MINDY BROWN, President of Bruun Consulting shares the past, present and future of location and GIS. She was one of the early pioneers of the geospatial industry and watched it ebb and flow over the last thirty years. As such she has a unique perspective on how the location professional has evolved over the years.

As Di-ann is driving around the Bay Area she uses Waze (http://waze.com) to find her way. From Waze she gets routing, traffic and road closure information. In exchange, Waze tracks her location and knows her ultimate destination. It knows that she is going slower than expected on Highway 101 and that she is probably in traffic.

There was a time, not too long ago, when “global” was a concept, but hardly a reality. As a corporation pushed its horizons beyond the relatively homogeneous local market, it encountered increased diversity and complexity, strange customs and even stranger legal environments. There were no global markets, no truly global products and few global brands. Corporations at best were multinational, jerry-built conglomerates of local institutions, each catering to relatively homogeneous local markets, each differing from the next.