Latest Contributions by Katie_Decker

Over the past 25 years, the annual Esri GeoConX Conference has become the largest annual geospatial event in the electric, gas and telecommunications industries. At the event, professionals and Esri users from both industries converge to network, collaborate, and learn as a larger, unified community. This year the conference occurs in Chicago, from September 5-8 th .    The Esri Startup Zone at GeoConX features five Esri Emerging Partners that introduce innovative GIS solutions for electric and gas utility challenges. Learn more about them here: http://bit.ly/geoconx17 , and be sure to make time to visit these companies!  Learn more about GeoConX: esri.com/geoconx.  ... View more

Congratulations to Esri Startup Partner, Quantum Systems (www.quantum-systems.com) who won the final of the Munich Business Plan Competition! Quantum is also an ESA's Business Incubation Centre Bavaria graduate. The Munich based startup develops unique UAV systems which are intended for high efficiency and flexible integration of sensors. In a nutshell: Quantum-Systems UAVs – the Quantum TRON – take off and land like a helicopter and glide efficiently like an airplane. The startup speaks of the so called transition flight – combining the long range and efficiency of its wings when flying with the ability to take off and land without additional equipment (such as a catapult for take-off or a net for landing). Learn more about the competition, Quantum and ESA BIC here: http://bit.ly/2vbxbbP  ... View more

A midsize utility in New Jersey has made the leap to adopt a cutting-edge mixed reality (MR) holographic application while blazing a path for other industries and businesses to follow. Toms River Municipal Utilities Authority (TRMUA) may just be the first utility in the world to use mixed reality headsets to guide fieldworkers in locating underground #utilities‌. This technological leap brings utilities and other companies with underground assets closer to realizing an age-old wish: to see through dirt. The mixed reality solution is helping field technicians in Toms River close service tickets more quickly and avoid costly repairs. At its most basic, the Toms River system takes three well-established technologies and combines them into one brand-new application. All three are commercially available—Esri’s #ArcGIS Platform, which stores location and attribute information on TRMUA’s underground assets; Microsoft’s #Azure cloud-computing service; and @Microsoft’s #HoloLens. The three were integrated and customized by #Meemim a Toronto-based company and #esri startup program Partner, founded by Alec Pestov, who previously managed several startups. Learn more: http://arcg.is/2uQSZtq ... View more

Neil Johnston, director of product design at Echosec Systems Ltd., also an Esri Emerging Partner, created an interactive map that shows fires, evacuation orders and alerts, highway closures and crowdsourced tweets all together to help BC residents evacuate safely. Learn more, http://bit.ly/2uvWMLq, or listen to his interview on CKNW, http://bit.ly/2vw2f2q. ... View more

Case Study: Powering Next Generation Economic Development: Move to the Top of the Short List by Michael Cleary, Chief Operating Officer, GIS WebTech, http://arcg.is/2ub3T8I   For economic development organizations (EDOs), getting on the short list is paramount. It is the opportunity to attract investments, create jobs, increase tax revenue, and improve the quality of living. Learn how Esri and Emerging Partner GIS WebTech supported Corpus Christi Regional Economic Development Corporation (CCREDC) in moving to the top of the short list. CCREDC a private/public nonprofit organization responsible for creating, managing, and supervising programs and activities that promote, assist, and enhance economic development within the city of Corpus Christi. ... View more

BREAKING: SSP Innovations, LLC announces acquisition of Paleon Solutions, Inc. The acquisition brings Smart Grid technology and executive leadership to SSP. Read the details about what this acquisition means for utility GIS: http://bit.ly/2rKDdPi ... View more

On June 7, Esri Sweden, CEO, Lars Backhans talked GIS and startups with our friend Tyler Crowley, organizer of STHLM TECH MEETUP, Europe's largest monthly event for startups. #STHLMTECH understands that collaboration between key players in the tech ecosystem is critical… but in order to make the magic happen… startups should look towards larger agencies and companies to build their success. Lar’s explained since 1969, Esri, the global market leader in geographic information systems (GIS), has pioneer problem solving through the use of powerful mapping and spatial analytics technology. Our company supports a free, 3 year Esri Startup Program, providing enterprise focused emerging businesses with the software and online services, support and training, and co-marketing to build effective and creative GIS solutions that support complex business problems. We love our startups because they’re interesting, challenging, and inspiring positive change in industry and society, and that is who we are. Today, Esri software is deployed in more than 350,000 organizations including the world’s largest cities, most national governments, 75% of the Fortune 500, and more than 7,000 colleges and universities. Esri engineers the most advanced solutions for digital transformation, IoT, and location analytics to create the maps that run the world. Learn more about us, www.esri.com, or register for the next meetup, www.meetup.com/STHLM-Tech-Meetup. ... View more

Recently, Esri participated at the TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2017 Hackathon, May 13-14, and Conference, May 15-17, in New York, NY. #TCdisrupt debuts revolutionary startups, introduces game-changing technologies, and discusses what’s top of mind for the tech industry’s key innovators. The hackathon occurs the weekend before the Disrupt conference. Over 750 developers from all over took part in a 24-hour coding test of endurance. At the hackathon we provided free ArcGIS Developer Subscriptions and credits to developers creating apps that included mapping, visualization, analysis, imagery, authoritative data and more. Hackers could build web, mobile, and desktop apps for any device. The lucky Esri prize winner received a $5,000 prize ($2,500 cash, plus $2,500 ArcGIS Online subscription).  Congratulations to our winner SafePath! While we could only pick one winner, we had a few other honorable mentions we wanted to share. You can view all the submissions here. Learn more about our winner and other Esri submissions below: SafePath SafePath is an Android app built by four students from Rutgers University. This project won the Esri $5,000 prize for the best integration of Esri technology in a hack. SafePath is a mobile app that notifies you when you enter a geofence designated as a recent area of hostile activity and offers you a safe route to a safe zone. The app used the ArcGIS Runtime SDK for Android together with the PubNub block we provided for geofence notification. The team utilized the night streets vector base map and added features to visualize where hostile activity was taking place and where the safe zones were located. Hostile data was aggregated from several sources including crowdsourcing and social media and then added to a hosted feature service. When the device entered a hostile polygon, or recent activity indicates the device is now inside the hostile geofence, the app sends a SMS message using PubNub to contacts registered with the app. Then it invokes Esri’s routing task to determine a route to the nearest safe zone and visualize that route on the map. The team was eager to continue working on SafePath after the hackathon and experimenting with other Esri technology. They plan to update the visual rendering with a heatmap and improve the real-time collection of data. Congratulations to our TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2017 winners! BackMap These developers found that 17,000 pedestrians were injured in the past year and wanted to create a system to help pedestrians, the visually impaired, and cyclists navigate through streets and buildings without ever pulling out their phone to distract them. BackMap is a system that includes a backpack with a vibration motor in the right and left strap of the backpack, an application to input navigation data, and a set of BLE beacons. This allows us to create two different navigation scenarios, one indoors and one outdoors. For the outdoors scenario, the user inputs a location, and the backpack leads you to that location by vibrating the right strap whenever you should turn right, and vibrate the left whenever you should turn left. This helps the visually impaired, pedestrians, and bikers navigate busy streets, along with anyone not able to constantly monitor their phone. This navigation and routing is performed using the Esri directions PubNub block. The project was built with Esri ArcGIS API for JavaScript, PubNub, ArcGIS Runtime SDK for Android, with geocoding, routing, and mapping services. Learn more in this TechCrunch feature. Wheelable Wheelable was inspired by personal experiences with accessibility. Wheelable is a web service that helps identify venues that have accessible facilities such as elevators, ramps, escalators, and others. Wheelable allows its user to review a location when it is not accessible for users with mobility disabilities to improve their experience organizing trips. The project was built with Esri ArcGIS API for JavaScript, PubNub, Node, Express, Handlebars, and MongoDB. Congratulations to the winners and other hacks! Supporting a hackathon requires a lot of energy, focus, and time, but is incredibly rewarding. Seeing eyes light up as people start to see what our GIS tools can do for them makes our work worthwhile, and at each hackathon we support, we see the work that’s been leveraged from developers.arcgis.com really paying off with teams integrating more advanced geo development than they had previously. Many thanks to the awesome team at TechCrunch, and especially to all the hackathon contestants and Disrupt attendees who chose to learn more about Esri and ArcGIS. We look forward to participating in TechCrunch Disrupt SF in September and hope to see you there. ... View more

Brady Hustad, President, Argis Solutions expands on Augmented Reality (AR) and the importance of data and GIS to preform analytics, visualizations, and better understand our world. View on YouTube: http://bit.ly/2qXbdpI . ... View more

Announcing AntrisPro+: New Workplace Efficiency Tool Reduces Administration & Supports Employee Safety, http://p.ctx.ly/r/4bqn. Responding to a shift in workplace culture as an increasing number of employees work alone or remotely, AntrisPro+ combines the latest in GIS tracking technology and geo-fencing, with Antris' signature time-interval check-ins to enable organizations to save time and reduce costs while improving team safety and workflow. Antris is a Esri Startup Program member and Emerging Business Partner. AntrisPro+ is fully integrated with Esri’s ArcGIS platform, supporting ArcGIS Identities (Named User Logins), and route optimization on both web and mobile platforms for users. Navigator for ArcGIS integrates with mobile apps to provide driving directions. Armed with Esri's powerful integration of geography and analytics, AntrisPRO+ will be able to reveal deeper insights into location data, enabling customers to make better-informed decisions about keeping employees safe and optimizing resources. Learn more: http://p.ctx.ly/r/4bqn Partner Listing ArcGIS Marketplace AntrisPRO App ... View more

Esri Teams with IBM to Offer Cutting-Edge Spatial Analytics to Developers in IBM Bluemix Cloud. IBM's New Cloud Environment Opens a World of Tools to Leverage Location Strategies for App Builders. Learn more: http://bit.ly/2nvKO1d. ... View more

Learn how to build geospatial apps through three foundational phases: Data, Design, & Develop. You can develop an app in 15 minutes, get started today: http://arcg.is/2nK4qeK ... View more

Improved performance, design and availability—the new Mapillary for ArcGIS Online app is now on the ArcGIS Marketplace. Learn more: http://bit.ly/2knqb5J ... View more

Add an Esri Vector Basemap to Your App: By DCarroll-esristaff: The Esri Startup Program hosted a technical webinar, Tuesday, August 23rd, 2016 titled, Harness the Power of Vector Basemaps with Esri, offering emerging partners a chance to learn about how to boost the visual experience in their apps with Esri Vector basemaps and layers. Doug Carroll from Esri discussed the different vector basemap offerings, the global coverage, how to customize the style of your basemaps and how to develop with this awesome content. Guest speaker, Todd Berry, CTO of Snaptrends, an Esri partner and successful small business will elaborate on why they chose to implement Esri Vector Basemaps in their product offering. View the recording here: attendee.gotowebinar.com/recording/8277590103654127106. View the slides here. Why Use Vector Tiles? As technology continues to evolve it’s important to consider when implementing new product improvements or features is truly a good fit. This is something Todd Berry, CTO of Snaptrends did immediately after Esri released vector basemap services. Developers like Todd are now exposed to dozens of layer types such as feature layers, vector tile layers, hosted tiled layers and visual objects like Web Maps and Web Scenes. With so many different types, important decisions need to be made.  To help developers make the right decision, the Esri Startup Team decided to draw special attention to vector maps (aka vector tile services) because we think they’re an invaluable asset to create an impressive visual experience. To recap the webinar, we’ve outlined some important details to evaluate, starting with asking when it’s right to implement vector mapping: Consider vector maps when the following requirements need to be met: When building mobile apps on high resolution devices When GPU's can be taken advantage of (but watch out for IE support) When showing thousands of features at once When you have a workflow for onboarding new data and recreating vector tile caches When should you not consider using vector maps? When your app requires editing, as there are no editing capabilities currently available on vector tiles. For editing use feature layers. When your app needs to display real-time data. For real-time data, consider stream layers or setting a refresh interval on a feature layer. For most imagery content. Imagery is best served out as image service layers because there are loads of capabilities on Images Services to work with images. Now if you’re feeling a little lost thinking about vector maps, that’s ok. Let us explain what vector maps are. If you think textbook you may be thinking vector maps are discrete data projected into a geographic space. That is true, but it leaves out how vector layers are implemented inside web, mobile and desktop clients. The fundamental difference between vector maps (as in vector tile layers) and the variety of other forms of vector layers is in how rendering and data parsing is implemented– aka it’s the code behind that makes vector tile layers different from feature layers, KML, GeoJSON, etc. What are vector maps? Vector tiles (aka vector maps) are a special layer type that taps into a system’s GPU for rendering. Vector layers make it possible to stylize and show discrete data. Vector layers transfer data in the form protobuf (protocol buffers tile format) which like raster png and jpg tiles is very performant (but when the client receives the file – the file is a much higher in resolution). Vector tiles can come from a single data source (a single shapefile or feature class) or can be made from many data sources. What is the difference between Esri vector basemaps and vector maps? Functionally both are the same layer type.  The difference is content. Esri Vector Basemaps are a set of highly curated, high quality production basemaps for people to use how they see fit. There are a set of 9 tile layers and 9 web maps of our basemaps found here. What makes Esri vector basemaps special? Big visual impact, it's like high definition mapping. Impressive labels that rotate. Vector layers in many ways merge together the best qualities of tile mapping and JSON based mapping. Clients can draw and stylize millions of features instantly, without creating enormous tile caches. Vector maps can be stylized, using simple styling code or by using apps like ArcGIS Pro as well as other open source projects like the arcgis-vectortile-style-editor or Vector Style JSON Editor (beta). Vector maps are standards-based and interoperable. Unlike other layer types, when implemented they make use of system Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) which accelerate rendering. Content gets painted on the fly vs assembled together in a series of images. Noteworthy: GPU access is now becoming cross platform. On devices (OpenGL) In browsers (WebGL) On desktop machines (DirectX, OpenGL) Even in virtualized systems (vGPU) Vector tiles will not display messages to users saying they have exceeded the number of features they can view/draw. How can I create my own vector tile data using feature classes and shapefiles? Tile creation in ArcGIS Pro 1.2 Publish tile layers in ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Server/Portal 10.4 Tile consumption ArcGIS Runtime Quartz – Beta 2 ArcGIS JavaScript 3.15+ and 4.0 APIs ArcGIS Pro 1.3 needed for packing tiles for offline vector tile implementations With these details now listed out, we hope the process for choosing vector maps over other layer types becomes a bit easier. Keep monitoring the Esri blog series supporting vector basemaps, blogs.esri.com/esri/arcgis/tag/vector-basemap. Lastly, please do check out our Vector Basemap gallery, arcgis.com/home/group.html?id=30de8da907d240a0bccd5ad3ff25ef4a. All the vector basemaps there are ready for use and can be plugged into existing Web Maps or put into a custom application.  Happy mapping! ... View more