, via Kevin Bullock, continues this discussion. Kevin came up on LinkedIn shortly after the #LAfires. He catalogued all open spatial data released for example from satellite imagery providers . He provides extra detail on LinkedIn, along with several other experts in the comments. Kevin's point is that, if the industry was responding effectively to this charter, he would not have to spend a week curating this list of open data. Yes, it is 2025 and the best we've got is a Google Sheet someone volunteered their time to make. We have to ask what incentives are necessary to stop this happening again. THE GEOSPATIAL INDEX The Geospatial Index is a comprehensive listing of all publicly traded geospatial businesses worldwide. Why? The industry is growing at ~5.4% annually (after inflation and after adjusting for base rates). This rate varies significantly, however, by sub index. For ~$400,000 to start, this growth rate is $5,000,000 over a working life. This channel, Bluesky account, newsletter, watchlist and podcast express the view that you are serious about geospatial if you take the view of an investor, venture capitalist or entrepreneur. You are expected to do your own research. This is not a replacement for that. This is not investment advice. Consider it entertainment. NOT THE OPINION OF MY EMPLOYER NOT YOUR FIDUCIARY NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE Bluesky: ⁠https://bsky.app/profile/geospatial.money⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠https://uk.linkedin.com/in/geospatialindex⁠ Watchlist: ⁠⁠https://www.tradingview.com/watchlists/123254792/⁠ Newsletter: ⁠https://www.geospatial.money⁠ Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5gpQUsaWxEBpYCnypEdHFC

Jed Sundwall⁠ is Executive Director of ⁠Radiant Earth⁠. This organization increases '...shared understanding of our world through community-led initiatives that make data easier to access and use.' This organization is motivated by our incapacity to address global issues such as accumulation of greenhouse gases and deforestation. They have identified poor collaboration and difficulty sharing data as causes. To foster easier collaboration and data sharing, we discuss a couple of Radiant Earth initiatives - Source Cooperative and Cloud Native Geospatial Forum. An example of results from the latter is CNG Virtual Conference 2024. ⁠Recordings here⁠. Jed was an incredibly effective communicator. He also wins for having the best microphone of any guest so far. Thanks Jed for being up for this. THE GEOSPATIAL INDEX The Geospatial Index is a comprehensive listing of all publicly traded geospatial businesses worldwide. Why? The industry is growing at ~5.4% annually (after inflation and after adjusting for base rates). This rate varies significantly, however, by sub index. For ~$400,000 to start, this growth rate is $5,000,000 over a working life. This channel, Bluesky account, newsletter, watchlist and podcast express the view that you are serious about geospatial if you take the view of an investor, venture capitalist or entrepreneur. You are expected to do your own research. This is not a replacement for that. This is not investment advice. Consider it entertainment. NOT THE OPINION OF MY EMPLOYER NOT YOUR FIDUCIARY NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE Bluesky: ⁠https://bsky.app/profile/geospatial.money⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠https://uk.linkedin.com/in/geospatialindex⁠ Watchlist: ⁠⁠https://www.tradingview.com/watchlists/123254792/⁠ Newsletter: ⁠https://www.geospatial.money⁠ Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5gpQUsaWxEBpYCnypEdHFC

Andrew Schroeder is Vice President of Research and Analysis at Direct Relief. He talks about the #LAfire situation and Direct Relief's response. He goes on to cover the use of human mobility data for analysis, geospatial AI models for damage detection and health system impact analysis. It was a privilege to encounter an analyst of the world as it turns. THE GEOSPATIAL INDEX The Geospatial Index is a comprehensive listing of all publicly traded geospatial businesses worldwide. Why? The industry is growing at ~5.4% annually (after inflation and after adjusting for base rates). This rate varies significantly, however, by sub index. For ~$400,000 to start, this growth rate is $5,000,000 over a working life. This channel, Bluesky account, newsletter, watchlist and podcast express the view that you are serious about geospatial if you take the view of an investor, venture capitalist or entrepreneur. You are expected to do your own research. This is not a replacement for that. This is not investment advice. Consider it entertainment. NOT THE OPINION OF MY EMPLOYER NOT YOUR FIDUCIARY NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE Bluesky: ⁠https://bsky.app/profile/geospatial.money⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠https://uk.linkedin.com/in/geospatialindex⁠ Watchlist: ⁠⁠https://www.tradingview.com/watchlists/123254792/⁠ Newsletter: ⁠https://www.geospatial.money⁠ Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5gpQUsaWxEBpYCnypEdHFC

Priscilla Cole is the organizer of Geospatial Risk Summit. It is booked for the greatest location ever, Hard Rock Hotel in Manhattan. You can join the LinkedIn group for more info prior to the event. I am very pleased to say that one of the speakers, Will Cadell, has already come on the show. Another speaker is Ken Zockoll, CEO of Spatial Risk Systems. As it happens I've already had them on the show too, via their chief scientist Alex Vengerovsky. Then there are the tech workshops. Again I'm pleased to say I've already given you a flavor of what they'll say through having Frank Romo and Wherobots on. So I feel well prepared myself, at least, for attending on Jan 29-30th. Will be a great start to the year! If you're nearby NYC and want to chat, I recommend attending or sending me a message if you want to hang out. THE GEOSPATIAL INDEX The Geospatial Index is a comprehensive listing of all publicly traded geospatial businesses worldwide. Why? The industry is growing at ~5.4% annually (after inflation and after adjusting for base rates). This rate varies significantly, however, by sub index. For ~$400,000 to start, this growth rate is $5,000,000 over a working life. This channel, Bluesky account, newsletter, watchlist and podcast express the view that you are serious about geospatial if you take the view of an investor, venture capitalist or entrepreneur. You are expected to do your own research. This is not a replacement for that. This is not investment advice. Consider it entertainment. NOT THE OPINION OF MY EMPLOYERNOT YOUR FIDUCIARYNOT INVESTMENT ADVICE Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/geospatial.moneyLinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/geospatialindexWatchlist: ⁠https://www.tradingview.com/watchlists/123254792/Newsletter: https://www.geospatial.money

Alex Wagner⁠ is a data scientist at ⁠SeerAI⁠. This is a start up that has produced Geodesic, a spatiotemporal data fusion platform. The discussion was triggered by a video 12 days ago from popular YouTuber Johnny Harris, "⁠Why Saudi Arabia is Building a $1 Trillion City in the Desert"⁠. Alex responded on LinkedIn with an ⁠animation of all evidence of construction activity at Neom since 2023⁠.   This was a perfect accompaniment to a conversation thread over the past two episodes with ⁠Valrie Grant⁠ and ⁠Jordan Regenie⁠. Across these two episodes I have raised the issue of human rights abuses on Neom related to land ownership. The first time I did it was with Valrie, who is the deputy chair of a UN body - the private sector network of the UN's council of experts on global geospatial information management. Noting that Jordan has a law degree and that I am a new migrant to the US, I took the opportunity to discuss the first amendment with him in the context of whistle blowing about Neom.   Both conversations were useful in building up a picture of how I am going to respond as a ⁠Geographic Information Systems Professional (GISP) certification holder⁠. I started by gaining the awareness of someone associated with the world's peak human rights body, the UN. I continued with understanding my rights regarding speech to do with this circumstance in the world's largest economy, the US. Now I am continuing the conversation here by looking at how geospatial analysis can assist in understanding the whole affair. It is good that this can occur in the context of what one of the most popular map related YouTubers recently had to say about the project.   Overall it shows how dynamic insightful our industry is. This conversation highlights how we have a global bench of talent independently researching and responding to the world as it happens.   THE GEOSPATIAL INDEX   The Geospatial Index is a comprehensive listing of all publicly traded geospatial businesses worldwide. Why? The industry is growing at ~5.4% annually (after inflation and after adjusting for base rates). This rate varies significantly, however, by sub index. For ~$400,000 to start, this growth rate is $5,000,000 over a working life. This channel, Bluesky account, newsletter, watchlist and podcast express the view that you are serious about geospatial if you take the view of an investor, venture capitalist or entrepreneur. You are expected to do your own research. This is not a replacement for that. This is not investment advice. Consider it entertainment.   NOT THE OPINION OF MY EMPLOYER NOT YOUR FIDUCIARY NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE   Bluesky: ⁠https://bsky.app/profile/geospatial.money⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠https://uk.linkedin.com/in/geospatialindex⁠ Watchlist: ⁠⁠https://www.tradingview.com/watchlists/123254792/⁠ Newsletter: ⁠www.geospatial.money⁠ Podcast: ⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/5gpQUsaWxEBpYCnypEdHFC

LEGAL DISCLAIMER This episode contains commentary only on the first and fourth amendments of the US constitution. It is not legal advice. The guest is not an attorney. Do not use this episode to make decisions about what is right for you regarding these constitutional amendments. Jordan Regenie is the founder and principal consultant at Peace, Love, Freedom LLC. This is a strategy consultancy for "scaling the acquisition, processing, and production of high-quality geospatial data products" . I came across Jordan on LinkedIn through an article he wrote about working on Bing Maps. I immediately knew I had to request an episode to continue the story Stephanie May started telling about how the tech companies all made their own base maps over the past decade. He has a fantastic story to tell. We also leveraged his law background to answer some questions a new migrant to the US might have about the first and fourth amendments. This was prompted by another one of his articles, on fourth amendment implications for geospatial. Overall an incredibly fruitful conversation for me. This is because his response to my question about the first amendment involved mentioning Larry Lessig's 4 modalities of change. These are law, markets, norms and architecture. This was a really helpful framework to begin to tackle a hard problem where change is necessary. I really recommend listening to that part of the discussion. Jordan's patience, thoughtfulness and obvious taste for adventure made him a great guest and we are so very privileged to have had him on. THE GEOSPATIAL INDEX The Geospatial Index is a comprehensive listing of all publicly traded geospatial businesses worldwide. Why? The industry is growing at ~5% annually (after inflation and after adjusting for base rates). This rate varies significantly, however, by sub index. For $480,000 to start, this growth rate is $5,000,000 over a working life. This channel, Bluesky account, newsletter, watchlist and podcast express the view that you are serious about geospatial if you take the view of an investor, venture capitalist or entrepreneur. You are expected to do your own research. This is not a replacement for that. This is not investment advice. Consider it entertainment. NOT THE OPINION OF MY EMPLOYERNOT YOUR FIDUCIARYNOT INVESTMENT ADVICE Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/geospatial.money LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/geospatialindex Watchlist: ⁠https://www.tradingview.com/watchlists/123254792/ Newsletter: www.geospatial.money Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/5gpQUsaWxEBpYCnypEdHFC

Interview with the deputy chair of the board, Valrie Grant. Through Mapping The Conversations, she is the most charismatic and professional podcaster of the geospatial industry. A couple of guests ago we had Nadine Alemeh on the show. She represents Taylor Geospatial Institute, but she is also on the board of the UNGGIM-PSN. I wanted to find out what this is, so I went to Valrie and she was nice enough to come on and explain it to us all. More here. THE GEOSPATIAL INDEX The Geospatial Index is a comprehensive listing of all publicly traded geospatial businesses worldwide. Why? The industry is growing at ~5% annually (after inflation and after adjusting for base rates). This rate varies significantly, however, by sub index. For $480,000 to start, this growth rate is $5,000,000 over a working life. This channel, Bluesky account, newsletter, watchlist and podcast express the view that you are serious about geospatial if you take the view of an investor, venture capitalist or entrepreneur. You are expected to do your own research. This is not a replacement for that. This is not investment advice. Consider it entertainment. NOT THE OPINION OF MY EMPLOYERNOT YOUR FIDUCIARYNOT INVESTMENT ADVICE Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/geospatial.money LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/geospatialindex Watchlist: ⁠https://www.tradingview.com/watchlists/123254792/ Newsletter: www.geospatial.money Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/5gpQUsaWxEBpYCnypEdHFC

Atlas is the 11th web mapping system we have profiled. I am very pleased with this episode. The CTO and co-founder Harald was a succinct, eager and engaged interviewee who gave excellent answers to the standard set of business profiling questions. He had a particularly useful message for apprentices or graduates in our industry. I really encourage you to listen to the end and hear what he has to say. Here are some links to items mentioned. Note that I could not recall what GDAL stood for, it is geospatial data abstraction library. Harald mentioned Kyle Barron is a very worthy technical contributor to our field. S2 is a spherical projection with no compromises. Store an entire planet's data using a single dimension with centimeter accuracy. We got talking about how what holds the industry back is not web mapping systems but rather easy access to spatial data for non professionals. ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World is an example from Esri. We know from listening to Stephanie May that Natural Earth is another: Another one is Overture Maps. Foursquare has also recently released its data. And that's it! Again, really cool episode, have a go on the platform, here is me adding a bunch of layers. THE GEOSPATIAL INDEX The Geospatial Index is a comprehensive listing of all publicly traded geospatial businesses worldwide. Why? The industry is growing at ~5% annually (after inflation and after adjusting for base rates). This rate varies significantly, however, by sub index. For $480,000 to start, this growth rate is $5,000,000 over a working life. This channel, Bluesky account, newsletter, watchlist and podcast express the view that you are serious about geospatial if you take the view of an investor, venture capitalist or entrepreneur. You are expected to do your own research. This is not a replacement for that. This is not investment advice. Consider it entertainment. NOT THE OPINION OF MY EMPLOYERNOT YOUR FIDUCIARYNOT INVESTMENT ADVICE Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/geospatial.moneyLinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/geospatialindexWatchlist: ⁠https://www.tradingview.com/watchlists/123254792/Newsletter: www.geospatial.money Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/5gpQUsaWxEBpYCnypEdHFC

Eldar Rubinov is Positioning and Geodesy Technical Lead at Frontier SI. This is a centre of excellence for spatial information in Melbourne, Australia (https://frontiersi.com.au). We had a great chat about a recent presentation he gave in Malaysia about use of an Australian/New Zealand SBAS for high accuracy positioning in Malaysia. He also tested Gallileo there. Even though both systems are not designed to offer high accuracy positioning in Malaysia, it could nevertheless be achieved with them. SBAS means satellite based augmentation system. It corrects a position from a global navigation satellite system (GNSS) like GPS or Galileo and broadcasts that from a geostationary satellite for a given area. A example is SouthPAN, covering Australia and New Zealand. In 2020 I arranged an Adelaide Mapup attended by Eldar. He gave us all instructions how to make our own receiver. I dutifully did so, here is the build log. We had a broader discussion about some of the technical details of these systems and how they can fail, such as spoofing and jamming. We then moved on to Eldar's comments on the Positioning, Navigation and Timing subindex of the Geospatial Index. It was good to have a review of my work by an expert. Finally, Eldar offered some reflections from his time at Fugro. I asked him for this given they are struggling in the market of late. Some links for those interested in topics discussed: Kuching location SouthPAN SBAS Galileo Galileo authenticated signals GPS PNT Subindex is found amongst this watchlist Listing of a few on LinkedIn Jammers (possibly illegal where you live) Landing in Queenstown, NZ Ramform Tita MyRTK THE GEOSPATIAL INDEX The Geospatial Index is a comprehensive listing of all publicly traded geospatial businesses worldwide. Why? The industry is growing at ~5% annually (after inflation and after adjusting for base rates). This rate varies significantly, however, by sub index. For $480,000 to start, this growth rate is $5,000,000 over a working life. This channel, Bluesky account, newsletter, watchlist and podcast express the view that you are serious about geospatial if you take the view of an investor, venture capitalist or entrepreneur. You are expected to do your own research. This is not a replacement for that. This is not investment advice. Consider it entertainment. NOT THE OPINION OF MY EMPLOYER NOT YOUR FIDUCIARY NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE Resources: Bluesky LinkedIn Watchlist Newsletter Podcast

Nadine Alameh is the best example I can find in the geospatial industry of the value of immigration to the US. We can understand through what she does now and how she got there. Nadine is the inaugural Executive Director of the Taylor Geospatial Institute. Prior to this, she was CEO of the Open Geospatial Consortium. Rounding out the picture of her current service, she is on these committees/boards: 1. UN Geospatial Global Information Management - Private Sector Network 2. US National Geospatial Advisory Committee (NGAC) 3. LebNet The latter is a network to assist Lebanese Americans in tech. We started our discussion on Nadine's family connection to the country (more here). At the time of recording, Israel and Hezbollah were at war. Nadine gave a personal account of an earlier civil war in Lebanon that occurred when she was a child. She survived and went on to be an outstanding student at the American University of Beirut. She was rewarded with a scholarship to MIT, completing two masters degrees and a PhD there. She then embarked upon a glittering career leading organisations that produce and spread standards so we can all efficiently work together. We are in a period of upheaval in the US to do with immigration. As such, we are confronted with timely evidence of the value of international scholarship programmes and immigration to the United States. Nadine's career is a continuous string of achievements serving the nation. Let alone the broader impact she now has through the UN GGIM. Here are some links to things discussed: 1. WMS standard 2. Unreal Engine georeferencing 3. MapsGPT 4. Taylor Geospatial Engine 5. Ethics: Locus Charter 6. My T shirt: Conspiracy of Cartographers Neom: 1. NEOM Is The Parody Of The Future 2. Neom - The Line - The Rise and Fall of Saudi Arabia's Linear City. 3. Saudi Arabia's giant money pit: NEOM | If You're Listening THE GEOSPATIAL INDEX The Geospatial Index is a comprehensive listing of all publicly traded geospatial businesses worldwide. Why? The industry is growing at ~5% annually (after inflation and after adjusting for base rates). This rate varies significantly, however, by sub index. For $480,000 to start, this growth rate is $5,000,000 over a working life. This channel, Bluesky account, newsletter, watchlist and podcast express the view that you are serious about geospatial if you take the view of an investor, venture capitalist or entrepreneur. You are expected to do your own research. This is not a replacement for that. This is not investment advice. Consider it entertainment. NOT THE OPINION OF MY EMPLOYER NOT YOUR FIDUCIARY NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/geospatialindex.bsky.social LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/geospatialindex Watchlist: ⁠https://www.tradingview.com/watchlists/123254792/ Newsletter: https://www.geospatial.money Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/5gpQUsaWxEBpYCnypEdHFC

EXPRESS BROADCAST: COMMUNITY ORGANISING WITH FRANK ROMO OF ROMOGIS Frank Romo gives us a masterclass in community organising. He just so happens to have geospatial capability also. He provides several fantastic examples of geospatial outputs and acquisition of political power by communities that he has served. Frank is a hero. Frank provides pathways to prosperity for young men. Frank leverages the power of drones to make youngsters keen about what we do. He has had success all over the US and internationally such as in India. This is a whole new world for our profession. There is an emerging trend in consulting firms of social value. Thankfully. None however are as successful and heroic in their impact as RomoGIS. A key example is a New York community's latest gun violence dashboard. We are privileged. Thanks Frank. THE GEOSPATIAL INDEX The Geospatial Index is a comprehensive listing of all publicly traded geospatial businesses worldwide. Why? The industry is growing at ~5% annually (after inflation and after adjusting for base rates). This rate varies significantly, however, by sub index. For $480,000 to start, this growth rate is $5,000,000 over a working life. This channel, Bluesky account, newsletter, watchlist and podcast express the view that you are serious about geospatial if you take the view of an investor, venture capitalist or entrepreneur. You are expected to do your own research. This is not a replacement for that. This is not investment advice. Consider it entertainment. NOT THE OPINION OF MY EMPLOYER NOT YOUR FIDUCIARY NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/geospatialindex.bsky.social LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/geospatialindex Watchlist: ⁠https://www.tradingview.com/watchlists/123254792/ Newsletter: https://www.geospatial.money/ Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/5gpQUsaWxEBpYCnypEdHFC

Fathom is a flood modeling company based in Bristol, UK (www.fathom.global). They were recently acquired by reinsurance heavyweight Swiss RE. Hence they are a welcome addition to the list of publicly traded companies profiled on this podcast. Gavin Lewis, Head of Engineering, delivered an inspiring message about this scientific organisation. It is incredibly topical given the two dramatic hurricanes in the US last 2 months, Helene and Milton. Compounding the message here is the devastating flooding of Valencia in Spain 6 days ago (10/29/24). We are facing a barrage of messages from nature that the service Fathom provides will help us become resilient to a situation of our own making. We also have a follow on episode to the topics raised in our episode with Spatial Risk Systems (https://youtu.be/Ljfm0VNGyRU?si=RCtkWb-sfSQ8C0do). In the accompanying Substack post (https://www.geospatial.money/p/spatial-risk-systems) illustrates the consequences for insurance companies that do not properly size natural catastrophe risk. This makes it straightforward to understand why Swiss RE bought Fathom. It will be interesting to continue to observe the acquisition trend in this space amongst competitor insurance companies. THE GEOSPATIAL INDEX The Geospatial Index is a comprehensive listing of all publicly traded geospatial businesses worldwide. Why? The industry is growing at ~5% annually (after inflation and after adjusting for base rates). This rate varies significantly, however, by sub index. For $480,000 to start, this growth rate is $5,000,000 over a working life. This channel, Bluesky account, newsletter, watchlist and podcast express the view that you are serious about geospatial if you take the view of an investor, venture capitalist or entrepreneur. You are expected to do your own research. This is not a replacement for that. This is not investment advice. Consider it entertainment. NOT THE OPINION OF MY EMPLOYER NOT YOUR FIDUCIARY NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/geospatialindex.bsky.social LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/geospatialindex Watchlist: ⁠https://www.tradingview.com/watchlists/123254792/ Newsletter: https://www.geospatial.money/ Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/5gpQUsaWxEBpYCnypEdHFC

Elizabeth Christensen of Crunchy Data walks us through how to use open source tooling to avoid paying the Esri tax. It was a great tour of the options and also a nice vibe check of the industry. A headline here is she echoes former guest Stephanie May in endorsing DuckDB. She also wanted to pass on that a great way to find out more is to attend PostGIS Day! More here. On the topic of resources, Elizabeth has been very helpful and provided the following set of links: #PostgreSQL, open source relational database https://www.postgresql.org/ #PostGIS, open source GIS data store https://postgis.net/ # PostGIS Day 2024 https://www.crunchydata.com/community/events/postgis-day-2024 #Crunchy Data, Postgres and PostGIS services provider https://www.crunchydata.com/ # Open Source Geospatial Foundation https://www.osgeo.org/ #QGIS download, open source mapping https://www.qgis.org/ #Simple map SQL queries as QGIS layers https://www.crunchydata.com/blog/connecting-qgis-to-postgres-and-postgis #pg_tileserv - Tile server for PostGIS https://github.com/CrunchyData/pg_tileserv #pg_featureserv - API JSON server for PostGIS https://github.com/CrunchyData/pg_featureserv/ #OpenLayers project https://openlayers.org/ #OpenLayers + PgRouting + pg_tileserv + pg_featureserv sample code https://github.com/CrunchyData/pg_featureserv/tree/master/demo #PostGIS day videos https://www.youtube.com/@CrunchyDataPostgres#Crunchy Data's Postgres Playground https://www.crunchydata.com/developers/tutorials #Really cool open source GIS people to follow Paul Ramsey @ Crunchy Data / cleverelephant Regina Obe @ Paragon Ryan Lambert @ RustProofLabs Cliff Patterson @ Luna Geospatial Matt Forrest @ Whereabots #Elizabeth's crunchy blogs https://www.crunchydata.com/blog/author/elizabeth-christensen #Elizabeth's LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabeth-garrett-christensen/ #Elizabeth's Twitter https://twitter.com/sqlliz THE GEOSPATIAL INDEX The Geospatial Index is a comprehensive listing of all publicly traded geospatial businesses worldwide. Why? The industry is growing at ~5% annually (after inflation and after adjusting for base rates). This rate varies significantly, however, by sub index. For $480,000 to start, this growth rate is $5,000,000 over a working life. This channel, Bluesky account, newsletter, watchlist and podcast express the view that you are serious about geospatial if you take the view of an investor, venture capitalist or entrepreneur. You are expected to do your own research. This is not a replacement for that. This is not investment advice. Consider it entertainment. NOT THE OPINION OF MY EMPLOYER NOT YOUR FIDUCIARY NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/geospatialindex.bsky.social LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/geospatialindex Watchlist: ⁠https://www.tradingview.com/watchlists/123254792/ Newsletter: https://www.geospatial.money/ Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/5gpQUsaWxEBpYCnypEdHFC

The co-founder and CEO of Esper, Shoaib Iqbal, talks about the grit and grind required to launch Australia's first earth observation mission, a hyperspectral satellite. He and his co-founder Przemyslaw Lorenczak are on this year's Forbes Australia 30 under 30 list: https://www.forbes.com.au/30-under-30-2024-technology/. Like many start ups in the space, pardon the pun, they have met with their fair share of disaster. Despite their first launch 10 months ago failing, Shoaib comments that growth is nevertheless spectacular. They were enterprising enough to strike a deal with another hyperspectral company for the imagery they were going to sell from their first launch. There is similarity in what Esper does to Spottitt using imagery analytics to ultimately write to asset management databases from space. Esper allows resource exploration companies to, effectively, perform geotechnical analysis from space. Instead of drilling expensive boreholes, then analysing the soil for evidence of, for example, lithium, they break the light spectrum up into many bands and look for the spectral signature of this raw material. A nice point Shoaib makes here is this can reduce the environmental disturbance of a large drilling campaign. He also makes a compelling economic case - less than $5 per image tile vs hundreds of thousands per exploration borehole. On the topic of exploration, I also talked briefly about one of the small number of maps that I made over 10 years ago that appeared in an announcement to the Australian Stock Exchange. This is when I worked at oil explorer Central Petroleum: An Asymmetrical Risk/Reward Equation, Asia – Australia Roadshow, 25 February 2013 – 7 March 2013 (https://wcsecure.weblink.com.au/pdf/CTP/01385300.pdf). More on the company: https://centralpetroleum.com.au/investors/. ABSOLUTELY NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE. THE GEOSPATIAL INDEX The Geospatial Index is a comprehensive listing of all publicly traded geospatial businesses worldwide. Why? The industry is growing at ~5% annually (after inflation and after adjusting for base rates). This rate varies significantly, however, by sub index. For $480,000 to start, this growth rate is $5,000,000 over a working life. This channel, Bluesky account, newsletter, watchlist and podcast express the view that you are serious about geospatial if you take the view of an investor, venture capitalist or entrepreneur. You are expected to do your own research. This is not a replacement for that. This is not investment advice. Consider it entertainment. NOT THE OPINION OF MY EMPLOYER NOT YOUR FIDUCIARY NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/geospatialindex.bsky.social LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/geospatialindex Watchlist: ⁠https://www.tradingview.com/watchlists/123254792/ Newsletter: https://www.geospatial.money/ Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/5gpQUsaWxEBpYCnypEdHFC

There is a new crowdsourced mapping campaign underway in India, Indonesia and Nigeria - Proto. Founder and CEO Akshay Aditya takes the view that maps are content. Similar to social media accounts and blogs. This system is about making it just as easy and engaging to contribute. This is the coverage map, showing the majority of content is in India so far. Principally it appears to be driven by the need to send delivery drivers to front doors reliably. It relates to the variance in addressing systems across the globe covered in the OpenCage episode. If you download the app, you'll be presented with a detailed data entry form for a new address. There is also a requirement for 4 photos. This reflects how it can be easier to help a driver identify a delivery point simply by looking at pictures of a property. We also got into the incentive system Akshay has put in place to get the map populated and kept up to date. They appear to run regular mapathons, have a very active community on Whatsapp and pay people in cryptocurrency to map the world. Ultimately the system offers $USD500 per square kilometre to map it. But there are lots of qualifications on that. Have a listen to find out more. Thanks Akshay for taking the time and opening up this part of the world for us on the show. THE GEOSPATIAL INDEX The Geospatial Index is a comprehensive listing of all publicly traded geospatial businesses worldwide. Why? The industry is growing at ~5% annually (after inflation and after adjusting for base rates). This rate varies significantly, however, by sub index. For $480,000 to start, this growth rate is $5,000,000 over a working life. This channel, Bluesky account, newsletter, watchlist and podcast express the view that you are serious about geospatial if you take the view of an investor, venture capitalist or entrepreneur. You are expected to do your own research. This is not a replacement for that. This is not investment advice. Consider it entertainment. NOT THE OPINION OF MY EMPLOYER NOT YOUR FIDUCIARY NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/geospatialindex.bsky.social LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/geospatialindex Watchlist: ⁠https://www.tradingview.com/watchlists/123254792/ Newsletter: https://www.geospatial.money/ Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/5gpQUsaWxEBpYCnypEdHFC

Eric Love gives us a tour of his fantastic Australian census and real estate mapping tool. This helps me find the 3 best suburbs to buy a house in Adelaide, South Australia. A competitor system is https://heatmaps.com.au/. Following are the custom Mappage outputs from Eric for my housing utility index of maximizing public transport use and educational attainment whilst minimising price. Map: https://mappage.net.au/?s=gzxlwyh0. List: https://mappage.net.au/?s=7z8ipe1w. Scatterplot: https://mappage.net.au/?s=ny6tjksz. THE GEOSPATIAL INDEX The Geospatial Index is a comprehensive listing of all publicly traded geospatial businesses worldwide. Why? The industry is growing at ~5% annually (after inflation and after adjusting for base rates). This rate varies significantly, however, by sub index. For $480,000 to start, this growth rate is $5,000,000 over a working life. This channel, Bluesky account, newsletter, watchlist and podcast express the view that you are serious about geospatial if you take the view of an investor, venture capitalist or entrepreneur. You are expected to do your own research. This is not a replacement for that. This is not investment advice. Consider it entertainment. NOT THE OPINION OF MY EMPLOYER NOT YOUR FIDUCIARY NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/geospatialindex.bsky.social LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/geospatialindex Watchlist: ⁠https://www.tradingview.com/watchlists/123254792/ Newsletter: https://www.geospatial.money/ Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/5gpQUsaWxEBpYCnypEdHFC

This is the second episode with Stephanie May. She talks about how the first world basemap was created for Facebook. We also spent some time covering how dark mode is produced for a map. Some discussion occurred about human factors and human/computer interface observations about the navigation display system offered by Tesla. This lead us to HD mapping and the pattern of coalitions forming between corporations that rely on this highly expensive form of spatial data. Examples include the various investors in Overture Maps Foundation (https://overturemaps.org/about/members/), Mapmaster (https://www.mapmaster.co.jp/en/company/), Here (https://www.here.com/about/investors) and Dynamic Map Platform (https://www.dynamic-maps.co.jp/en/company/overview/index.html). I have set up a HD Map subindex of The Geospatial Index to reflect this unique category of investment in our industry. Check the overall index here and scroll down to HD Map: https://www.tradingview.com/watchlists/123254792/. It contains 25 publicly traded companies. Continuing the overview of technology and resources used by cartographers in the context of setting up vector tile-based global basemaps, Stephanie also pointed us at Mapzen (https://www.mapzen.com/projects/) and their associated Tilezen (https://tilezen.readthedocs.io/en/latest/). In terms of data sources, Stephanie highlighted the utility of Natural Earth (https://www.naturalearthdata.com/). This is maintained by Nathaniel Kelso, a star of our industry, who now runs Kelso Cartography. Here is a profile of him in National Geographic (https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/real-world-geography-nathaniel-kelso/). His career shown on LinkedIn is incredible: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathanielkelso/details/experience/. THE GEOSPATIAL INDEX The Geospatial Index is a comprehensive listing of all publicly traded geospatial businesses worldwide. Why? The industry is growing at ~5% annually (after inflation and after adjusting for base rates). This rate varies significantly, however, by sub index. For $480,000 to start, this growth rate is $5,000,000 over a working life. This channel, Bluesky account, newsletter, watchlist and podcast express the view that you are serious about geospatial if you take the view of an investor, venture capitalist or entrepreneur. You are expected to do your own research. This is not a replacement for that. This is not investment advice. Consider it entertainment. NOT THE OPINION OF MY EMPLOYERNOT YOUR FIDUCIARYNOT INVESTMENT ADVICE Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/geospatialindex.bsky.socialLinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/geospatialindexWatchlist: ⁠https://www.tradingview.com/watchlists/123254792/Newsletter: https://www.geospatial.money Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/5gpQUsaWxEBpYCnypEdHFC

This is episode 1 of 4 with Stephanie May (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mizmay/). She is a veteran of the web mapping industry. She was Senior, Technical Cartographer at Apple. Next she was Lead Cartographer at Facebook creating their first global basemap. Her most recent position was Director of Geospatial at Stamen. As such we are faced with an excellent follow on guest from Linda Stevens (https://youtu.be/55urfsPH_ws?si=tDa9bQOluLwApKYj). This is because Linda described how Esri came to dominate the market through educating a global army of technicians accustomed to their software. One may describe them as having the career of 'Esri Technician' with various levels of seniority. This raises the question of what a career could look like if one did not become an Esri Technician. Stephanie May is the perfect person to illustrate that for us. Early on in our discussion we covered her viral kriging analysis of housing affordability in San Francisco. Here are some write ups from the time: https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/most-expensive-neighborhoods-san-francisco_n_2967522 https://burritojustice.com/2013/03/20/rent-from-on-high/ https://goldengatexpress.org/43942/latest/news/interactive-heat-map/ https://stamen.com/stephanie-may-interdisciplinary-cartography/ She also recreated a web version of the map just for this episode in the past week: https://mizmay.github.io/RentAffordability/RentAffordability_2013_EBK.html Further on in the discussion we started to talk about the technology behind web maps. She recommended understanding these concepts to make good ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_Buffers https://geoparquet.org/ https://docs.mapbox.com/help/glossary/mbtiles/ https://docs.protomaps.com/pmtiles/ The discussion turned to navigation (pardon the pun) toward the end when talking about her time at Apple Maps. Here is my journal publication on wayfinding that I mentioned: https://josis.org/index.php/josis/article/view/21 Also during our coverage of navigation aids Stephanie mentioned an NYT op-ed about flaws in Google Maps: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/10/opinion/google-maps-driving-apps-flaws.html Interestingly, I came across discussion from them also about the need for landmarks in route directions: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/15/science/giving-directions-start-with-a-landmark.html. THE GEOSPATIAL INDEX The Geospatial Index is a comprehensive listing of all publicly traded geospatial businesses worldwide. Why? The industry is growing at ~5% annually (after inflation and after adjusting for base rates). This rate varies significantly, however, by sub index. For $480,000 to start, this growth rate is $5,000,000 over a working life. This channel, Bluesky account, newsletter, watchlist and podcast express the view that you are serious about geospatial if you take the view of an investor, venture capitalist or entrepreneur. You are expected to do your own research. This is not a replacement for that. This is not investment advice. Consider it entertainment. NOT THE OPINION OF MY EMPLOYER NOT YOUR FIDUCIARY NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/geospatialindex.bsky.social LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/geospatialindex Watchlist: ⁠https://www.tradingview.com/watchlists/123254792/ Newsletter: https://www.geospatial.money/ Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/5gpQUsaWxEBpYCnypEdHFC