Ben Stucki

SpatialKey is featured on the cover of this months ComputerWorld magazine, and in the feature article “Can Web 2.0 Save BI?”. The article includes an interview with Chief Jon Greiner of the Ogden Police Department in Utah, which is the first police department in the country to implement an enterprise version of the SpatialKey Law Enforcement Dashboard. In my last post I described a few areas where I think SpatialKey sets itself apart from other mapping solutions, but nothing beats hearing it from a customer:

Today, the officers are using the new BI tools to perform geographic profiling of crimes and analysis of police data “in seconds,” he says. Before, it could take days for the department’s single crime analyst to fulfill a report request. An added bonus is that experienced police officers with extensive street experience are now able to apply their firsthand knowledge to crime analysis.

It’s amazing to see the product I work on every day shown in such a broad-reaching publication in the IT industry. Maybe it’s just the pretty visualizations that got it on the cover, but I’ll take the contents of the interview as further proof that we’re quite possibly making the best mapping product on the web.

Universal Mind released a technology preview of SpatialKey last week, which is the information visualization product that I’ve been working on in its various forms since late last year. Andy and Doug already have detailed posts about the release, but I wanted to mention a few more things that I think make SpatialKey the best web-based mapping product in existence.

1. It answers the big questions.

When someone’s dealing with larger sets of geographic data, there’s something fundamentally different about the questions they have regarding that data. For instance they’re not only interested in the location of an individual house, but in how that house’s price contributes to the local market. So while SpatialKey can still answer questions like “Where are the three bedroom houses in my area?”, it also lets users answer questions like “What’s the average price of a three bedroom house in my area?”. I think that’s a big shift from anything that exists in web-based mapping today.

2. Big questions require big data-sets.

The fact that SpatialKey lets users answer “big” questions means that it needs to handle more data than other mapping solutions, a lot more. So while Doug’s pretty happy with the demos we have out that visualize thousands of points (even tens of thousands) using SpatialKey Personal, those are still “cute” compared to what we’re able to do using the Enterprise Server. With the server-side solution hooked into your database, you can do all of the same filtering and visualizations with literally millions of points, and it’s just as fast. We don’t have any public demos of the Enterprise Server yet, but keep an eye out for updates on the SpatialKey blog just in case.

3. It’s engaging and interactive.

The need to make geographic data relevant isn’t new, but historically the task of analyzing and visualizing this data was firmly in the hands of analysts and statisticians. SpatialKey not only renders these visualizations in realtime, but it allows almost anyone to interact with and explore the data globally, city-wide, street-level, and even further. The answers that were once hidden in raw data are now at your fingertips and easily acessible.

I’m obviously proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish with SpatialKey so far, but we know that it’s not perfect yet. We’re still rounding out a few rough edges and working hard on more features that I look forward to showing you soon. Until then, let me know what you think of it so far!

OpenFlux is getting ramped up for some exciting new demos at 360Flex San Jose, but we’re still waiting for that one component that really shows what the framework is capable of. Luckily for us the guys at 360 conferences decided to sponsor the official OpenFlux Big Idea Contest. Here’s how it works.

OpenFlux makes it so easy to build custom components that we’ll prove it. We want to see your best component ideas and designs. You come up with it, and we’ll build it. Entries can be submitted as pencil sketches, design mock-ups, or even plain text. The submission with the most votes at the end of the contest takes home a PlayStation 3 courtesy of 360Flex!

The contest deadline will extend past the 360Flex San Jose conference, but you’ll need to be in the audience on Wednesday to hear the final deadline. That means you’ll have plenty of time to learn more about OpenFlux in San Jose and even develop your own OpenFlux components! A fully functional component is a valid submission of course, but remember that your entry could still get out-voted by that one solid idea scribbled on the back of a napkin. I like to think that this is what OpenFlux is all about. It makes sure that framework details don’t get in the way of good ideas and helps developers become innovators. Once you have the ability, there’s only one question left… what’s the big idea?