As you already know, this year at GIS Cloud we are focusing all our resources on reinventing our platform and making all our solutions even more intuitive, as well as adding some new features that will make a huge impact on different workflows around maps.
That is why we decided to spend a significant amount of time presenting these solutions to our users, clients and partners across the globe. The annual FOSS4G Conference which was held this year in Boston seemed like a good base for the US East Coast Tour. As FOSS4G supporters for a couple of years now, we have come to know that this type of event is a great platform to meet the community and users from many different industries who are in search of solutions for data collection and management, as well as ways of improving the efficiency of cities and organizations working with location-based data on a daily basis.
FOSS4G is a conference organized entirely by volunteers, and we have to say, they did a great job. The first two days were reserved for workshops and other events, and there were many to choose from. Some workshops were introducing 3D visualizations, others were presenting different web applications, geocoder solutions and much, much more.
GIS Cloud held a “Real-Time Collaborative Mapping” workshop on the 14th of Monday, focusing on different workflows around data and on collaboration using maps as a basis. Attendees gained hands on experience with our solutions which enable users to complete their project using a single platform, with apps that work together, from data collection and management, to data classification and analysis, to creating a unique custom application on top of the platform. They also got a preview of the new GIS Cloud platform and an innovative collaboration tool, Collaboration Streams, which allow for real-time communication, exchange of documents and photos, drawing, as well as discussion around features or a certain ‘map view’.
We also seized the opportunity provided by FOSS4G’s hospitality and organized a separate co-located event in Boston on Tuesday: GIS Cloud Training Sessions. These sessions included a live demonstration of GIS Cloud Solutions for the entire workflow of an organization. On top of this, we had some time to present more about the company itself and to introduce real user stories and case studies in order to familiarize attendees with our vision and the impact of cloud-based GIS on organizations and communities worldwide.
The next three days were quite intense and we spent most of the time behind the booth, introducing Collaborative Mapping to new users or catching up with the existing ones about new developments and plans for the future. There were many interesting talks during the conference and two of them were given by members of our team. Dino, our CEO, talked about “Offline Maps Sync using SQLite” to a full and curious auditorium, and Igor, our Business and Partner Manager presented a way of building an app without coding in his presentation “Don’t Code, Configure: Turn Your Maps into Apps”, which brought us some interesting future partnerships.
We also had an opportunity to exchange experiences with fellow GIS exhibitors and to get a better grasp of the GIS community, whether during session breaks or at the many interesting social evening events FOSS4G organized for us, such as having draft beer at the Harpoon Brewery or mingling in the Boston Aquarium. Essentially, we all want to spread awareness about the many new mapping solutions on the market, especially in the cloud, and there are a lot of us dealing with similar challenges in our day-to-day work.
On Friday, FOSS4G wrapped up with an exciting invitation to next year’s conference in Tanzania, but our visit to the East Coast wasn’t over. We headed to New York State to meet up with users and clients, and to hold a few more workshops as well. On Tuesday the 22nd we had another full hands-on workshop in Albany at New York State Department of Agriculture & Markets. During the presentation we received many questions and were very happy for the interest and enthusiasm shown about our solutions. Due to many applications for the workshop in New York State we decided to organize one more in the north of the country, so on August 24th we held a similar workshop in Syracuse at the Syracuse Center of Excellence. New users were delighted to learn about the full array of possibilities GIS Cloud apps have to offer, and existing ones were enthusiastic about the new features we presented as a part of the new platform. We received great feedback from attendees of all the workshops and we are positive they are going to result with some great new partnerships in the near future.
