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.

Hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards, earthquakes, floods and terrorism – the catastrophic disasters that remind us of the fragility of life and the uncertainty of investments in the future are subject to sophisticated risk modeling. Risk management is both an actuarial and a spatial problem, and the ability to diversify risk is critical to a healthy insurance industry.

The last few months have been quite exciting, since we launched our premiere issue and website of LBx Journal this past spring. I attended a number of conferences over the summer and fall, including the ESRI User Conference (Business GIS Summit), GeoWeb, Cable Broadband GIS Summit, Location Intelligence, CTAM Summit (cable marketing conference), Enterprise 2.0 and the Web 2.0 Expo.