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True Globalization at Last

To understand true globalization’s playing field, businesses must learn a new way of looking at the map. National borders filled in with different colors are not just irrelevant, they are distracting, as are pins in cities. Instead, companies need to see the world’s urban centers and to understand their nature at a glance.

By Robert Avila | September 15, 2009 September 15, 2009

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Product Review: Find Spot

Spotlite 2.O Pet GPS Locator

SecurusGPS released their advanced pet locator Spotlite 2.0 in early March 2013. I had the privilege of trying out this nifty gadget. It is designed to be worn by a 10 pound or greater sized dog. I don’t have a dog, so I did the next best thing. I used it to track my car and to track my partner’s suitcase (with his permission of course) as he traveled from Colorado to the East Coast. Let’s call them both Spot.

By Natasha Léger | April 22, 2013 April 22, 2013

Scaling Map Wizardry

To 100 million Microsoft Office 2013 Users

Marketing, operations, and business managers have been asking their IT departments for several years now for ways to see data on a map. IT and GIS (or IT and geo applications) have not mixed well as departments or as integrated priorities. This difficulty left many managers and departments to seek other solutions or to engage in skunk works projects with a variety of available technologies, including free and open source applications. These work-arounds to productivity have had both their successes and challenges. Microsoft has come to the rescue...

By Natasha Léger | April 18, 2013 April 18, 2013

Underground Assets

Streamlining the Call-Before-You-Dig Process

Designers of large projects, such as a highway expansion, a new shopping mall, a sewer or water lineupgrade project, or a gas line replacement, are often presented with unique challenges – including those that lie beneath the earth’s surface. Although not seen from a casual, above-ground glance, there is a world of assets and critical infrastructure that exist underground. When new projects are in the early phases of development, it is vital...

By Bill Kiger | April 17, 2013 April 17, 2013

COLUMNS

Executive Interview

Bringing More Attention to the Location Profession

Past, Present, and Future

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.

By Natasha Léger | March 8, 2013 March 8, 2013

Scaling Enterprise GIS

A Retail Perspective

Jillian Elder is not your average GIS Manager. Jillian sees GIS as another tool in a broader information toolbox that helps to solve a problem. As her team sits within the Market Planning and Research Group of Walgreens that reports to the CFO, she is charged with finding and accessing the best data from across the organization to answer particular questions. This interview discusses the challenges encountered in implementing an enterprise-wide location information strategy.

By LBx Staff | January 29, 2013 January 29, 2013

The Case for Tracking

Assets, People, and Pets

Securus, Inc. is a mobile safety and security products and services company that is taking machine-to-machine (M2M) hardware and software solutions to a new level. They have built an M2M software platform that enables a user to track any asset, person, or pet. The convergence of more efficient hardware, improved mobile connectivity, and other sensor technology innovations are redefining the possibilities and affordability of the location tracking market. We spoke with Chris Newton, President and CEO of Securus, Inc., about the market drivers for assets, people, and pet tracking.

By LBx Staff | January 9, 2013 January 9, 2013

Game Changer

Humans As Sensors

Adding the Time Dimension

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.

By Brady Forrest | January 13, 2010 January 13, 2010

Back Behind the Firewall

Net Technologies Move From Consumer to Enterprise

About five years ago, the group I worked for at Microsoft looked at what was happening in the blogosphere and decided to bring it in-house. We saw that the conversations needed a

By Brady Forrest, O'Reilly | May 25, 2009 May 25, 2009

On Minding The Store

Think Locally, Act Globally

It’s the Customer, Stupid!

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.

By Robert Avila | August 3, 2011 August 3, 2011

Corporate Evolution

Are corporations prepared to go where their policies are taking them?

Corporations have been pursuing an implicit model that has shed much of the internal political, social and cultural qualities that characterized past corporations and have transformed themselves more and more into purely economic institutions. As this model has advanced, corporate loyalty, a largely political concept, has been replaced by the formal or “at will” employment contract, a purely economic arrangement.

By Robert Avila, Managing Director, Future Crunch | June 14, 2011 June 14, 2011

The Rebirth of Brand Management

It’s Not the Lead; It’s the Customer Experience that Matters

Brand is the social contract of business, the implicit agreement between the parties in a transaction about the nature of their long-term relationship. One is tempted to quote Hobbs to the effect that economic life devoid of brands tends to be “solitary, poor, nasty brutish and short,” a description eerily evocative of today’s commercial environment. As with political theory, when discussing brand it is easy to slip into morality tales. The recent collapse of the Tiger Woods and Toyota brands calls up images from Greek tragedy with choruses of talking heads lamenting their fall from greatness.

By Robert Avila | June 30, 2010 June 30, 2010