The Real Story Behind Faster Spatial Queries I’ve been in geospatial long enough to know that performance metrics can be deceptive. When I recently ran a query to enrich drive-time isochrones with population data—something that’s geometry-heavy and computation-intensive—I got results from two powerful engines: Wherobots and BigQuery. Wherobots returned results in 57 seconds.BigQuery took 1 […]
What the Modern Data Stack can teach us about the future of geospatial
There are a few truths you can always count on in geospatial. Something is always changing. There’s always a new way to do something. Spatial is special. Spatial data needs to be democratized. Spatial data is in a silo. Spatial data is a second class citizen. I have heard so many of these over the […]
Why Cloud-Native Geospatial Data Is Making “Spatial” Just Data Again
Every once in a while, a conversation topic starts surfacing repeatedly, unprompted, from completely different directions. This week, for me, that topic was cloud-native geospatial data. Seven conversations in 24 hours. All roads leading to the same challenge: geospatial data is abundant but remains frustratingly difficult to use. What struck me wasn’t just the volume […]
The Role of Geospatial Data in AI, LLMs, and the Next Wave of Tech Innovation
When people talk about AI, the focus is usually on large language models, GPU power, or the next wave of multimodal capabilities. But there’s a quietly growing field that could be just as important: geospatial technology. In the latest episode of the podcast, I sat down with Justus Killian, partner at Space Capital, a venture […]
Upload, Visualize, and Share Map Tiles in Seconds
This issue is presented by MapHub TOP OF THE STACK Two quick datasets for mobile phone and data coverage. This data has always been hard to get your hands on but (at least for the US) I came across these shapefiles (they appear to be vectorized rasters) for LTE coverage for data and voice for the big providers: T-Mobile, AT&T, […]