Geospatial technology, markets, and practice
My recent essay on the SaaS market argued that AI pressure is unlikely to apply evenly. The exposed segment was products in the middle of the market that are expensive enough to prompt examination, bounded enough to cleanly emulate, and shallow enough in terms of integrations that rebuilding them would not be outrageous. They were … Continue reading GeoAI and the Soft Middle of the Geospatial Market
This post summarizes themes that emerged across multiple sources curated by GeoFeeds during April and May 2026. Taken together, these themes suggest that geospatial AI (GeoAI) is moving through a familiar stage in the life of an emerging technology. The early question was whether it could do useful work. The current discussion revolves around what … Continue reading Geospatial AI State of Play, April–May 2026
Open source geospatial tools are good. I have been making some form of that argument for most of my career, especially on this blog. The mature projects are equal to or better than their proprietary alternatives. The communities that build and maintain them represent some of the best technical talent working in this space. None … Continue reading Sovereignty and Open Source
In February 2026, Gary Gale published a brief post describing a problem that, on its face, looked mundane. A volunteer‑maintained mapping project called Vaguely Rude Places had experienced an abrupt surge in traffic. Daily requests jumped from the low thousands to the hundreds of thousands. There was no corresponding spike in public interest, no viral … Continue reading When Geospatial Is Consumed at AI-Scale
Not everything I do these days is with AI. Lately, I've had the opportunity to do some work with Mergin Maps as part of my consulting work. It is a field data collection application by Lutra Consulting that builds on top of QGIS. The mobile collection app itself is available for iOS and Android through … Continue reading XLSForm with Mergin Maps