August 2008
19 posts
Another very solid day in San Diego. I attended sessions on facility management and building data models in the morning. The sessions were generally VERY well attended (75 - 125 in each session) with good feedback during and after the sessions. At lunch there was the Facilities Special Interest Group meeting which was again very well attended with good interest. After lunch the BISDM committee meeting.
While I was attending sessions, the booth was still very active. Some highlights:
ESRI Portugal came back to the booth again with more interest. Several solid Navy contacts by the booth. Smithsonian project continues to get rave reviews in the booth and in presentations. Very solid feedback on the usability of the interface. Had a nice visit with Duane and Yurong in the afternoon.
This evening had further discussions with Brent Jones, Matt, Paul Rooney and several of Richard’s Navy contacts. A number of initiatives to follow up on here as well as some health care conacts that Todd ran into at the social. Andrew had some very encouraging discussions with some new contacts at ESRI UK. Andrew not feeling well and retired early.
Watched the fireworks from the top of the Hyatt…. Nice.
Today has been a very busy day of meetings and steady activity on the trade show floor. The amazing impression shared by most everyone on the team today was how many people now understand the basic concept of in-building GIS compared to a year ago and are actively working to budget or even implement approaches to in-building information.
Archibus implementation has been well received. Robotic data collection has generated a lot of serious inquiry. I won’t go into all of the details here, but we had serious inquiries from a number of different government programs, and several commercial organizations today. Very encouraging.
Lunch with Brian Goldin who is launching their GIS indexing tool this week (http://voyagergis.com ) Outstanding product.
Interesting meeting with ESRI Korea this afternoon.
Dinner with Michael Mannion and Chris Hansen this evening.
VOYAGERGIS has released their discovery solution in soft launch at the ESRI User Conference. The application crawls your personal or enterprise systems and catalogues all geospatial data and related files. I just viewed the demo and it was awesome. There is a free-ware entry copy available at voyagergis.com
Mobs at registration when we arrived to the convention center this morning. It took a while to get Benton and Todd registered and we were a bit late getting into the plenary session. By the time we got there, there were no seats to be had and we ended up standing in the back until the first break.
Good plenary morning sessions. No great surprises, but very good demos. Mike Parkin’s demo of 3D visualizatoin and analysis on the MIT campus was particularly good. There was also an outstanding demo of common operational picture built on the new Flex ADF and ArcGIS Server that was very compelling.
Booth materials arrived by late morning, but we were missing some key pieces (dowels that hold the booth together) and Kevin had to find a hardware store to get replacements. Assembled the booth in the afternoon and reviewed marketing materials and message.
Great conversations in the map gallery this evening with John Young, Matt Davis, Chris Friel, Steve Grise, Brent Jones and several others. Many interesting opportunities and perspectives discussed. Dinner with Matt and John.
Got Andrew registered this morning. Ran into Simon Thompson briefly in the hallway. He had a number of suggestions about how Andrew could get ESRI UK more motivated about working with PenBay. Andrew has a bunch of follow up to do with Simon.
Spent some time in the exibition hall of the Survey and Engineering Summit. Had a very interesting conversation with Michell and Ben from Trimble. They may have some gear that could be useful for us in our pursuit of 3D in-building data capture as well as different gear that may be useful for locating equipment. Ben will have someone from Trimble follow up with us.
VERY interesting conversation with the gents from Adapx. They build a “pen and paper” (the pen is electronic and the paper is printed with encoding in it) solution to GIS data collection and editing. This represents some very interesting opportunities for us in NYC and for Andrew in the Security planning field.
Attempted to get the booth set up today, but the booth stuff had not been delivered yet by Show Air. Hoping that Brittany can run a trace on our shipment first thing in the morning to give us some hope. Booth is in a great location and is directly behind Archibus on the end of an aisle.
Picked up Benton at the Airport around 6:30.
Attended the Defense and Intelligence Executive Track (DIET) social briefly. Had a brief chat with Mike Quinn who will be taking on a new role for ESRI based in Singapore some time this winter. Also spoke briefly with Dave Pointer and George Mankowski from NAVFAC Midwest. Plan to follow up with them again later in the week.
Saw Mike Parkin at registration this afternoon. He will be presenting space management and utilization visualization in 3D and 4D across the MIT campus during the plenary show on Monday morning. Also will be demonstrating 3D wayfinding across the campus. Very cool.
Had a quick visit with Terry Martin. He shared his perspective on the state of GIS in the USAF along with a brilliant concept for saving fuel for USAF and any other large fleet aircraft operator. He also has a local opportunity that we will follow up with later this week.
Ran into Simon Thompson (ESRI C4ISR) who may have a lead for us on data development work that may be of interest to Richard. Also met Craig Fones (ESRI Defense Modeling). Craig is interested in our abilities to help in the modeling of urban environments.
Picked Andrew up at the airport and stopped by Santanas for a quick burrito. Great Mexican food cheap. One of my favorites in San Diego.
This evening saw Peter Curtis (ESRI BP coordinator Denver) quickly and invited him by our booth. Had very interesting discussions with April Nichols (ESRI BP Danvers) and Brent Jones (ESRI Surveying) about the international market. April suggests that I meet with Bill Shepard this week if possible.
Traffic Jam (all ESRI band) played for the Survey Summit reception this evening. Pretty darn good.
