Fulcrum 2014 Year In Review

2014 was an exciting year for Spatial Networks and Team Fulcrum! Looking back at our accomplishments over the past twelve months, it’s clear that Fulcrum has really matured into a stable, feature-rich platform, which is fast becoming the go-to solution for structured geographic data collection. We have a dedicated and diverse customer base who are using Fulcrum all across the globe, in ways we never could have imagined and 2015 is looking to be another exciting year!

Expansion of Team Fulcrum

Team Fulcrum grew by 10 new hires in 2014! Myself and Jason joined the engineering team early in the year, while Steve joined the geography group, Molly started rocking business development, Jenn took over number crunching, Tara joined the marketing team, Josh took over Android development, Crystal headed up the analytics group, Kara took over admin duties, and Cory took on product management responsibilities.

We also completed an epic office move from our old Clearwater location to our new, beautiful home in downtown St. Petersburg, FL. The entire team descended upon our new St. Pete headquarters in December for a unique All Hands Week where it was quite literally “out with the old and in with the new”.

We are always looking for new talent, so if you think you might be interested in joining the team, drop us a line.

Rocking The Conferences

With all this new help, we were able to hit the conference circuit in full force this year. We traveled around the world speaking, giving workshops, following industry trends, and meeting with our users and partners to help drive product development and stay abreast of technological, social, and geographic trends. Here’s a review of some of our travels:

• In March, Coleman and Patrick traveled to the GCT 2014 Conference in Tunisia to meet with organizations working on mapping projects throughout Africa. Coleman gave a presentation on field data collection techniques, covering methodologies for efficient digital data collection.
• The annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) convened in Tampa in April. With the meeting practically in our backyard, the Spatial Networks crew manned a booth and greeted follow geographers.
• In May, the annual GEOINT Symposium was held in Tampa as well. We presented at the Mobile GEOINT Tradecraft Workshop and manned a booth where we had the privilege to meet and chat with a diverse group of folks from the intelligence, defense, and homeland security communities, along with other vendors and attendees.
• In August, Molly attended the Maryland Association of Counties (MACo) Conference, introducing municipal representatives to the power of the Fulcrum platform.
• September was a busy month with Coleman heading to New Orleans to speak at the GIS-Pro Conference, Jason and myself attending FOSS4G in Portland, OR, Kyle heading to the GeCo in the Rockies Conference, and our design team attending the Circles Conference in Texas. After returning from Portland, I joined Andie and Steve at the Central Florida GIS Workshop in Orlando, where I gave a presentation on BootLeaf, my open source responsive web mapping template.
• In early October, Coleman and I capped off a series of webinars on using Fulcrum for fish & wildlife management by attending the annual Organization of Fish & Wildlife Information Managers (OFWIM) Conference in Flagstaff, AZ. We held a live Fulcrum workshop for conference attendees and had the pleasure of meeting some great folks who are collecting a lot of interesting data!
• In November, several SNI folks headed to NYC for the Geography2050 Conference, which was hosted by the American Geographical Society and sponsored in part by Spatial Networks. Our very own founder, Tony Quartararo, moderated a panel discussing how technology will fundamentally change how we understand geography in the future. Molly headed to the International Association of Emergency Managers(IAEM) Conference in Texas to meet with folks leading HADR initiatives.
• Finally, earlier this month, a small contingent traveled to Orlando for the PowerGen Conference while Kyle and I had the opportunity to attend the CartoDB14 partner event and workshop at CARTO’s NYC office. I gave a lightning talk and we did a brief demo showing how structured data collected with Fulcrum can be mapped, queried, and analyzed in real-time when integrated with CARTO services. We also met with our CARTO colleagues to discuss tighter integration strategies and other opportunities for 2015.

Features Galore

2014 was a year of exciting new feature releases, along with the usual bug squashing, stability improvements, and design tweaks. We started the year off with a massive update, which included relational table functionality and are ending the year with some solid sync speed and stability improvements. Here’s a recap of what the engineering team has been working on for the last 12 months…

January

• Added New Features like repeatable fields, advanced export formats, improved data import wizard, automatic conflict resolution & data merging, batch PDF report generation, and interactive offline maps.

March

• New Field Types (time, yes/no checklist) with improved numeric type and range validations.
• Additional translations supporting Spanish, French, and Portuguese.
• Activity Feed For Monitoring Changes for monitoring record changes in the web admin console.
• New Mobile Record Actions for easily duplicating records, showing records on the map, and getting driving directions.
• Additional Map Layers and Location Tools for viewing MBTiles, GeoJSON, and custom TileXYZ layers in the web map.

May

• Additional API parameters for filtering records by date ranges.

June

• Introduction of SpatialVideo for recording video with synced GPS tracklogs on mobile devices.
• New Hyperlink Field for linking to external applications, website, photos, PDF’s, etc.

August

• New App Dashboard page for viewing app activity and accessing administrative tools.
• Record Title Popups for quickly viewing a record title without having to open the full record page.
• Online Media Links with landing pages for directly accessing media files (photos, videos, and signatures).

September

• New Fulcrum API Wrappers for Ruby, Python, and Node.

October

• Fulcrum Map Embeds for easily creating an embeddable map from data shares, complete with a custom title, popup content, and map extent.

November

• Full Support for Offline Tile Servers– extending support of custom online tile servers to our mobile clients.
• Mobile App Icons– allowing you to associate your logo and brand identity, which is now exposed to your mobile users.

December

• Barcode & QR Code Scanning for rapidly collecting and searching inventory data.
• Composite Record Title Fields– making it easier for field staff to get more info at-a-glance when browsing data on their mobile device.

Anticipation for 2015

We want to wish all our friends, clients, colleagues, and partners a happy, healthy, and productive new year! Stay tuned for plenty more to come in 2015!

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