A market analyst pulls a Starbucks foot traffic report. The numbers look fine. The store-by-store breakdown is clean. The chart is presentable. Then someone asks how the brand is performing in Mexico, and the report has nothing to say. You were looking at about half the company. In episode 45 of The Spatial Stack, I […]
Every decade or so, a new idea emerges that quietly shifts the entire trajectory of geospatial technology. H3 did that for the 2010s. S2 did it before that. But today, we’re looking at something entirely new. In a conversation with Felix Palmer, creator of A5, I realized just how much latent innovation still exists in […]
Every so often, an insight lands that shakes the foundation of how an entire field sees itself. During my conversation with Nadine Alameh, one line did exactly that: “Stop introducing yourself as a geospatial person.” Not because geospatial isn’t important. But because we’ve unintentionally built walls around a discipline that powers almost everything people do […]
Earth observation is at a breaking point. We have more satellites than ever, more sensors in orbit, and more raw data streaming to the ground every day. Yet most of that data is never used. And the cost of collecting, storing, and analyzing it has kept the industry locked behind government budgets, exclusive contracts, and […]
If you work in GIS long enough, you eventually discover a major tension in the field. Most geospatial tools evolved in their own universe, built around desktop workflows and specialized formats. At the same time, the modern data stack has exploded, bringing enormous advances in cloud computing, real-time processing, SQL analytics, and open source engineering. […]
