Location Intelligent Information Finds You

The astute among you will notice I’ve adapted the latest advertising campaign from Thompson Reuters to suit our industry a little more. But the campaign really did hit home a message, that for leading companies, location intelligent information is business critical. In tough times such as these, those businesses who are going to emerge from the economic haze, location Intelligence is essential. The Reuters advert led me to an earlier campaign they had run – interestingly the first time (April 2008) that Thompson Reuters had ever run an advertising campaign – which equally applies itself to our industry. Indeed, “Location” intelligent Information finds you. The re-emergence of LBS, and the seemingly endless supply of GPS enabled devices, shows location intelligent information really will find you. You can also check out how things like GPS and digital compasses are bringing augmented reality to a location device near you soon here. In the database world, recent indications from Microsoft show that it’s adoption of spatial capability with the SQL Server database is coming on nicely, Open Street Map is being touted as a credible alternative and geospatial cloud computing has probably just edged past Web 2.0 as a buzz word/phrase.

Whether your business is in the public or private sector, you will have a finite amount of information (and less money to acquire more information), so now is the time to exploit that information and make it work harder for you with location bringing a critical dimension.  In understanding your customer, the “who, what, where” questions have never been more relevant. According to some articles, IT spend will rise towards the end of the year, but how they spend, and what they spend on will be interesting.

As the world (sooner or later) drags itself out of the doldrums of this crisis, the IT survivors are beginning to show fruits of innovation and creation (with PBBI no exception) to help you make the most of your organisations greatest asset – data.

Location is taking centre stage in that innovation.

Chris M

Global Recession - July 2009

Well, if a picture is worth a thousand words, then a map is surely worth a thousand pictures. Last year I looked into the news media we receive to see how many articles were backed up with maps, and it’s a surprisingly high percentage now. Whenever a breaking story comes on, it will be accompanied by a map. Whatever country you’re reading this from (and currently we have readers from around 50 countries) have a glance through your local media. Above is an image taken from this weeks Economist (article also available from economist.com). It puts an powerful global perspective an the state of today’s economy, and raises some very interesting questions that an article could never hope to achieve in a succinct manner.

Chris M.