Ryan Kmetz is Research Director at IQSpatial. We are privileged to have his time in this episode. He talked with us about economic conditions faced by geospatial workers in the US. We reflected on the emergence of a protest movement, the No Kings march a couple of weekends ago. We observed how this has emerged in the context of very high cost of living, lack of wage growth, high costs of housing and education. Ryan is a useful guest here because he has in his family history a great great great grandfather who was involved in similar protest movement against a Russian czar and was sent to Siberia as punishment. In a hero's journey like so many who have come to America over the centuries, this man escaped prison to New York City where he sold newspapers on a street corner. A few generations later we have Ryan to tell this story and remind us that things happen in cycles.

By using a translation service you can read more about this family member here.

Ryan also told us about another family member who adds to the picture of unrest like we see now occurring in cycles, and how cynical political figures can exploit underprivileged groups in society to distract the population from the real causes of their issues. I recommend listening to find out more about that family figure.

Ryan then turned the mic toward me for a summary of what I have observed in my career from the perspective of exploitation of the poor and vulnerable. It was a chance to step through what I covered earlier in the year in 8 episodes starting here. We then used this material about cycles of exploitation of the vulnerable in society across the centuries, examples of how to deal with that from his family history and evidence of this pattern continuing in my career across the world to make the case for a new way of worker participation in the economy.

That new way is expanding democratic participation via owning shares. When you own shares you can vote on how a company is run. Through community organising (and we can use a prior guest Frank Romo for inspiration here) Ryan and I perceive there is an opportunity to assert ourselves in the industry to direct our work to favour the poor and marginalised.

I look forward to your own reflections on this matter and working with you to build up a force for justice here.

0:00 - Motivation for Microsoft to compete with Esri

1:20 - Who is Rakesh and data engineering services of SketchMyView

6:40 - Deploying a land and planning GIS for the UK government with Microsoft Synapse

22:25 - Is there a similarity between Synapse and Fabric?

26:26 - ACID compliance, delta files, lakehouses, bronze, silver, gold layers

35:18 - Apache Sedona in Fabric tutorial

57:20 - Why is it worth it to use Apache Sedona in Fabric?

1:00:44 - SedonaDB

Apache Sedona is a way for a regular Apache Spark using data analyst to acquire geospatial capabilities. With Sedona, if you know SQL, you know GIS. Rakesh Gupta is Principal Consultant at SketchMyView in London. He tells us about how to set up Apache Sedona in Microsoft Fabric in 2 lines of code. It was a privilege to have his time for this tutorial as he showed how easy it is to get up and running with a powerful, free spatial analysis system that leverages Apache Spark for scalable compute. He also touched in the new SedonaDB, released last month. This is a significant development for the geospatial economy because it is a database created with geospatial data as a first class citizen. This means we have our own database library that is only a pip install away:

pip install "apache-sedona[db]"

Something to consider as a replacement for DuckDB. More here and here.

Having started his career at USGS in 1980, Joe Francica is a veteran of the geospatial industry. He has a lot of experience in publishing, for example as Editor In Chief of (the now shuttered) Directions Mazagine…and he has been host of On Point with Korem.

Joe’s latest venture is www.LocationIntelligence.us. In my endless search for the world’s geospatial companies, I came across his Guide to the Location Intelligence Marketplace.

It contains his global list of over 1000 such companies. What a treasure trove! Joe has of course made his own effort to segment the market.

In Appendix 4, the report has over 100 venture capital and private equity firms that are versed in the task of assessing viability of geospatial business ideas.

A fascinating statistic - in the decade 2015-2025, Joe estimates that these firms have put $USD10 billion into geospatial ideas!

The timing of this episode is exquisite. Just when I was starting to think about starting a business in another industry, he has got me thinking again. If others have had success, why can’t I? And why can’t you?

Thanks Joe, for inspiring us and giving us this report as an expression of a tremendously successful career.