So I’m recently back from that Mecca of all mapping events, the annual Esri User Conference in San Diego.
To those of you who are not familiar with Esri: they win the prize for being the largest technology company that most people have never heard of, and since their founding in 1869 1 Esri has come to dominate the field of something called ‘GIS’ 2. Every year tens of thousands of loyal pilgrims flock to this mapping Mecca to learn about the vast and ever increasing myriad of Esri mapping products, 100+ of which happen to be prefixed with the word ‘ArcGIS’. 3
Now this has become a fairly large conference — not CES sized mind you — but at ~18,000 attendees certainly not something to be sniffed at.
Many attendees go to the conference to hear about the hundreds of shiny new buttons and pull-downs that Esri has added to its flagship desktop product, ArcGIS Pro. However, I think most people go to the conference to meet birds of a feather. In this regard the Esri User Conference is an unmatched event for networking and learning about exciting new Map Happenings.
This year there were 238 organizations touting their wares. Many of them have been established for decades 4, but most of the really interesting ones are in an area called the Startup Zone. It’s in this area that you’ll find a bunch of young, enthusiastic and bubbly whippersnappers who are attempting to make a small dent in the mapping universe. And who knows — they may yet succeed.
To that end I thought you might enjoy learning about a few of them.
So, with great and abundant fanfare, here are the inaugural “Cool Map Happenings” award winners from this year’s conference 🎉:
- Atomic Maps
- Capella Space
- Cyvl.ai
- GeoCam
- InCitu
- Reveal Technology
- SatVu
- Seer AI
- Unknot.id
- Urban Sky
If you’re on the list — congratulations — you get the esteemed honor of receiving a free and, I hasten to add, extremely scarce, Map Happenings T-shirt 5 😱
Atomic Maps was founded a few years ago by the illustrious Jim Young. Jim came to realize that the amount of data that is being generated by organizations is getting exponentially larger and, when it comes to data that have geospatial attributes, there are simply no off-the-shelf systems that can make any sense of it. But Atomic Maps can.
To illustrate this point, take one of the key demos from the big stage at this year’s Esri User Conference. It featured the work that the California utility company, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) is doing to make it easy to tie the many millions of images of infrastructure to a location to make it more efficient to inspect electrical substations.
What wasn’t mentioned in the demo is that under the covers this whole system is powered by Atomic Maps. Using this system PG&E was able to increase their productivity by a whopping 150%.
It’s not just PG&E. Atomic Maps is working with a number of extremely large companies enabling some extremely large data analyses — something that just isn’t possible in a traditional GIS.
So if you want horsepower, go talk to Atomic.
Capella Space isn’t exactly just starting up. Founded in 2016 they’re focused on something a little different from all the other satellite upstarts like BlackSky, Maxar, Planet and Satellogic. Instead of launching satellites that capture imagery, Capella has launched a constellation of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites.
What is SAR? Well it’s a technology that’s been around for decades — I know that because my father-in-law worked on the project that put SAR on the SR-71 spy plane back in the 1970s. But Capella is the first company to make SAR imagery readily available.
What’s different about SAR? Well because it’s radar it can see through clouds. And smog. And smoke. And it can see at night. At sub-half meter resolution.
So you want to see what’s going on? No longer do you have to wait. Obviously their imagery is treasured by those in the defense / intelligence industry but it’s also invaluable for responding to natural disasters.
Net/net Capella is very different. They’re worth following closely.
When it comes to capturing street view imagery and LiDAR, Cyvl.ai wants to make things easy. Super easy. They’ve developed a sensor pack that they’ll send to you in a pelican box — for free. You can mount it to any vehicle in minutes, connect it to an app on your phone and then just start capturing data.
The captured data is then processed in the cloud and post processed to provide information on pavement conditions, signs, trees, pavement markings. And of course you get the 360 street view imagery as well as the 3D LiDAR data too.
All the captured data can then be viewed or integrated into your favorite package — e.g. Esri, Revit, Cartegraph or Civil 3D.
Cyvl.ai claims that field surveys can be completed five times faster than conventional boots-on-the-ground methods.
And their pricing model is simple too: it’s just a cost per mile charge.
So Cyvl.ai’s claim to fame isn’t really about new technology. It’s about packaging the tech and making it so easy that anyone can do it.
So GeoCam and its Kiwi founder, Myles Sutherland, is doing some really interesting stuff.
Geocam is focused on scaling and automating physical digital twins — for local governments, utilities and indoor facilities. They’ve developed a proprietary device with multiple cameras that can be used to survey an indoor or outdoor space and from it they create a 3D photographic model. It provides seamless outdoor – indoor data collection, including in areas where there is no GPS. The data can be used to create as built floor plans and can be a foundation for indoor routing and navigation.
Right now GeoCam just provides a service — they’ll put boots on the ground to survey just about anywhere it’s possible to go. They’re thinking about leasing access to their equipment at some point down the road.
Why is GeoCam relevant? Well first they don’t have the overhead of having to use LiDAR. Second, they’re significantly cheaper and quicker to survey than anything else that’s out there (e.g. Matterport)
Last but not least they have a very simple and easy to understand pricing model that’s simply based on a cost per square foot (or meter).
inCitu is using AR to “bring future cities to life”. Hold up your camera in front of a building site and ‘Voila’ now you can see what the future building will look like right in front of your eyes.
The use cases are many:
- Cities can keep the general public informed as to plans by posting a simple QR code at the site. Then users can immediately go from “QR to AR” to experience the site as it will be built
- Home development builders could use it to help prospective buyers understand what a home development will look like once all the houses are complete and the landscaping is in.
- The AEC industry could use it to help construction workers understand what will go where and when.
It looks like inCitu has already partnered with Snap and they’re doing work with a number of cities. And they’ve already got scale — for example they’ve created AR overlays of hundreds of buildings in the NYC area.
I can’t wait to see what they do with Vision Pro!
Like Capella Space, Reveal is in the business of radar. Only instead of looking at the ground they look underground. This innovative startup from New Zealand is hoping to revolutionize the whole world of “call before you dig”.
No longer do you have to perform an expensive survey and no longer do you have to guess at where the utility lines run. Now you can actually visualize them before the first jackhammer breaks ground.
Using the Reveal rig, which is typically pulled behind a truck, you can instantly get a picture of what’s below ground and Reveal’s technology can help classify it into different types – gas, electric, sewer.
What impressed me about their tech was its ability to reveal how plans differed from “as built”. You could clearly see where the utility was meant to be per the plan, and separately from the Reveal scan — where it actually was.
Now the trick will be for Reveal to get scale. There’s a big market and the cost of mistakes can be huge.
Given all the news about temperature records being broken SatVu has picked the right time and the right era for their business. Like Capella Space they were founded in 2016, but instead of focusing on photographic or radar imagery they’re focused on high resolution thermal data.
Their birds can capture images and can also capture up to 60 seconds of video. All at 3.5 meters resolution. That’s compared to only 100 meter resolution available from Landsat.
Of course this is valuable for multiple use cases: climate action, understanding industrial activity, defense/intelligence work and, I would imagine, helping to determine the boundaries of active fires.
Like most satellite constellations, SatVu can be tasked, including through an API.
Super cool. Or maybe super hot?
Seer AI is a tiny company lead by some really sharp cookies: Jeremy Fand (ex-Wall St), Daniel Wilson (ex-US Intel) and Rob Fletcher (PhD in High Energy Particle Physics). Daniel and Rob both did stints at Esri where they got to understand the challenges of geospatial.
So what does Seer do?
Well essentially they make it easy to perform incredibly large geo-temporal analyses across vast, disparate datasets all without having to move any of the data or load any of it into a server. This unlocks capabilities that up until now have not been possible.
They claim their platform is the world’s first “Geospatial Data Mesh”, which removes the need for complex data transformations and which is enabled through a decentralized data model. Their core technology rests on a knowledge graph, making vast datasets searchable through space, time and relationships. Their tag line: “Answer questions you didn’t know you could ask.”
Given their background I can only begin to imagine the kinds of analyses their technology could perform.
Their web site is very light on details, and I’m guessing their clients won’t let them feature a lot of their work.
So very stealthy. But definitely one to watch.
So Unknot is onto something. And if they can pull it off, it’s something really big.
If you visit their website you’ll see them talk about tracking — tracking people and objects. You’ll also seem them highlight their work with organizations like the US Army and the US Air Force. And they’ll give you an impressive demo of tracking security staff as they wander across the floor of a casino.
But what I think their technology is really all about is indoor positioning.
Indoor positioning is inherently hard. There is no GPS indoors so you need another method. To solve this problem organizations providing indoor positioning technology have used a number of techniques. Apple uses one involving something called ‘Wi-Fi fingerprinting’ and it requires a pre-survey of the building to record the radio frequency interference patterns. Other companies use Bluetooth beacons and triangulation, but that requires the installation of hundreds if not thousands of beacons.
Unknot.id claims to solve this problem without the need for any surveys or any beacons. If they’re claims on accuracy, precision and efficiency can be realized then they’ve got a huge TAM to go after.
I look forward to watching them closely!
Urban Sky is collecting imagery. But in a very different way. Not from satellites. Not from planes. Not from drones. No, Urban Sky collects imagery from balloons. And not just any balloons — they collect them from something they invented called “Microballoons”.
These little devils are reusable balloons costing just a few thousand dollars and they can quickly be deployed to capture hi-res data over a broad area at an extremely competitive cost.
When launched these balloons soar to 50,000-70,000 feet (15,000-20,000m) in the stratosphere and can capture 10cm resolution data for as little as $5 per square kilometer.
Some of their secret sauce includes the ability to figure out exactly where to launch the balloons to capture the area of interest. It’s based on highly detailed modeling of the predicted weather and climate patterns as well as the physical characteristics of the balloons.
As you would expect the use cases for Urban Sky are many: urban change, fire boundaries, agriculture monitoring, environmental change and disaster response. For organizations that need broad swathes of hi-res data on a regular basis at a reasonable cost Urban Sky can fit the bill.
Go take a look, I think you’ll find their work fascinating.
1 Ok, it wasn’t 1869, but sometimes it feels like it.
2 I think GIS stands for ‘Geographically Insidious Systems’.
3 Or as some have called it: ‘ArgghhGIS”.
4 At 130 years, I think you win the prize @ National Geographic Society!
5 I know, I’m a cheap bastard, but I’m also retired and so I don’t have any money. To get your free T-Shirt you first have to promise to model it in an online post. If you want more than one I’ll give you the super secret link to buy them. 😉
Map Happenings 