Esri vs Open Source GIS: The Real Debate Behind the Tools

It started the way most online debates do: with a LinkedIn post and a strong opinion. I’d shared a graphic about modern GIS tools, highlighting open-source workflows and cloud-based options I believe help push the industry forward. Kyle Satterfield, GISP, had a different take. He took my graphic, dropped it into ChatGPT, and asked it […]

Breaking the GIS Silo: Why GeoParquet and Iceberg are the key to Spatial Analytics at Scale

For decades, GIS has lived in a world of its own. Specialized software. Obscure formats. A profession that, despite being critical to everything from climate modeling to logistics, has remained siloed from the rest of the data world. But that’s finally starting to change. In the latest episode of the Spatial Stack podcast, I sat […]

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 […]

Why Cloud-Native Geospatial Is the Future of GIS (And What Comes Next)

For decades, working in GIS meant downloading massive datasets, struggling with storage limits, and figuring out how to make sense of it all locally. I remember those early days clearly—each download felt like a commitment, and each analysis came with its own compromise. We got used to it. But looking back, that entire process feels […]

How Placekey Is Revolutionizing Spatial Joins and Entity Resolution

If you’ve ever tried to merge location data from different sources, you’ve probably run into the same nightmare I have: mismatched formats, duplicate addresses, missing POIs, and enough edge cases to make your head spin. This is why I was excited to sit down with Hayden Mortimer, president of Placekey, on the latest episode of […]