🛣 Options, Not Roadmaps

An option is something you can do but don’t have to do. All our product ideas are exactly that: options we may exercise in some future cycle—or never.

Without a roadmap, without a stated plan, we can completely change course without paying a penalty. We don’t set any expectations internally or externally that these things are actually going to happen.

I know Basecamp is always the industry outlier with these things, but the thoughts on roadmaps are probably more true for many companies in reality than we’d all like...

🗺 How We Get Data Collected in the Field Ready for Use

My colleagues Bill Dollins and Todd Pollard (the core of our data team), wrote this post detailing how we go from original ground-based data collection in Fulcrum through a data processing pipeline to deliver product to customers. A combination of PostGIS, Python tools, FME, Amazon RDS, and other custom QA tools get us from raw content to finished, analyst-ready GEOINT products.

🔥 Mapping the Camp Fire with Drones

The 518 coordinated flights operation, by 16 Northern California emergency responder agencies, is one of...

Since I got the Mavic last year, I haven’t had many opportunities to do mapping with it. I’ve put together a few experimental flights to play with DroneDeploy and our Fulcrum extension, but outside of that I’ve mostly done photography and video stuff.

OpenDroneMap came on a scene a couple years ago as a toolkit for processing drone imagery. I’ve been following it loosely through the Twittersphere since. Most of my image processing has been done with DroneDeploy, since we’d been working with them on some integration between...

💻 The Disappearing Computer

For his final weekly column of his long career, Walt Mossberg talks about what he calls “ambient computing”, the penetration of IoT, AR, VR, and computers throughout our lives:

I expect that one end result of all this work will be that the technology, the computer inside all these things, will fade into the background. In some cases, it may entirely disappear, waiting to be activated by a voice command, a person entering the room, a change in blood chemistry, a shift in temperature, a motion. Maybe even just a thought. Your whole...

At work we’ve been building an integration between Fulcrum and DroneDeploy, a service for automating drone flight and data capture for aerial imagery. It’s compatible with the Mavic, so I gave it a shot with some test flights over my house.

The idea is simple: use DroneDeploy to draw on a map the area you want to survey from above, and their app handles building the flight plan, sending it to the drone, and flying the waypoints to take all the photos. You then take the pictures from the drone’s storage and upload to your DroneDeploy project for processing....

Querying OpenStreetMap with Amazon Athena 🗺

Using Amazon’s Athena service, you can now interactively query OpenStreetMap data right from an interactive console. No need to use the complicated OSM API, this is pure SQL. I’ve taken a stab at building out a replica OSM database before and it’s a beast. The dataset now clocks in at 56 GB zipped. This post from Seth Fitzsimmons gives a great overview of what you can do with it:

Working with “the planet” (as the data archives are referred to) can be unwieldy. Because it contains data spanning the...

I bought a Mavic Pro a couple weeks ago and just got a chance to take my first flights this past weekend. In short, it’s the most impressive technology product I’ve used in years. I’ve never owned any drone, so this is pretty cool for someone in the mapping industry. Let’s dive in.

Since going out to fly aerial mapping missions with some partners of ours a couple months back, I wanted to buy one of DJI’s drones — either the larger Phantom 4 Pro, or the smaller Mavic. Extensive research led...

Someone attached HD video cameras to an RC airplane and flew it all around the urban environments of New York City.

The shots flying down the towers of the Verrazano Bridge and around the head of the Statue of Liberty are breathtaking.