Latest Contributions by SimonThompson

I’ve had a chance to review many of the post Business Summit interview and was struck by the comments of Jon Voorhees from Bank of America; one of our biggest and brightest financial services clients. He said “While we may be ahead of most of our competitors, we are so far behind where the technology can provide for us today. And we've got to catch up, because someone's going to pass us in their ability to think better; have better insight; and therefore make better, faster decisions.” Two things stand out for me about technology, location analytics and business: Any organization is only as good as its ability to apply the business value it gets from technology and You need to continually evaluate how you make decisions and challenge the status quo.  We’re all accustomed to new feature and changes in software and companies invest in training to learn those features but it strikes me that not enough companies realize that they need to evolve their business thinking too.  As @PhilSimon points out  “In the Age of the Platform, complacency is just about the worst mistake you can make. If you don't cannibalize your own business, your competition will.” And that’s the crux, technology will only take you so far. It’s people that matter and how they think. How you empower them to take the company in new directions, to apply novel ideas and use technology in more intelligent smarter ways – that’s what keeps your business fresh and competitive. Esri continues to make our software easier to produce powerful, insightful visualizations and analytics and that’s arming people with new skills and opportunities to apply location analytics to get ahead and keep ahead. ... View more

As we head into the Fourth of July weekend, the US has risk mapping issues on both coasts. In the West California is going to speed up its quake fault mapping program based on increasing transparency and scrutiny partly led by the Los Angeles Times which has an excellent report here California acts to speed up quake fault mapping - Los Angeles Times After a couple of decades in which budgets were cuts and the public’s attention to earthquake risk slipped, this important issue is back on the table for local governments, real estate developers, home owners, schools and the general public. And that’s a good thing. Earthquake faults and other public hazard data are readily available on ArcGIS Online and Esri supports open data initiatives that deliver live, near real-time and historic data for all business sectors and organizations. A subset can be found here: Which  brings me to Tropical Storm Arthur which is threatening East Coast celebrations as I write this. , see a BBC report at http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-28132465 Much of the same data that international news organizations, first responders, planners and local forecasters use is available to ALL Esri users and it comes from authoritative sources too. This is easily integrated into analysis services in ArcGIS Online, desktop or any of the tools, templates and applications that come with Esri’s Location Platform. From supply chain risk analysis to modeling potential losses in insurance, estimating flooding or trying to see if my 4 th July barbeque is going to be rained out, ArcGIS Online is a great starting point. There’s a great many places to start and resources to get you going, So go on take the time to explore ArcGIS Online, you never know what you might find. ... View more

Importing a CSV file with a single point fails with a error message: Failed to publish csv: 24305: The polygon input is not valid because the ring does not have enough distinct points. Each ring of a polygon must contain at least three distinct points. The silverlight plugin will crash too. My file is simply a header row and a single row of attributes. I want to import a simple point into a map to use as a reference and then add different map documents into a mashup. Each reference layer has will have unique information in the pop-ups rather than a common set of attributes. ... View more