Welcome once again to our 5 Things on Friday column, our chance to end the week by sharing 5 cool, handy tips, tricks and resources that you may find useful in your job. These tips come from our team members and also as tips via our social media channels. To kick off 2017 we’ve shared 5 really cool items here including a handy event calendar, an opendata challenge, some amazing story maps, a free MOOC, and a beefy laptop. As usual, please do feel free to share your tips with us so we can consider including them in a future edition.
Commercial Drone Conferences & UAV events 2017
The Drone and UAV technology sector has exploded in 2016 and there’s no signs of it slowing in 2017. Last year we saw many events and conferences focused on UAV tech and 2017 will see many more. Here’s a handy resource and calendar of must-consider UAV technology conferences taking place in 2017. This is a huge area of interest for our team as we have greatly expanded our UAV and aerial mapping services here at GEO Jobe!
2016 definitely saw an explosion in ArcGIS Online use and in particular, a huge surge in the publication of Story Maps. With the gallery growing daily it can’t be an easy task to pick out the best of the best, however, Esri has done a fine job sharing their list of Top Story maps of 2016 and ten of their favorite team produced stories. the maps range from mapping terrorist attacks, the history of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and mapping the wetlands of the World. Great stuff here!
A reminder here for you data hounds and big data enthusiasts that Open Data challenges and competitions are becoming quite popular and frequent all around the country. These are typically somewhat localized and offered up by government agencies who are encouraging academia and industry to get their hands dirty, grab some opendata and develop some cool solutions to local issues and problems. One such challenge just issued comes from B.C., Canada in this data visualization challenge via the BC Innovation Council, BC Stats, and BC Centre for Data Innovation. In this specific example, the data visualization challenge is being applied to B.C. Housing market data – Good Luck! See details of the $75,000 prize here
Free Online Training for Imagery Analysis
The turn of the calendar to a new year is the perfect time to think about education, training, and professional development. For GIS professionals, Esri is a fabulous resource with plenty of free and paid education and training. One fine session kicking off in Feb is titled Earth Imagery at Work. This free online course is for everyone who is interested in applications of earth imagery to increase productivity, save money, protect the environment, and even save lives.
The Laptop With 3 Screens – Finally!
January is here and that also means time for CES, the World’s largest Geekfest and technology exhibition. Always chock-full of crazy tech, CES is your chance to get a glimpse at what will be coming this year to your local Best Buy, mobile handset shop, and to Amazon Prime. Once cool gadget our team picked up on is this very sweet, multi screen laptop from Razer. this bad boy will obviously appeal to the gamer inside you, however, the engineer, CAD tech, and GIS analyst will also appreciate the power and functionality afforded by this unit. If you get one be sure to send us a photo! Code-named project Valerie, the unit is expected to run you around $5K. If the Razer isn’t your cup of tea then perhaps this $9,000 Acer is more your speed!
We hope you found something of interest here. If you have a cool GIS, GeTech, Geo EDU, UAV or other story/tip of interest, please share with us via email (hit the Contact Us link to the right) or drop us a tweet @GEOjobeGIS
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