In this episode of OnPoint with Korem, I sat down with Jeff Jonas, an entrepreneur and a former distinguished engineer with IBM who is now the founder and CEO of Senzing. Senzing is a company that does Entity Resolution. What’s entity resolution? Let’s say your favorite hotel chain has three different loyalty club account numbers for you. How do they know all three are just one person? Or the government is trying to prevent a known terrorist into the country and the watch list has a slight name variation that should resolve whether it’s the same person or not. Entity resolution then is recognizing when two observations relate to the same entity. So, how much of this uses geospatial technology…all of it. Does this sound a little boring…maybe, but Jeff is anything but boring. I promise you’ll learn something so let’s hear from Jeff in this episode of OnPoint with Korem.

In this episode of OnPoint, I sat down with Ben Edelman, the vice president of Syndicated Telecom for Kantar, a worldwide media agency focused on providing data insights and strategy for brand development. Ben faces the challenge that many companies are facing today with dealing with the barrage of data and being able to geospatially analyze it faster for both marketing and competitive intelligence, specifically in his world to understand the potential of 5G and wireless internet access. And as you can tell, he’s right in the thick of it. Hear more in this episode of OnPoint with Korem.

In this episode of OnPoint with Korem, I spoke with Dennis Crowley, the founder and former CEO of Foursquare. Dennis discussed the company’s evolution from the days when Foursquare was known as the “check-in” app until today as one of the leading providers of hyper-local mobile movement and points of interest data. We also discussed the direction of Foursquare and consolidation of the mobile data industry and perhaps where it’s headed next. Stay tuned for another episode of OnPoint.

For many years, Ryerson University has been known as one of the best schools in which to study retail location theory. And today, I’ll be speaking with Dr. Joe Aversa, an Assistant Professor at Ryerson Ted Rogers School of Retail Management in Toronto, Canada. His current research interests and teaching responsibilities include retail location decision-making, big data analytics, retail planning and location strategy. All the topics related to the focus of our podcast series... where geospatial technology meets business. Stay tuned.

In this episode of On Point with Korem, I sat down with Bryan Mistele, CEO and founder of INRIX. We discussed the nature of how the collection of traffic and other mobility data is impacting everything from connected and autonomous vehicles to how this might impact the urban environment. Bryan discussed how cities will be transformed with more dynamic information, like optimizing traffic signal timing but also using location information arbitrage that hedge funds are leveraging to predict stocks prices. He thinks that whether its traffic lights, tolls, or sending messages to trucks and vehicles already on the road to avoid delays of even your latest amazon order, more dynamic data will lead to benefits for consumers.

In this episode of On Point with Korem, I had the opportunity to speak with Andy Dearing, the former CEO of Boundless Geo and now General Partner and Geospatial Project Lead at GeoFutures STL, an organization leading the economic development of geospatial technology in the St. Louis area. We spoke about a breadth of topics including the changing nature of deploying both open source as well as commercial geospatial solutions and the tradeoffs of both and how this has impacted the ability to find qualified technologists that are skilled in both programming and location analytics.

In this episode of On Point with Korem I sat down with Kevin Pomfret, a lawyer with Williams Mullen but also the director of the Center for spatial law and policy. Kevin is one of the few people in the legal profession that has studied the implications of geospatial technology with respect to licensing, data privacy, intellectual property, and regulatory issues. We cover a tremendous amount of ground during this conversation so if you’ve had questions about the legal constraints around data use as well as personally identifiable information, drones and even the impact of Apple’s iOS14 release, you won’t want to miss this podcast.

In this episode of On Point with Korem, I spoke with Dr. Sarah Battersby, a principal research scientist at Tableau, a Salesforce company and a former associate professor of geography at the university of South Carolina. Dr. Battersby spoke to the issue regarding the overlap of functionality between GIS and business intelligence and how much functionality should be developed within BI tools vs. how much is actually used and needed. She talked about how location analytics has become a true differentiator in the BI space. As a former university professor she advocated for the need to insert geospatial technology into curriculums designed for the business professionals.

In this episode of On Point with Korem, I sat down with Alan Smart. He’s the chairman of the Tasmanian Spatial Industry Council in Australia. We looked back a few years to a study that Alan was involved with sponsored by ACIL Tasman, a consulting firm, that attempted to value geospatial technology to a country’s individual gross domestic product (GDP). The results were absolutely fascinating because what was found was that between 0.6% and 1.2% of GDP was because of the productivity offered by geospatial technology.

In this episode of On Point with Korem, Jan Kestle, the CEO and Founder of Environics Analytics discusses how geography is the secret sauce inside of data and analytics as well as the overall importance of space in data. Jan noted that there are more solutions to leverage spatial analytics and that certainly the technology is available to more people. As such, Jan discussed promoting how universities need to take an interdisciplinary approach to educating students about the use of geospatial technology and also about how this new era of mobile movement data provides exception insights.