Location Intelligence Articles

Features

Broken Promises of Privacy

Lessons for Location Privacy

Computer scientists have recently undermined our faith in the privacy- protecting power of anonymization, the name for techniques that protect the privacy of individuals in large databases by deleting information like names and social security numbers.

By LBx Staff | July 11, 2012 July 11, 2012

Location Intelligence for Enterprise 2012:

Priorities and Use Cases

The 2nd annual Location Intelligence for Enterprise Conference confirmed that the use of location information, technologies and solutions is indeed a competitive advantage for companies. Jones Lang LaSalle, FedEx, Walgreens, Walmart, and Thomson Reuters, to name just a few, spent 2 days discussing how location intelligence is mission-critical to...

By Natasha Léger | June 20, 2012 June 20, 2012

Location Data Privacy

The Elephant in the Room

When it comes to privacy, there are basically two ends of the spectrum: Those who are in the “sharing culture” who act and behave in a very open manner, and those who feel privacy is a “protected right” and find any intrusion to be offensive. But, privacy is more complicated than that.

By The Location Forum | May 11, 2012 May 11, 2012

Marketing is Place-based Skill

The Experience Associated with "Place" Still Determines Consumer Buying Patterns

Location is everywhere, but the authors remind us of the importance that “place” plays in connecting people with products and services. To the authors, “place” has multiple meanings, because it is associated with the mental maps that people create about various experiences. The primary strands of place include: psychological place, physical place, virtual place, geographic place, and global place.

By LBx Staff | May 30, 2012 May 30, 2012

Satellite Imagery Trivia

Location SmartBrief Poll Results

We randomly polled Location SmartBrief readers in a series of poll questions over a 6-week period to get a sense for what people think relative to satellite imagery. Here's what they said...

By LBx Staff | June 19, 2012 June 19, 2012

Processing Pixels: Revving up GPUs

Subtitle: DigitalGlobe and NVIDIA on the Quiet Revolution

Geospatial technologies, and therefore geospatial solutions (especially those dealing with large imagery files) have always been burdened by high computing challenges. These challenges have translated into latency issues. Over the last several years, DigitalGlobe has invested in GPU technology to accelerate speed to market in delivering imagery products and services.

By LBx Staff | May 23, 2012 May 23, 2012

Where 2012: Data, Sensing, and Applications

The CES of Location

The Where Conference (formerly Where 2.0) has certainly evolved since its inception eight years ago. While still very much a developer conference with a focus on the innovations in location aware applications, itís starting to feel more like a trade show and thatís a good thing for sponsors. The Esri, Google, and Nokia booths towered...

By Natasha Léger | May 9, 2012 May 9, 2012

The Fate of U.S. Commercial Satellite Imagery

Why You Should Care

Satellite imagery was something that the general public did not have access to before 2005. People caught glimpses of the stories satellite imagery could tell only from documentaries produced from the likes of Nova and National Geographic. Google Earth changed all that June 2005 and …

By LBx Staff | April 11, 2012, 10:19pm April 11, 2012, 10:19pm

Environmental Science Sensors Are Watching

Open Standards for Sustainability

This article outlines the OGC standards that support public and private sector efforts in measuring, monitoring and managing the human impacts on our planet, and how those standards are used to collect and distribute water, oceanographic, geological, and hazardous chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear explosive information.

By Steven Ramage | February 19, 2012 February 19, 2012

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

Who is looking out for your location data privacy?

The Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) recently released a report rating technology companies’ stewardship of users’ personal data. Twitter and Sonic Inc. received high marks while Verizon, AT&T and Apple received low or no marks. The EFF looked at six privacy best practices categories which include:

By Natasha Léger | May 21, 2013 May 21, 2013

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

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