WhereCampEU London - a great success

First day back in the office after an exhausting weekend attending the WhereCampEU unconference here in London.  The conference was really well organised, with great venues and food, and all that at zero cost thanks to very generous sponsors and a great bunch of volunteers! Also thanks for the free beer at Smithy's sponsored by Axon Active, I thoroughly enjoyed the pub evening.

Attendants came from over 13 different countries, with public and private sector attendants, web2.0 startups, core OpenStreetMap people and a strong presence of academics, specifically UCL!

Slowly, people seem to be uploading their presentations to the wiki, allowing a more complete view of the content presented. Altough in retrospect, I might have made some bad decisions regarding which sessions to attend, my conference highlights included definitely the Skobbler presentation, the Zen of Map Quality , and Steven Feldman's business model workshops. On the Saturday afternoon, Bob Barr passionate analysis of the current and future state of the Ordnance Survey made for a great closure to the conference. I didn't make it to the post conference drinks on Saturday.

Overall, I would have wished for less Openstreetmap presentations, at times it felt like a dress rehearsal for the SOTM2010 !!! But, I will definitely return to WhereCampEU 2011, as it is a great opportunity to network with a wide array of relevant players in the geoweb industry and OSM community.

Manifold - Crossing the Chasm ?

First a disclaimer, my motivation for this post is not to discredit Manifold the software package or CDA International Ltd. I hesitated for a long time before finally deciding to post this very brief and probably flawed "analysis" based on many assumptions, with the aim to start an earnest discussion on the commercial development of Manifold GIS in a wider market context, based on more than just this starting point of analysis.

For the past 6 years the web forum Georeference has been the hub of the Manifold GIS user community, providing a virtual gathering place for users, enabling the development of a vibrant online community of expert users, sharing knowledge, discussing wider issues and helping novice users on a level that is very rarely encountered in other support forums. I believe it is fair to think that for many users of Manifold GIS, it is the first port  of call when looking for information, help and advice with the software, before making use of paid support from Manifold directly. So as more licenses of Manifold are being sold and used , the number of forum users, posts and threads should increase in parallel. Given this premise, forum activity levels then act as a very imperfect proxy for the market penetration rate of the Manifold GIS software package. There are of course several caveats* to this theory.

The forum thankfully records and shares usage statistics (number of posts/threads per month). I assembled and visualised the growth in terms of forum threads and posts over the past 6 years in the graph attached below. In order to give some context, I also included the release dates of significant versions of Manifold on the graph.

One very fundamental observation from this graph is that since  Manifold v8 has been released, there has been a decline of activity on the forum. Whereas in the preceding years, there was almost uninterrupted growth in user forum activity, right now, over two years after the release of v8, the forum contributions have returned to the level of mid 2006, and trend doesn't imply a return to growth.Also notable has been the gap between the software release cycle prior to v8, and after. Whereas Manifold used to bring out a major revision each year (2004,2005, 2006,2007), for the past two years, users have been waiting for Manifold v9.

Given the caveats detailed below, what conclusions can the graph give us on the general business development context of Manifold?

I believe it is fair to say that CDA, the company developing Manifold GIS, are a high-tech software company (i hesitate to use the term start up, as they have been on the market for 8-10 years), which have a disruptive product, challenging the established GIS market in terms of pricing structure (and some may argue in terms of software quality/features). The study of disruptive technology innovations has been formalised in a number of theories, one very prominent one being the "Crossing the Chasm" model. This model aims to explain the specifics of marketing of high-tech products, and distinguishes two crucial stages: First, the product is marketed to and adopted by "visionaries", a small set of users which form a small base of early adopters of the product. In order to gain mass market adoption though, the company crucially needs to gain enough momentum to jump the proverbial "Chasm" towards the pragmatists (early majority). A step at which many high-tech companies ultimately fail!



Manifold certainly has achieved a core basis of highly motivated early adopters which act as voluntary technology evangelists, as evidenced by the very supportive online community, as well as a number of user initiated meetings. From this basis, Manifold has over the past 4 years been working to gain momentum to cross the chasm towards the early majority in the GIS market, rapidly issuing improved software versions, opening a partner centre in Silicon Valley, starting to issue press releases and other media related activities. The success of these measures though lies in the continued rapid pace of updates being sold, given that Manifold do not levy annual maintenance fees from its existing user base.

In my opinion, as of right now, CDA Int. Ltd. are stuck in a limbo between an established early adopters user base, and the early majority user base they are trying to reach in order to significantly advance their market penetration. While they seem to be struggling to finish version 9, their existing user base seems to be eroding, increasingly frustrated by a lack of updates and activation issues, while many of the early majority users, more technically conservative, are holding back from buying in to Manifold, waiting to see what v9 brings to the table.

*Important caveats complicating the estimation of the number of users/licenses from forum activity levels :

1. Not every user of Manifold is an active participant to the forum. Most likely only a very small percentage of Manifold users ever contribute to the forum.


2. Most users will only participate when they have a problem/question they need advice for.
   


3. A given person might be responsible for a varying number of Manifold licenses. This can range from one user with one license, to one administrator who is responsible for hundreds of licenses installed across a company, or embedded as a software component invisible to end users.

Location Intelligence - EngD research presentation at CASA

Just a quick note that I will be giving a half hour presentation tomorrow at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis on my Engineering Doctorate research. I will put up the slides of the presentation after tomorrow Its up here now.  This should be a good opportunity for anyone  interested in a good summary of my work over the past three years. Below an abstract and location details:

Wednesday, February 10, 2010: 17.30
CASA, Basement Lecture Theatre, 1-19 Torrington Place, UCL

Location Intelligence: an innovative approach to business location decision making
As one of the leading ‘world cities’ London is home to a highly internationalised workforce and is particularly reliant on these sources of foreign direct investment (FDI). In the face of increasing global competition and a very difficult economic climate, the capital must compete effectively to encourage and support such investors. Through a collaborative study with London’s official foreign direct investment agency, Think London, the need for a coherent framework for data, methodologies and tools to inform business location decision making became apparent. This presentation will discuss the development of a rich environment to iteratively explore, compare and rank London’s business neighbourhoods alongside ancillary data. This is achieved through the development, integration and evaluation of data and its manipulation to form a model for locational based decision support. Firstly, we discuss the development of a geo-business classification for London which draws upon methods and practices common to many geospatial neighbourhood classifications that are used for profiling consumers. In this instance a geo-business classification is developed by encapsulating relevant location variables using Principal Component Analysis into a set of composite area characteristics. Secondly, we discuss the implementation an appropriate Multi-Criteria Decision Making methodology, in this case Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), enabling the aggregation of the geo-business classification and decision makers preferences into discrete decision alternatives (Carver 1991; Jankowski 1995). Lastly, we present the preliminary results of the integration of both data and model through the development and evaluation of a web-based prototype and evaluate its usefulness through scenario testing.

OpenStreetMap progress in Port-au-Prince

Just a very quick note to the video posted below, which shows the impressive response by the OpenStreetMap Community to the terrible earthquake last week in Haiti. I also attended the short talk of Mikel Maron at #geomob last Friday, where he again praised the response by OSM to the earthquake, and how OSM has become the defacto clearing house of spatial data for the disaster relief efforts.

Manifold GIS set to leverage GPU's much more widely in v9 ?

If you are interested in the path the next version of Manifold likely is taking, the following screencast of Dimitri's recent presentation at the Nvidia GPU Conference gives us some hints! Altough Dimitri  doesn't in this presentation go into any great specific detail about Manifold v9 CUDA capabilities (expected as that the presentation was not covered by an Non Disclosure Agreement), nonetheless, this presentation seems to be the closest one can get to a technical presentation by Manifold at a User Meeting, minus the NDA!

First, Dimitri goes into a lot of detail about the fundamental software development challenges for GPU programming, much of which is over my head in terms of technical detail. Sadly, all the examples in this presentation refer to raster processing, which is already present in Manifold v8.

The second half of the talk is clearly more interesting, as he presents fundamental architectural work developing a lightweight processing scheduler. This scheduler seems to be the key infrastructure element enabling efficient workload paralellisation, enabling Manifold to optimally leverage a heterogeneous environment of multiple CPU's and GPU's. One thing that seems to be clear from this presentation is that Manifold over the past two years have been very busy rewriting large parts of their core code to enable the paralellisation of almost all GIS tasks inside Manifold. Particularly interesting is the mention at the end that they are in a position to take advantage of any GPGPU platform (Nvidia and AMD), which implies the adoption of OpenCL by Manifold for their next release.

PostGIS Developments Presentation

If you didn't get a chance to fly down to Sydney to attend the FOSSG4 conference (I certainly didn't!), they now have video casts up of most presentations at http://blip.tv/search?q=fosslc. One I found interesting was a great video cast of the presentation by Paul Ramsey on development progress on PostGIS at the recent FOSSG4.

A great mention as well for Manifold as one of the GIS packages supporting PostGIS in the video by Paul Ramsey, although he alleges to some FUD that Manifold the company spread regarding PostGIS ( at 13:15 in the video, although I don't remember what particular Dimitri postings he was referring too :-)


According to Paul's presentation, PostGreSQL (with PostGIS) certainly seems to be at least equal to other spatially enabled databases in terms of feature completeness, performance and robustness, and its free, making procurement much easier (19:00 min in video). And the new release of PostGIS seems to be all about speed improvements, which is obviously a good thing. A overview of the roadmap ahead for PostGIS promises a lot of things to come...

Now, my interest in PostGIS has only started lately, mostly because I was asked to develop a "Introduction to Spatial Databases" e-learning course. Given the need for students to be able to run the practicals on their home computers, we chose PostGIS and Quantum GIS as the software tools for the tutorials. I must say I have been impressed by the functionality of PostGIS, and it certainly hasn't been a very steep learning curve for me, thanks mostly to my previous Spatial SQL knowledge learned from Manifold's Spatial SQL experience. Although the syntax and some of the commands are slightly different between PostGIS SQL and Manifold Spatial SQL, knowledge of either is really helpful when trying to write queries! Wider issues of optimisation such as spatial indexes though present another level of complexity/power in PostGIS,  which Manifold's internal SQL engine doesn't expose to the user.

"Introduction to GIS & Cartography" Course Dates announced

Just a quick note to say we have finalised dates for the next session of our "Introduction to GIS and Cartography" course using Manifold GIS in February (18th and 19th) 2010 here at UCL.  Please find below the detailed invitation:

The invitation is also available in PDF format with a detailed agenda

The Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering, University College London, will be hosting an Introduction to Geographical Information Systems and Cartography Course on the 18^th and 19^th of February 2010. This course is aimed at novice or potential GIS Users interested in key concepts of geographical data capture, storage and analysis. After course completion participants will be able to generate, manipulate and analyse geographic information confidently and create high-quality cartographic outputs.

The course is organised into modules containing comprehensive overviews of fundamental topics relating to Geographical Information Systems, databases and cartography, alongside hands-on tutorials teaching participants the most important functionalities of GIS.

The course will introduce users to and use Open Street Map (OSM) data and Manifold GIS software. Participants will be tutored by leading GIS lecturers and researchers with extensive GIS expertise in a commercial and academic context.

Participants will receive a comprehensive training manual containing all of the course content such as presentation slides, tutorial worksheets, project files and datasets used. This training manual will act as a valuable reference guide after the course is completed.

Each participant can expect:

• Experienced academic tutors


• A workstation preloaded with all software and data for the tutorials


• State-of-the-art air-conditioned computer room


• Comprehensive course documentation folder


• Course Certificate from UCL on completion


• Lunch and refreshments provided

The course fee is £650 (incl. VAT) per participant. Please note that we have arranged a discount for organisations sending two or more participants. The course will be held on UCL’s main campus in Bloomsbury, Central London.

For booking and any further enquiries, please email Patrick Weber at p.weber@ucl.ac.uk or you can phone +44 (0)20 7679 2745 .