The Fulcrum Focus

Keeping your fleet on the road with Fulcrum
If you operate a motor pool in your line of work, you probably realize how challenging it can be to maintain good records of your vehicles. Some people use paper forms and spreadsheets but find this to be limiting and time consuming. Many companies just don’t actively manage their fleet at all, hoping that the drivers will perform maintenance when needed. If you operate a fleet of vehicles and you use Fulcrum, here is an app you may want to deploy to your staff.

Animal and plant communities are profoundly affected by climate change. During periods of warming or cooling, the first ecosystems to be effected are the ones that are located near the geographic edge of their range, for example the ‘islands’ of of spruce-fir forests that sit atop the Smokey Mountains of North Carolina. These ecosystems can act as a ‘canary in a coal mine’, an early indicator of what is to come later, on a much larger scale. The Boreal Wetlands of the Adirondack Park are such ecosystems. This vast array of bogs, fens, and other wetlands are some of the southernmost of their kind in North America. Impacts of climate change will be observed there first, and may provide clues about what changes in plant and animal communities we can expect in the future.

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.

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

Using Photo Metadata in Fulcrum
When looking at photos, it often helps to glance at the metadata behind your photos. Accessing this information can give your photos more context. For example, how close was the captured photo to the record location? Here’s a quick tip, to access the metadata of a photo you want to click “Image Data” (top left corner) while looking at a photo. This will display a map, make/model of the capture device, device OS, Fulcrum version, dimensions, date, latitude/longitude coordinates, altitude, compass heading, and distance to the record.

As we just wrapped up a great 2016, it’s important for us to plant some flags for 2017. We’re constantly evolving and improving our platform, so clear milestones ahead of us can be both immensely helpful to guide our team toward shared goals, and also give customers insights into where we’re headed strategically with Fulcrum.

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!

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are becoming ever more commonplace in the mapping business for collecting cheap aerial imagery on demand. Once an expensive hobby for tinkerers, UAVs have rapidly become a truly disruptive technology in the geospatial industry. The ability to quickly send an inexpensive and nimble platform of sensors into the air to survey your surroundings, and receive realtime feedback, has opened the door to countless opportunities for data collection and analytics.

The holiday countdown has begun! We understand that finding gifts for map geeks 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 $15 to $1,500, we hope you can find something within your price range that will be treasured for years to come.

Fulcrum for field biologists
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.

We’re excited to be attending the excellent Geography 2050 Symposium this week in New York City. Set up as an open symposium by the American Geographical Society, the objective is to offer a platform for discussion around the challenges facing planet, with a focus on mapping, geography, and spatial sciences. After an excellent show last year, this year’s focus is “Exploring Our Future in an Urbanized World”, with a set of topics relating to urbanization and the growth of cities.

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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.

What a week! Last week was the fourth annual Denver Startup Week. Denver has a thriving entrepreneurial community and is quickly becoming one of the best places in the U.S. to start, build and operate a business. #DENstartupweek showed me how strong the community of tech, marketing and startups are in my city.

Next week Bryan and I will be attending the International Construction and Utility Equipment Expo (ICUEE) in Louisville, KY. We’ll be spending all three days (9/29 – 10/1) showcasing how Fulcrum can be deployed for field environments to increase productivity, workflow, and data quality.

How do you choose which navigation app to use? For me, I compare the strengths of the leading navigation apps available. There are a plethora of options in each app store to choose from, but I focused on the three apps that maintain the best data sources available. This means the data they use is reliable and maintained on a global scale. The three turn-by-turn navigation apps below provide users with a free mobile app, as well as access to edit the data behind the map.

Nearly every one of our users is a business customer, and the data resident on their mobile devices is protected company property. We take security very seriously, and want all of our users to have the tools at their disposal to keep their work safe. The objective of this article is to shed light on a few techniques available already on your iOS and Android devices to help protect your data that’s floating out in the world with your staff as they’re using mobile devices 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.

In a couple of weeks we’ll be out at the American Public Works Association 2015 annual conference in Phoenix, AZ. Hundreds of organizations around the country use Fulcrum for public works field data collection in water management, transportation signage, safety audits, asset inventory, construction site management, and more.

There’s been a boom in the last couple years of big tech companies trying to reach to the periphery of the globe and bring Internet access to people without connectivity. Facebook is launching giant solar-powered drones with lasers, Google is floating balloons with antennae into the stratosphere, and smartphones are cheaper than ever.

This week we are attending the Institute of Transportation Engineers’s 2015 Annual Meeting, talking with the leaders in civil engineering design, traffic studies, planning, and design about methods for improving the data capture process. Field-based data is critical to get the latest information on transport infrastructure.

The Fulcrum team creates 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.

Here at Fulcrum, we often have people traveling for work to conferences, trade shows, presentations, and lectures. Upon their return to the office, they have to turn in the much dreaded expense report for approval and reimbursement. In my opinion, there isn’t anything worse you can do than making the employee do it over and over again because it didn’t include the complete trip details. If you use Fulcrum, I’ve created an expense app to create a hassle-free expense tracker.

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.

Skitch for photos
Many Fulcrum users have a desire to annotate photos, make circles, add text notes, or simply draw on existing photos. We are occasionally asked what sorts of tools are out there for annotation (or if that feature is available). Annotating photos often helps to identify something within a photo so there is no mistake in what is being identified (for example in safety audits, environmental surveys, damage inspections, etc…). In our opinion, the Skitch app beats everything on the market, hands down. It was recently purchased by Evernote, so it is safe to say that it is going to be around for a long time.

Maptime is an exciting new initiative with the mission of “opening the doors of cartographic possibility to anyone interested, by creating a time and space for collaborative learning, exploration, and map creation using mapping tools and technologies”.

Many local government agencies maintain awesome datasets of aerial photography, and publish that imagery under flexible or public domain license to enable easy use for many different types of applications. Fulcrum supports the MBTiles format for offline map packages, so it’s useful to know how to take the up-to-date, hi-res imagery available in GeoTIFFs for your project area, and build maps to use in the field. In this post I’ll walk through downloading and converting some aerial photos, then loading them into TileMill to create offline maps, including a video walkthrough on how to create them.

I’ll be out in Chicago this week for the Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting. The AAG 2015 Meeting is one of the largest gatherings of Geographers in the world and brings together close to 8000 geographers from 60 countries. The program will cover a large selection of topics and looks to offer many interesting talks.

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.

CRM systems abound on the internet these days, giving sales teams ample ways to log sales meetings, leads, customer interaction, and track business opportunities. Giving sales teams and management the visibility into operations and sales activity can bring incredible value to your organization if done well. However, a CRM tool is only as valuable as the data you put into your system. The more rapidly you have raw data and feedback from your field sales people, the faster you can make decisions to influence the customer or prospect interaction process.

The latest Fulcrum release includes some subtle enhancements for programmatically interacting with the mobile apps. We’ve introduced the fulcrumapp:// URL scheme for opening the app to create a new record or edit an existing record, with the option to pass in certain attributes via parameters.

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.

Classification sets in Fulcrum let you create predefined hierarchies and schemas for classifying selection choice data into a standard format. This makes selecting a value from a long list of items incredibly efficient in the field. Classification sets are searchable and let you quickly ‘drill down’ to your intended value.

For mapping-based projects using Fulcrum as a data collection platform, GPS positional accuracy is paramount for many applications. These days there are quite a few devices available on the market to augment your consumer-grade hardware, an excellent option for cost savings that doesn’t require you to drop $5,000 on a piece of custom hardware (with crappy built-in software). You can buy specialty sub-$1000 receivers to get better GPS accuracy, but pair them up with purpose built location based apps like Fulcrum to get your work done.

A few weeks back we announced that we built integration tools on top of Zapier, to enable Fulcrum to be wired up with over 100 web services. This week the integration is now public for all Zapier users. Using Zapier, when you collect data in the field using Fulcrum, that data can trigger events to perform actions like sending emails, SMS alerts, and tons more.

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.

The Fulcrum Development Team just returned from San Francisco following another great FOSS4G Conference. This was my second FOSS4G Conference, and my first time attending the North America event. As with FOSS4G Portland, the best thing about attending a conference like this is being surrounded by all the creative energy of folks excited about doing cool stuff!