Geospatial FM

Michael Ferrari is Chief Scientific and Investment Officer at AlphaGeo . We focused on how resilience varies across geographies and what this means for long term regional investability. Accompanying this discussion is their web app . This is confronting. If you change the time slider to "End of Century", most of the world is red, indicating significant physical climate risk. Particularly...

Border Professor Henk van Houtum published Free The Map in 2024. He sent it to me whilst I was still living in London last year. Shows how long this has been in the making as I've since migrated to the States. Kind of fitting, given the book frequently mentions the EU migration crisis and problems with EU Frontex maps showing how many come from where. As a key intervention, the book recommends...

Appropriately, I am publishing today's episode from an airport - JFK. This is because it is about the positioning, navigation and timing vertical, specifically about how GPS can be spoofed and jammed, affecting air travel safety. Also appropriately, the recording with Dana Goward , President of Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation , was occasionally of poor quality. The bandwidth gods have a...

I came across Sergei Nozdrenkov through a post on LinkedIn saying : "Hey friends, I’m looking for a founding engineer and founding AI research scientist to build multimodal foundation models for natural ecosystems, starting with 3D coral reef data." He is the founder of Wildflow . This is a continuation of the nature data theme last touched on with Alex Logan in the episode about ⁠Cecil⁠...

Upping the cadence here as the backlog is growing again and I need to get things out whilst they’re fresh. Today we’ve got BigGeo on the chopping block, a Canadian cloud based geospatial company. Brent Lane, CEO , was an inspiring speaker because (showing my bias here) he had another story about ringing the bell at the NYSE to tell us about. This is the second time we’ve had someone on that’s done...

As usual there is a connection through a number of episodes going on here. Back when interviewed Stephanie May , she introduced me to global base maps made by various tech companies. I jumped at the opportunity to continue the theme when I came across Jordan Regenie's write up of his involvement in Bing Maps. He mentioned a company participating in that effort was Compass Data so I dutifully p...

Brett Clark is Director Global Sales at Blackshark . Blackshark is an incredible company. They are responsible for the global 3D world of Microsoft Flight Simulator . Now they have a system called ORCA™ HUNTR. This is a no-code environment enabling users—with little to no coding or AI background—to train, test, and deploy object detection and classification models on RGB imagery, including satelli...

Conflict Ecology is a geospatial research lab led by  Jamon Van Den Hoek , Associate Professor of Geography at Oregon State University. I have been privileged to profile many leaders in our industry through this podcast. None, until now, routinely appear on TV and have the work of their lab used in print media. Jamon is a hero to us all and we are so privileged to have an hour of his time.

Continuing the EO Summit coverage, another attendee was Alex Logan , co-founder and CEO of Cecil. This is a nature data platform which began with trees. They focus on metadata, more here . It was a fascinating discussion. I am new to this space and there is a strong overlap with those in carbon credit and biodiversity markets. What I appreciate the most is the emergence of financial materiality. F...

I was privileged to be granted access as a member of the press to EO Summit by the convener, Aravind ( https://www.linkedin.com/in/aravindravichandran/). I am now delivering on my duty providing coverage for you here. Adam Maher ( https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-maher-17969731/) is CEO and Founder at Ursa Space Systems Inc ( https://ursaspace.com/ ). He participated in the Commodity Intelligence...

Mike Spaeth is Global Vice President at US Artificial Intelligence Institute ( https://www.usaii.org/ ). He has a career in environmental, sustainability and governance analytics at Moodys before moving on to Maxar then Earth Daily Analytics. Here he gained experience in geospatial foundation models. We are privileged to have him on regarding his latest role at USAII where he talked about the poss...

Gideon Singer is a Solutions Engineer at CARTO . He is another guest from Geospatial Risk Summit. Gideon gave a technical presentation on the first day about processing pipelines in CARTO. It was a sign of how far the platform has progressed since I began using it over a decade ago. Back then it was called CartoDB. In this episode he continues the demonstration of analysis, mapping and presentatio...

Ajay K Gupta is Chief Executive Officer of HSR.Health. This is a company in the Global Top 100 Geospatial Companies – 2025 Edition from Geoawesome ( https://geoawesome.com/global-top-100-geospatial-companies-2025/ ). I voted on the selection panel 2022-2023 but not the year HSR was voted in. Another item discussed was AWS funding for their Anna platform (as it is novel tech). Additionally we talke...

Upcoming Domain ChangeDue to launching Geospatial FM, I will change the domain from www.geospatial.money to www.geospatial.fm. This will occur over the next few days. Just a heads up. You will still receive emails as normal. Nelson Roque Nelson Roque is Assistant Professor, Human Development and Family Studies at Penn State University. He studies the brain as it develops and ages. He also lectures...

Nearmap is a name near and dear to our hearts in geospatial. They were a rocketship as a stock before Thoma Bravo took them private end of 2022 ( https://www.thomabravo.com/press-releases/thoma-bravo-completes-acquisition-of-nearmap-ltd ). Chris Sams is Government Product Solutions Leader at Nearmap. I met him in January at Geospatial Risk Summit. He has some great commentary on how an earth obser...

Miles Kauffman , Masters Of City and Regional planning student at Georgia Tech, came on the show to tell us about an Atlanta to Orlando high speed rail study he is conducting. It was such a privilege to connect with him after attending a Georgia Geospatial Association ( https://gageospatial.org/ ) networking event in Atlanta a few months ago then being referred to him by an attendee there. At the...

Next #GISchat is with Michael Bartholomeusz about NOVI . ✒️ https://open.substack.com/pub/geospatialindex/p/novi-and-a-new-venture-geospatial 📽️ https://youtu.be/4z40_uU8gIs Novi describes themselves as an edge compute and space infrastructure company. They advise one can obtain these benefits: "get real-time earth observation data at a fraction of the cost with VISTAsat - a full-stack, next-gener...

Why I am reporting on the NEOM human rights situation and publicly traded engineering consultancies involved. It is an introductory episode for the final stretch of this series. NEOM is a collection of projects in a northern province of Saudi Arabia accompanied by violations of Article 17 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

⛔️ this ep again mentions suicide. Covering all loose ends from my recollections about working at Amec Foster Wheeler in Kuwait. Finally got to a point where I can move on from #GISchat about Kuwait. Discussed: 0:00 - 3:24 - Emotional impact 3:24 - 3:42 - Agenda 3:42 - 22:50 - Use of ChatGPT to interpret arterial blood gas (ABG) test results and fully understand the brutality of the context of th...

A final round exposing the evidence I collected during my time at Amec Foster Wheeler in Kuwait about human rights, ethics and safety violations. This is in the service of disclosing how safety matters to do with manpower company NBTC Group were handled by Amec Foster Wheeler, superintendent's representative on Kuwait Oil Company projects. Why? In 2024 a fire in an NBTC worker accommodation facili...

Caution - this episode contains some details of suicides that happened when I worked at Amec Foster Wheeler in Kuwait. If you need it, these are helplines you can call for the top 5 most popular countries for this newsletter:USA: 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. UK: 111 for the NHS.Canada: 988 for the Suicide Crisis Helpline. Australia: 1300 22 4636 for Beyond Blue. India: 9820466726 for A...

Here we look at a missed opportunity to avoid the death of 49 people in an NBTC accommodation fire last year in Mangaf, Kuwait. The missed opportunity was in the firing of a worker in 2017 for calling an ambulance in response to an H2S gas poisoning at GC-30 in the North Kuwait Asset. Instead, he could have been listened to for stating that people are punished for speaking up about safety issues....

Caution - this episode contains some details of suicides that happened when I worked at Amec Foster Wheeler in Kuwait. If you need it, these are helplines you can call for the top 5 most popular countries for this newsletter: USA: 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. UK: 111 for the NHS. Canada: 988 for the Suicide Crisis Helpline. Australia: 1300 22 4636 for Beyond Blue. India: 9820466726 for...

Caution - this episode contains some details of suicides that happened when I worked at Amec Foster Wheeler in Kuwait. If you need it, these are helplines you can call for the top 5 most popular countries for this newsletter: USA: 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. UK: 111 for the NHS. Canada: 988 for the Suicide Crisis Helpline. Australia: 1300 22 4636 for Beyond Blue. India: 9820466726 for...

Reflections on doing geospatial in Cambodia. Prompted by Free The Map, a book about change in the way we do cartography. This is in the lead up to an episode with the author, Henk Van Houtum. Dehumanization: An Integrative Review: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6927454_Dehumanization_An_Integrative_Review Eviction and relocation events 1982-2012 in Phnom Penh, Cambodia: https://youtu.be/...