The Fulcrum Focus

Last week I attended the GIS CAMA Technologies Conference in Savannah, hosted by URISA and IAAO. The event was a meeting-of-the-minds for tax assessors, property appraisers, and the GIS / technical staff for the industry writ-large to discuss the latest in tech and trends for the property assessment community.

Climate change profoundly affects animal and plant communities. During periods of warming or cooling, ecosystems near the geographic edge of their range experience the impacts first. For example, the ‘islands’ of spruce-fir forests atop the Smokey Mountains of North Carolina face such early effects. These ecosystems serve as a ‘canary in a coal mine,’ offering an early indication of larger-scale changes that may follow.

Jason Wheatley is the Geospatial Technologies (GIS) Manager for Century Engineering, Inc. in Hunt Valley, Maryland. He has worked in both the public and private geospatial industries since 2004. He received a B.S. in Geography, as well as a M.S. in GIS and Public Administration from Salisbury University (Salisbury, MD). The Century Geospatial Technologies Group (GIS Group) provides technology consultant services to clients within federal, state, local governments, as well as the private sector throughout the Mid-Atlantic Region.

This month in our continuing series of customer interviews, we talked with one of our long-time customers in the manufacturing industry. Manufacturing companies are a growing user base for mobile data collection applications, and Fulcrum is a great match for manufacturers because it offers an integrated mobile solution that speeds up quotes, customer service, and order management. Real-time data capture is what differentiates the leaders from the rest. Mike Merrill is the NDE Coordinator & Field Service Tech at Turbine Master. He has worked there since 2000 and has seen many changes that technology offers to workflows. Our team sat down with Mike and asked him about his data collection methods, the turbine industry, turbine inspections, and the future of data collection technologies.

Many of our customers are using Fulcrum for different types of consulting projects, meaning they’re delivering on projects on behalf of someone else — as a subcontractor to a prime contractor, to a city or municipality, or to another government agency. I wanted to take a moment to review some of the many advantages of the Fulcrum platform for consulting engineers, business analysts, field services companies, or software developers, and give a little background on why so many choose Fulcrum as a basis for completing their projects.

One fire (or flood) away from failure

The statistics behind data loss are alarming: 70% of today’s businesses would fail within 3 weeks if they suffered a catastrophic loss of paper-based records due to fire or flood.1 And with more than 4.6 million episodes of catastrophic business data loss happening each year2, could your business survive such an event? And what could you do to prevent the problems of catastrophic data loss from interrupting your business? Today I’ll discuss the true cost of a paper-based business workflow and how digital forms mitigate the risks that come from relying on physical forms and paper record keeping.

As we wrap up another exciting year, we’d like to take a moment to recap and review some of our highlights over the past 12 months. When we closed out 2014, I anticipated this was going to be an exciting year, but could never have predicted just how much we could have accomplished! Read on for Fulcrum’s 2015 year in review.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are becoming increasingly common in mapping, offering affordable aerial imagery on demand. Once an expensive hobby for tinkerers, UAVs have quickly transformed into a disruptive force in the geospatial industry. The ability to deploy a cost-effective, agile sensor platform for real-time surveying has unlocked vast possibilities for data collection.

The holiday countdown has begun! We understand that finding gifts for map nerds can be quite tricky. So, the Fulcrum team has compiled a list of the top cartography gifts that your map geek is sure to love. Ranging from $45 to $2,000, we hope you can find something in our holiday gift guide for map geeks that is within your price range that will be treasured for years to come.

For field biologists, collecting data in the field is just another day at work. Traditionally, most field biologists carry around notepads or clipboards to take notes, document habitats, and make measurements. In addition, they need to carry cameras and GPS devices for taking photos and videos of flora and fauna in the wild, and plotting these locations.

Recently I joined the board of the Homeowners Association in my neighborhood and discovered what many others have discovered about their HOA: a lot of frustration around management of the community and the lack of support the residents receive from the board. According to the Community Associations Institute trade association, it is estimated that HOAs govern 24.8 million American homes and 62 million residents. This leaves about twenty percent of Americans living in a community managed by an HOA.

The first in our series of customer spotlights, Blaine Hackett is the Director of Business Development, GIS for RESPEC. Blaine has been working with Geographic Information Systems since 1990. He received his B.S. in Geography from the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse and Masters of Geographic Information Science from the University of Minnesota. He has worked in diversified GIS environments including state and local government, consulting engineering and planning, non-profit and Fortune 500 companies. Our team sat down with him and picked his brains on data collection methods, the GIS industry and the future of geospatial technology.

Nowadays, we use our smartphones to find and evaluate everything from local music venues to hot spots to eat lunch. But how does my search engine know when to serve up a list of sushi restaurants when I’m downtown, but serve up a how-to guide when I’m at my house? And what does it take to appear and stay visible in those local searches? Today, I’m taking you through a tour of the local listings ecosystem, from schemas to search snippets, to show you the several important factors and elements that go into appearing and ranking in local search queries.

Earlier this year we launched calculation fields, and we’re constantly impressed with the ways our customers are using them to add value to their field surveys. I want to demo a neat technique you can use to embed proj4js into a calculation field to gain access to custom GIS projections.

Geography 2050 is a symposium to gather the brightest thinkers that live and breathe geography, either as a core business or a peripheral part of their core expertise, and discuss the potential markets, changes, and potential for where we’ll be in the field of geography by the year 2050.

Nearly all our users run businesses and rely on their mobile devices to store protected company data. We prioritize security and provide tools that help users safeguard their work effectively. This article explains techniques on iOS and Android devices that help users protect data while employees work in the field.

These days we all have far more accounts and passwords than we know what to do with. Managing a set of over 100 unique usernames and passwords for online services like banking, productivity, hosting, social media is becoming untenable even for casual Internet citizens. As a high-octane user of web services, I have over 500 unique accounts for different things, hundreds of which I rarely use, but occasionally need. This combined with the risk of having an account compromised with sensitive information make the need for a hyper secure password strategy for any online accounts. The trouble is that to be truly secure, you should use strong passwords, vary them from site to site, and reset or update them from time to time.

There’s been a boom in the last couple of years of big tech companies working to bring connectivity and geocoding solutions to the farthest reaches of the globe. Facebook is launching giant solar-powered drones with lasers, Google is floating balloons with antennae into the stratosphere, and smartphones are cheaper than ever.

The Fulcrum team creates a virtual company culture in a number of ways. One of the popular ways to toast one another is through GeoBooze, our Fulcrum + Slack-integrated drinks sharing form.

Two weeks back I was in Washington, DC at the GEOINT Symposium, the major industry event for the geospatial intelligence market, put on by the excellent USGIF. Each year there’s a growing number of companies with a primarily commercial focus, showcasing their tech for government users, which shows that the focus of the government community is more and more shifting toward off-the-shelf and consumer tech each year.

Thomas Steele-Maley is the Director of Innovation at GEMS World Academy Chicago, and is working on bringing Mobile Learning to K-12 education.

With the ongoing widespread flooding and tornadoes affecting the southern United States, I’m compelled to write this post. It is directed towards the emergency managers and incident commanders in affected towns and counties and is meant to provide you with guidance on how to expedite disaster declaration using simple off-the-shelf technology. One of the chief goals of emergency managers should be to decrease the amount of time it takes for survivors to receive the assistance they require. This was my goal for five years while I worked for FEMA as a Geospatial Coordinator. Fulcrum will continue to offer our services to any emergency manager who needs assistance.

Our latest update for Fulcrum on Android got some design updates and improvements to match Google’s Material Design specifications for layouts, look and feel, and interaction. You’ll see right away in version 2.13 that the app list is now presented as a drawer that slides out from the left. The form user interface has also gotten a facelift to conform to the Material standards.

Last week I attended an event with the US Geospatial Intelligence Foundation intended to showcase various cloud-based technologies for the GEOINT (geospatial intelligence) market, with speakers from HumanGeo, Agilex, DigitalGlobe, and more. The objective was to give quick lightning talks on cloud-based platforms enabling GEOINT capabilities, as part of the USGIF’s Innovation Task Force series.

Guest blogger J Allard is CEO and Founder of Project 529 and a Core Team member of the Portland Police Bureau Bike Theft Task Force. This post was originally published May 18th on bikeportland.org.

Guest blogger Danny Sheehan is a geographer and data science student with the Built Environment and Health Project at Columbia University.

House of Hope story
My name is Megan Smith and I am an outreach worker with the House of Hope CDC. House Of Hope is a nonprofit that provides a spectrum of housing and supportive services to people experiencing homelessness, with the mission of preventing and ending homelessness in Rhode Island. Toward this end, my role consists of collaborating with community partners to engage individuals not well-served by the current homeless service provision system. We’re specifically focusing on those who are staying on the streets and are experiencing significant mental health and substance use challenges.

Each year, more than twenty student researchers in the MSc Engineering Geology program at the Technical University of Munich take advantage of the Fulcrum for Education program to study and map landslides in the Austrian Alps. As GPS and GIS technology replaces paper maps and handwritten notes, these students are being trained to use modern field data collection tools and techniques in their landslide mapping courses.

Recently, we’ve been expanding and redesigning our App Gallery search functionality, making it much easier to locate relevant apps for specific industries. In order to make new users aware of how Fulcrum could be used, we populate the Fulcrum App Gallery with sample apps. By doing this, we have found that almost all new users start with one or a few of these apps to get started, and on occasion, some improve them for their own use. The use cases of Fulcrum continue to surprise and delight us.

Collecting rich media along with your survey forms is one of Fulcrum’s hallmark capabilities, allowing you to add detail to your collection workflow by using pictures and SpatialVideo.

Historic preservation
Historic preservation is a big deal in our cities these days. There’s an entire movement focused on the rediscovery and re-use of our urban cores. With any city of significant age, a key step to making the most out of our existing infrastructure is understanding, preserving, and in many cases reusing our historic sites in new and interesting ways.

This time last year, I was a FEMA employee working in the field of GIS. I was pondering at that time how to build a mobile GIS app that worked on an iPad or iPhone and could be deployed into the field with the Public Assistance teams (their current process involves paper and GPS units, and a lot of data entry done in hotel rooms). This mobile app would need to be extremely easy to use, be able to feed data into a database, and the data be viewable on a live map. This was a challenging proposition, but one that excited me.

We have a lot of Fulcrum customers that work in the fields of engineering and architecture, and when designing and constructing facilities of any size, it is imperative to be compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act design standards. In researching ADA compliance, I used the New England ADA Center’s ADA Checklist for Existing Facilities form to build a custom ADA Fulcrum app. The New England ADA Center is one of ten members of the ADA National Network, and publishes the checklists. I found their checklists to be extremely comprehensive. Because Fulcrum is so flexible, it took me about 30 minutes to build most of the Priority 1 checklist. You can see how easy it is to use in the video below.

We’re working on building some integration tools using Zapier, a great service that allows Fulcrum data to be integrated or sent to other services based on specific triggers. Zapier has existing tools to integrate with services like Salesforce, Dropbox, Google Drive, Basecamp, and many more – or to do simple actions like send emails, SMS messages, or push notifications.

Recently, we at Fulcrum came across the AccessLand initiative to provide open data and APIs for “our nation’s parks, forests, monuments, campsites, cabins, and tours.”

Fulcrum’s SpatialVideo collection capability can be a valuable addition to data collection workflows, including mapping of rights-of-way, assets, pipelines, electric lines, environmental monitoring, and more.

I recently demonstrated to a Fulcrum customer how to georeference a floor plan of a mall for indoor use when conducting inspections of malls around the country. This same process can be used with Fulcrum for creating small offline maps. I’ve chosen not to use QGIS or ArcMap, but instead am using inexpensive or free software that anyone can learn to use in less than an hour.

Fulcrum customers worldwide are using the platform to collect a huge variety of data in the field, and the dynamic, adaptable nature of Fulcrum allows the flexibility to build the exact tool for the job. Today we’re introducing a new feature to extend this even further: Calculated Fields.

While recently writing some software in JavaScript, I noticed a pattern. I would create an object, and then call init() on it. The instance needed some stuff done before I could use it.

Our latest updates include some great form validation enhancements for even better quality control over your data. These enhancements include supporting custom validation patterns for text fields by defining a regular expression (regex), as well as the ability to define min/max limits for certain field types.

Customizing Fulcrum photo options on Android
Our latest release of Fulcrum for Android (2.10.0), is adding photo quality options to the settings. This option can be used to scale images taken at the device’s full resolution down to a smaller size. Working with smaller images can significantly improve a number of things (storage usage on the device and server, synchronization times) without having a negative impact on your data.

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!

Every day we find new customers using Fulcrum for wildly different applications for field data collection. Nothing is more exciting as an engineer than to see something you’ve built being used to solve real challenges, all over the world. However, as a fast-moving, agile software team faced with an enormous variety of use cases—sometimes with directly opposite requirements—you can’t build everything (nor should you).

Like many companies who employ off-site team members, Spatial Networks brings everyone together a few times a year for a week of handshakes, hugs, good food, and better beer. Amazingly, some code usually gets shipped as well. Our most recent visit was punctuated by a long awaited change of venue as we moved into our new, custom-designed space, leaving behind an office that never quite felt like home. These visits are important for a variety of reasons, but here are a few that stand out to me each time we have a meeting of the remotes. Here’s a recap of what got done:

Fulcrum update – In-App Barcode and QR Code Scanning
Fulcrum is already flush with data types that you can build into your own custom data collection apps for field surveying. Many Fulcrum users have deployed Fulcrum for asset inventory and evaluation projects, with service technicians or inspectors tracking asset locations and conducting quality inspections.

Last month we sent out a customer satisfaction survey to Fulcrum account owners in order to better understand what our customers enjoy about Fulcrum, what they dislike, and how we can make their experience better. Suffice it to say, we learned a lot.

Adam Rose, PE, GISP, CFM has several letters after his name, but is nonetheless fairly lazy: he enjoys creating and automating software and hardware to make the lives easier for environmental engineers and others in the water profession. In his spare time he is a product manager at XP Solutions, a software company.

OpenStreetMap editing is typically centered around tracing, meaning digitizing features on top of satellite imagery to extract things like roads, buildings, landuse areas, coastlines, and other visible features. The data made available by providers like Bing for OSM tracing is fantastic for creating the basic foundational elements.

Update for 2023:
We are thrilled to announce that Fulcrum has entered into a definitive Commercial Provider agreement with Esri™ to leverage their technology stack. This partnership brings together the leading solution for field inspections and data collection with the top geographic information systems (GIS) platform, which is used by clients in virtually every industry that requires location-related data, mapping, and analysis.

The latest updates to the Fulcrum Android and iOS mobile apps include some great new functionality that we are excited to announce. While every update includes subtle improvements, behind-the-scenes performance enhancements, and bug fixes, this release includes some great new features for truly customizing your mobile apps.

Fulcrum was designed from the ground up to support full offline usability, but we are proud to extend support of custom online tile servers to our mobile clients as well. The latest updates to the Fulcrum Android and iOS mobile apps now list all of your Tile XYZ layers in the mobile layer selector, right along with your custom offline layers.