Welcome to LBx!

Why and When Does 'Where' Matter?
By Natasha Léger | Published May 1, 2009

Natasha Léger

Welcome to the launch issue of LBx Journal, a multi-media resource for businesses looking to explore the business potential of location intelligence. We humans are intuitively location–aware, but business thinking and analysis are often stuck in spreadsheets, metrics, and key performance indicators that can undervalue the location dimension. The strategic assumption underlying almost everything that we do as individuals and organizations is directly correlated to where we, something, someone else, or a species is located on the planet.

LBx Journal is designed to help you answer this question: Why and when does “where” matter? We are combining expertise in business consulting, publishing and creativity to address how tapping into the location dimension benefits businesses worldwide. The U.S. and indeed the world are in the midst of the worst financial crisis in history, not because of the sub-prime mortgage meltdown, but because of something much more insidious: the lack of context and long-term thinking as companies cut their way to profitability and

higher stock valuations, and turned to creative financing. For economies to be healthy and strong, value needs to be created. Because the map is the most powerful visualization tool with the ability to integrate volumes of data and still render meaningful pattern recognition, location applications are the best tools for identifying new value, creating opportunities for all kinds of businesses.

In this issue, our contributors discuss the benefits of incorporating location into the research, development, and decision-making processes of businesses. In “The Power of Location Intelligence,” Craig Bachmann discusses the impact of integrating location awareness into sales, mark

eting, supply chain management, and development of partnerships. Kevin Thomas of Intermap discusses in “Making Vehicles Smarter” how 3D terrain models are integrated into product development strategies to design smarter, more fuel-efficient cars and trucks.

In “Visual Intelligence for New Markets,” Ruth Stiver of FortiusOne discusses the power of search and the ease with which marketers, researchers, or anyone else can find location data relevant to their business objectives and then customize their own map presentation. ESRI, the GIS software company, is credited as being the founder of geographic intelligence. Director of their Commercial Business Solutions Division, Simon Thompson discusses the hidden relationships in geographically relevant data that can be exposed using GIS technology.

The Game Changer column by Brady Forrest, Chair of the Where 2.0 Conference, is about innovation and technology. In this issue, he shares how consumer technologies are changing the way enterprises do business. Robert Avila’s On Minding the Store column is a big picture view of the strategic assumptions underlying business trends. In this issue, he discusses why businesses have collectively lost the art of long-term thinking. Finally, the benefits and challenges of location intelligence and applications are highlighted in two extraordinary interviews with key individuals at the world-renowned National Geographic Society and at the second largest cable company in the U.S., Time Warner Cable.

Discover your location dimension,

Natasha Léger, Editor
Natasha@lbxjournal.com

SEE MORE IN THIS CATEGORY:

Scaling Solar-Powered Electricity

A Production and Distribution Perspective

Solar energy from the perspective of efficient allocation of resources from a land, labor, and capital perspective, and looking at the solar energy ecosystem from energy production to distribution to the customer

By Natasha Léger | January 23, 2012 January 23, 2012

Before and After the Storm

Willis Re on Crowdsourcing to Tsunami Zones

Location-aware social networks have a huge potential for enabling people in a community to help themselves during a crisis. Spatial analysis makes crowdsourced data actionable.

By Karen Richardson | January 2, 2012 January 2, 2012

Agility and Innovation

The NGA Turns to Open Source

This article outlines the NGA’s business case for moving towards an open source software technology strategy. The financial, technical, and operational reasons behind their policy change are discussed.

By Mark Lucas | December 27, 2011 December 27, 2011

COLUMNS

Executive Interview

A GIS Visionary

A Meta-Model for Business: Executive Interview with Geoff Osborn

This interview illustrates a next-gen innovative approach to business modeling that leverages GIS and enterprise system assets for improved enterprise search and decision support.

By LBx Staff | January 31, 2012 January 31, 2012

Law, Regulations, and Best Practices of Location Data

Executive Interview with Kevin Pomfret, Esq., Executive Director, Centre for Spatial Law and Policy

We were pleased to speak with Kevin Pomfret of the Centre for Spatial Law and Policy on his perspective of the legal and policy landscape, the burning issues for providers and users of location, and the future of best practices and guidelines.

By LBx Staff | November 9, 2011 November 9, 2011

Scaling Location Data in Australia and New Zealand

The R&D Behind It

Australia and New Zealand have developed a forward thinking public-private partnership incubator for spatial information innovation. It’s called the Cooperative Research Center for Spatial Information (CRCSI). It is a joint venture of . . .

By LBx Staff | August 16, 2011 August 16, 2011

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 Bob Avila | June 30, 2010 June 30, 2010