My definition is that geo-enlightenment is understanding the interconnectedness of things.
— Jack Dangermond
The world that you and I live in is increasingly challenged. Population growth, pollution, over-consumption, unsustainable patterns, social conflict, climate change, loss of nature... these are not good stories.
Web GIS provides us with a whole new window into our information through applications that are easy, 3D, and analytic. These applications are not just casual things, but reach deep into geographic knowledge and apply it.
Because we're in a small town and somewhat isolated from the fast lane of high tech, we've been able to grow and concentrate on our work instead of being distracted by the competition and getting caught up in the soap opera of Silicon Valley.
ArcGIS Online is the complete hosted GIS in the cloud, supporting mapping and apps. Additions to this component have included smart mapping, formal metadata, better administration, and high-performance geocoding.
One of the things that's making ArcGIS come alive is apps. Apps are opening up the ArcGIS platform, making it available to everybody in your organization as well as to the public.
We have a rich and vibrant partner ecosystem with several thousand formal business partners. Some of them are very large companies that we collaborate with in many ways.
Our intention and aspiration is to continue building out thematic information about every subject - basemaps, imagery, demographics, landscape data, etc. - so anyone can use it to access thousands of authoritative maps.
Our world is evolving without consideration, and the result is a loss of biodiversity, energy issues, congestion in cities. But geography, if used correctly, can be used to redesign sustainable and more livable cities.
You have to be very fast-thinking, creative, and mobile. It is key to making a business move.
We are driven by providing technology to enterprise customers.
I am hunting for people who would be a good colleague or a teammate, not someone who works for me.
I am not that good a manager for me to be comfortable borrowing someone else's money.
A location-aware tablet will let us use what's called geodesign to compose participatory, what-if scenarios onsite, using maps that several people can share - something we could always do with paper but that's been a challenge with digital maps in the field.
GIS is the only technology that actually integrates many different subjects using geography as its common framework.
I don't understand why young entrepreneurs feel this pressure to take venture capital or go public. Don't get me wrong: Public companies are A-OK with me. I just think there is another way. Staying private is a lot more sane.
My parents were immigrants who started a nursery as a way to get us kids through school. I learned around the dinner table about customer service and cash flow and paying bills.
GIS is waking up the world to the power of geography, this science of integration, and has the framework for creating a better future.
A number of organizations are already using Web GIS to create shared information and facilitate collaboration, and it is literally changing the way organizations operate.
GIS is being influenced by and integrating with all kinds of new innovations such as faster computing, big data, the cloud, smart devices, and distributed processing.
I think it is widely agreed that Carl Steinitz, over the 50 years he taught at Harvard, has been one of the most important figures in influencing the theory and practice of landscape architecture and the application of computer technology to planning.
AppStudio is a native app builder that allows you to build the app and automatically deploy it on Android, iPhone, and Windows. It lets you design it once and then implement it anywhere.
As we continue advancing and leveraging GIS and as we keep bringing in new generations of technology as well as new generations of people, my sense is we're going to achieve extraordinary things.
As an organization, Esri is strong, and we're continuing to grow. We're dedicated to this. And we're excited to see what you can accomplish and to watch your work evolve.
ArcGIS includes a Living Atlas of the World. It's like a large living library of geographic information.
Someone once told me be interested, not interesting - that really clicked for me.
At Harvard, I worked for some time as a researcher in a lab for computer graphics and spatial analysis, which is one of the birthplaces for what we do.
Cartography and geographic thinking are cool.
When I got into college, I found what ultimately became my life's work. I couldn't sleep at night, I was so excited about it. So I'm attracted to people who play at that level. They actually want to play in their professional life.
We tell stories with maps about global warming, biodiversity; we can design more livable cities, track the spread of epidemics. That makes a difference.
Planning a garden, park, building, or city shouldn't be done in an office.
Once you digitize data, you can actually analyze patterns and relationships in geographic space - relationships between certain health patterns and air or water pollution, between plants and climate, soils, landscape.
One thing that has made us so successful is that we've never taken outside investment. That means we can concentrate on what our customers want - not what the stockholders or the VCs want.
One city can look at other cities relative to their city and learn something. It's a matter of sharing the patterns of what exists in one society based on landscape or cultural values versus other cities.
GIS, in its digital manifestation of geography, goes beyond just the science. It provides us a framework and a process for applying geography. It brings together observational science and measurement and integrates it with modeling and prediction, analysis, and interpretation so that we can understand things.
Web GIS allows us to take our systems of record - our traditional server and desktop technologies - and integrate them, bringing them together into a system of systems.
We have millions of users around the globe who do amazing things with our technology every day.
During that year at Harvard learning with Carl Steinitz, I had the feeling that I was drinking knowledge out of a fire hose. I learned more in that year than I had learned in the previous ten years of my education.
In the area of field apps, Collector for ArcGIS is great, but where do you go? There's a navigator app. And then what do you do when you get there? There's a workforce app. So all of these apps work hand-in-hand to support field workers.
We support about 5,000 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) with software, training, and technical support. We provide our software at virtually no cost to them, and they're lighting up the world with what they do.
Mapping and visualization is a huge area of work and is of interest to many people. We're working on reinventing a new kind of 3D cartography to make it easier to tell stories with 3D maps.
ArcGIS is an integrated Web GIS that is supported by services. These are abstracted in a geoinformation model that's managed by the portal, and then accessible by a number of apps, which are the growing part of this system.
I want to have all that scientific information that we're building be used in designing the future so that people who make geographic decisions - and here it's not just land-use planners, but it's everyone: foresters, transportation engineers, people who buy a house - can analyze all of these information layers and design a future.
Google has been an amazing benefit for our business. People understand the whole world of mapping and want to do more than not get lost. They want to do spatial analytics. It's been fantastic for us.
I prefer to find craftspeople I can be colleagues with and who take an area of responsibility and run with it.
You have to decide who you are going to serve - stockholders or your customers.
Something like 80 per cent of business decisions have a location element. In fact, it's probably higher than that.
I can put tweets on a map to show who is saying what where, which could be used for marketing or social research.
GIS started on mainframe computers; we could get one map every five to 10 hours, and if we made a mistake, it could take longer. In the early '90s, when people started buying PCs, we migrated to desktop software.
I went on to Harvard and got very interested in computers and studying the earth's landscape.
