Introducing Spatial North
It’s official. I’ve started a company. It’s called Spatial North.
At present we’re focusing on providing products and development services for interactive mapping and collaborative web applications. Spatial North will manage and maintain Quikmaps, which has just a drawing library to enable interactive map editing on 3rd party web applications (post to follow).
Check out the new website, and, better yet, contact us for business opportunities.
Dave Starr said,
February 21, 2007 @ 4:40 pm
Nice to make your acquaintance, Ken. I found your blog via Tim Hibbard’s recent mention in his blog.
I’m particularly excited by your business plans, I hope you can find a way to make the vision translate to enough dollars to make it work well.
Interesting that in your “About” section you would call your education “justification” for your vocation. Based on that, I’d be justified in looking no farther than a door greeter at Wal*Mart … I have very little formal education in Geography, GIS, GPS or software development, but I’ve worked in the field since Dangermond was first porting product to DOS, and I was with the GPS program, on the communications side since there was one operational bird on orbit. I’ve spent a couple million (of the government’s money) on GIS and I’ve even made a few bucks since I went on my own, as well.
In all those years no one has ever done much to integrate users into the process …. submit your requirements and we’ll submit our deliverable …. they seldom match well … indeed in recent years the GIS segment of the business has disappointed me by focusing everything on the “certified professional”, putting big “common folk can’t come here” billboards wherever possible. Google and Yahoo have done absolute wonders in the past few years and interfaces to connect with these tools that don’t involve finding street directions or yet another StarBucks locator are certainly needed. best of luck and keep me in the loop when you roll anything out/take on an interesting gig, I’ll write about it.
ken said,
February 21, 2007 @ 11:38 pm
Thanks Dave, glad to have your support!
Agreed, the GIS community has in many ways tended toward “featuritis” and “certified” professionals. Certainly its historically academic nature plays a part in this (PhD-types are trained to be particular and hence tend to see importance in every angle), as well as its commercial domination by one player. However, I would argue that only recently has browser technology reached the point of supporting usable, fast, sexy GIS tools, and as such, GIS has until recently been limited to highly-focussed, usually heavily-featured, desktop applications. The web opens an entire world of opportunity.
In defense of academic credentials, I’d say my degree listing is in support not of a chosen vocation, but of my self-description. There is a difference - vocation must be supported by a community of colleagues, while a self-description carries very little weight if you question my self-awareness…