Category Archives: Articles

Qld Globe, a great way to distribute information

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The Qld Government recently released the Qld ‘Globe’.  It’s a way that the Queensland public can access their mapping data.

When this was released we wanted to quickly add some functionality to the planXchange service.  Surveyors have been using Google Earth for a long time and this would enhance their experience.  Unfortunately, what should have been a few minutes work to extend the KML has proven to be impossible (currently).  KML is an open standard that has some Google extensions. Unfortunately the current implementations extend KML in an undocumented way. I reached out to…

Male Mental Health

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Last week I was fortunate to present at the SSSI Qld Northern Surveyors Group conference. The dinner speaker was Andy Froggatt  who is not from the Surveying industry but from the Health industry. He gave a fantastic presentation on depression in the workplace. It was really challenging to listen to as there wasn’t a single person in the room who didn’t resonate with one of his many statistics or stories.

My first small step towards change is getting involved for the first time in Movember. Raising money and more importantly awareness of Men’s health issues. For more information…

To delete or not to delete

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Leigh Jasper (Co-founder and CEO of Aconex) has written an interesting article discussing the perils of deleting records from collaboration based systems.  Leigh talks about the integrity of the system.  If you cannot be sure that a document in a control system will still exist at some point in the future, then that is a risk legally but also for business value.

I believe the same is true from a spatial and communication point of view.  For example, if a user can delete a ‘well’ entity from a gas field, and it just vanishes from…

Communicating “Where am I?”

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I love seeing new ways of displaying location. Yesterday I visited a local menswear shop, Apartment in Brisbane. They had recently moved and had a “we’ve moved” card. Here is the map they provided showing their new address. Great design from Zero Hour & Co

The proliferation of websites using Google Maps on their “contact us” page means we don’t get more innovation on location display like this from Graphic Designers.

Cloud computing – a shot in the arm

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I came across an article which discusses how ‘cloud computing’ may be one facet of how the global economy may be able to kick-start itself.

“Economists and pundits have long feared the emergence of what they called “hollow corporations,” or businesses that don’t actually produce actual goods or services themselves, but instead act as brokers or intermediaries relying on networks of suppliers and partners. But now, thanks to technology, successful businesses surprisingly are often brokers of services, delivered via technology, from providers and on to consumers. Where are these services coming from?  Look to the cloud.”

Interestingly, it goes…

What’s the next disruptive idea for collaboration?

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Paul Wilkinson wrote an article on his blog recently entitled ‘What’s the next disruptive idea for collaboration’.  Paul’s blog is normally focused around collaboration for the construction industry, but it made me think about collaboration more generally.  Below is my reply I posted on Paul’s blog.

Paul, your blog post made me think about the convergence of a number of collaboration technologies that I believe is happening – particularly in the SaaS/Cloud space.

SaaS/Cloud solutions are either established or gaining traction for many specific tasks. For example, the delivery of Document Management (there are many), maps (Google Maps)…

Making your device work harder than their server

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With the release of Version 5 of Google Maps on Android the processing has moved away from web servers and onto mobile devices by becoming a vector application. Up until this release, all versions of Google Maps, on phones or desktops, were based on the client requesting raster tiles from the server whenever you zoomed or panned across the map. This article takes a detailed look at these features from a Digital Cartography perspective. It is also interesting for people who are looking at the benefits of getting devices to do more of the heavy lifting.

Map Tiles are created…

Collaboration in the workplace

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Collaboration in the workplace has changed tremendously and is still evolving at a rapid pace.

Thousands of years ago people communicated face-to-face and by drawing on cave-walls. Over the years there has been a progression to letters, memos, telephone calls, telex, faxes and during the last +/-20 years email and applications on mobile devices (including SMS and MSN Messenger).

A lot of business people are now also using newer technologies to collaborate.  For example, public access solutions such as Facebook, Twitter, Skype and LinkedIn allow for communication between people.  There are also similar ‘enterprise social network’ solutions for corporate…

Cloud, SaaS, etc

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Introduction

When talking to people about ‘The Cloud’ and ‘SaaS’ I have found that the terms are often either not fully understood, or used interchangeably (me included !), or both. There are also a few associated terms that are used as well. So I thought a discussion of this space would be useful.

So what is ‘The Cloud’?

‘The Cloud’ as defined by Wikipedia is: “the provision of computational resources on demand via a computer network. Historically, the term ‘The Cloud’ is used as a metaphor for the Internet.

Cloud computing can be compared to the supply of electricity and…