Geomob provides a forum to learn and exchange ideas about any interesting services and projects that deal with location. Everyone working in or curious about the location space or with location services is welcome. In this episode Ed Freyfogle introduces Geomob and draws parallels between the projects and ideas being presented in the Geomob community and the trends in the wider geospatial community.
This episode is sponsored by HiveMapper
A platform that takes video and creates 3D mapping layers based on that data. The video can be from a variety of different sensors, does not need to be vertically looking down on the geography and each 3D output is georeferenced!
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In Conversation
What Geomob Is
Daniel: Hey Ed, welcome back to the podcast — and I say welcome back because you’ve been here before. The first time you came along you talked a little bit about geocoding and translating between machines and humans. I remember when you contacted me and said, hey, I’d like to talk about this, I think it would make an interesting topic, and I remember thinking, okay, geocoding, I think we all get what it is. But it very quickly became very obvious to me that you are someone who thinks very deeply about the geospatial industry, and I really enjoyed that conversation. This is going to be my first attempt at actually introducing someone, so for the audience, to give you a little bit of background: Ed runs OpenCage Data, which is a geocoding service, he’s also invested in a few different geo startups, and he is, I guess you could call you, the founder of something called Geomob. So welcome again, Ed.
Ed: Thanks for having me back. So first of all, not entirely correct — I was not the founder of Geomob, but I’ve been running it for about 10 years. The original founder was a guy named Chris Osborne, and then he moved and he wasn’t able to bring it along, and then we took it over. Geomob is a meetup that we have every couple of months, so usually about once a quarter. We started it in London and we’ve been running it in London for about 10 years, and since then we’ve now expanded to a few other cities — four cities — and hopefully growing to a few more.
Ed: The thing that’s different about this meetup is it’s not a technical meetup, it’s not a startup event, it’s not a pitch event or anything like that. The only purpose of Geomob is to bring together people who are doing interesting things in the geo space, in whatever way, shape or form, and then we have fun and we learn a little bit about what they’re doing, and we hear some talks, and then we meet up and have some beers and we exchange information and people get to meet each other. We try to summarize it in our tagline, which is: geo innovation for fun or profit. So it could be startups, it could be big companies, it could be people from academia, it could be hobbyists — we have a lot of people coming from the OpenStreetMap community and those types of groups. Or it could just be people who are interested in maps or geo who are happy to come along.
Ed: As I said, we do it about once a quarter — it varies slightly, it’s not a very strict or rigorous schedule. Depending on the city we have anywhere between — I think the biggest one we’ve ever had was maybe 100 people, but normal is let’s say 50, 75 or so, and in some of the newer cities of course it’s still a little smaller. We’ve been doing it for about 10 years, and that gives us a chance to look back over where the industry has been and how it’s been evolving and what the trends are.
Daniel: What I find really interesting about Geomob — the idea of it and the community that you’re building around this concept — is that it’s everyone. It’s everyone that’s interested in geo, or interested in solving a problem that has something to do with geospatial, that has something to do with maps. I think this is what we’re seeing out in the industry as well. We’re not just seeing the classically trained geographers, the geospatial specialists and the remote sensing people involved in the industry anymore. These are people that are showing up and they’re solving problems, and they’re seeing interesting ways to do what we called mashups back in the day, where they are just curating a whole bunch of data or putting together different services in a way that solves a problem in the geospatial world.
Ed: Wow, I don’t think I’ve heard the word mashup in at least five years, so that’s kind of a weird throwback. But yeah, what you say is absolutely correct. We definitely have people with the hardcore GIS background — let’s say the national mapping agencies, in the UK the Ordnance Survey, or here in Barcelona, which is another city we’re in, the Catalan mapping agency. Those people definitely come and contribute and often give talks. But a big part of the audience is just people who don’t really self-identify necessarily as being geo developers, but much more that they’re building a service or a product or whatever that happens to have a geo aspect. And so they come along and tell us about that, and learn and meet the others and pick up some tips and tricks. It really is a very broad spectrum.
Doers Only
Ed: I could tell you a little bit about how we structure the event. It’s in the evenings, and depending on how many people volunteer to speak, we have anywhere between four and six different speakers. Each speaker gets 10 to 15 minutes to present their topic, and I really try to be selective — there’s one qualification I try to have in terms of who gets to speak, and that is they should be a doer. Maybe they’re a software developer, maybe they’re a product manager, maybe they’re the founder of a geo startup in some way. But really I want the people who are actually building and creating the things, not marketing and PR people.
Ed: Those talks take an hour, an hour and a half, and then afterwards we typically go to a nearby pub. Both of those sides of the event are very important: on the one hand the talks, where we learn about new things, but then the socializing aspect, where people get to mix and mingle and ask very detailed questions of the speakers if they found it interesting. And that’s what really creates the community. We found that’s quite important also, that we physically go to another venue, a more social venue, because then it breaks down the barriers in the audience. Sometimes some of the speakers we’ve had have been big names, or people from big brands, and then in the audience you might have a first-year student or something — but because it’s more of a social interaction, it’s much easier for people to comment and learn and share ideas. And that’s really what we’re trying to stimulate.
Trends Over 10 Years
Daniel: So we’ve got this very broad community of people that are interested in geo in some way, shape or form, and I think it’s really important to note that they’re all makers, they’re all people that are actually doing things — at least the presenters. So what kind of projects do you see them working on? Do you see any trends in this community?
Ed: A lot of drones, actually. It varies slightly by city. As I said we’re in four cities now, the original one being London, which is a huge city and has a huge thriving tech community, so a lot of startups, because they’re trying to get the word out about their service. In the other cities maybe it’s a different mix — we often have the event at different universities, so we get people from academia. But really it’s as broad a mix as possible, anyone who wants to volunteer.
Ed: In terms of trends, having done it now for 10 years, there are a lot of things that we see. One big trend, the mega trend, is that the barriers to entry to doing amazing things have fallen significantly. When we started Geomob in London, a big component was all the people from OpenStreetMap — that’s where OpenStreetMap started 15 years ago — and we saw a lot of people come from that kind of original OpenStreetMap group. One of their main motivations for creating OpenStreetMap was just getting access to data: it was cost prohibitive for people to get good geodata to do things. And now that’s not the case at all. Now the problem is the other way around, there’s too much data. So there’s more and more value in curation rather than creation of data.
Ed: Another big trend is of course the rise of mobile. Everyone now has a device with them all the time that knows where they are, and so that opens up all kinds of possibilities. And the trend that you alluded to at the beginning — that we have more and more people who don’t come from a GIS background in any way, they don’t have any kind of formal geo training, they don’t self-identify as being GIS people or geo people. They’re just software developers, or in many cases they’re just like, oh, I have an idea or a vision for a project or a product, and it turns out I need geo to do that.
Ed: And because of mobile, now more and more products have a geo aspect. Interesting, more and more niche tools are coming about. Whereas people previously might have taken a broader approach and said, I’m going to build this big amazing thing that’s going to change the world — we still have those kinds of people — but now you also see more and more people who just take a much more pragmatic approach and say, oh, I built this little service that does X, and it solves this niche need. People have this problem, I’m going to charge this amount of money to help them solve it. So we see businesses like that. But really it’s a broad spectrum — we’ve had startups all the way through to artists. Some of the projects that come in, there’s no business model behind it at all, it’s just someone says, this is a cool idea I had and the technology now makes it possible. We’ve been fortunate to have people who actually draw maps physically by hand, still draw maps, and come in and talk about how they do that and the challenges of doing that in an increasingly digital world. So really it’s the broadest possible spectrum of anyone doing anything interesting in geo.
Daniel: I’m really glad you mentioned that there’s room for non-programmers as well, for non-technical people, and that you have artists showing up and saying, hey, I’m physically drawing a map — this is not scalable, it’s probably not repeatable, this is a one-of-a-kind thing. You don’t need to be technical to do this, or perhaps even to appreciate it. So that’s really cool that that side of it is also being represented.
Building Is Easy Now — Getting Noticed Isn’t
Daniel: When you look at this broad spectrum of people and projects and ideas, and you’ve already identified a few of the trends you see at Geomob itself — do you see those trends being reflected in the broader geospatial industry?
Ed: I think so, in that the tooling around geo — whether it’s a service like Google Maps, or whether it’s the availability of data with something like OpenStreetMap — it’s just gotten so much easier to build things. And I don’t mean just quick little prototypes, I mean actually robust, scalable, usable, impressive tools and services. All of the software — I’m thinking of projects here like Leaflet or OpenLayers — that make it so much easier to do things with maps on websites and in apps. The ability to get the user’s location from a mobile application. All of that has made things so much simpler.
Ed: But then that opens an interesting challenge. Previously the challenge was, how do I get the data? Now you’ve got that, and then you say, well, how do I build it? Okay, so now it’s simpler and simpler to build it — and now increasingly the challenge becomes, just because I built it, how do I get people to use it? How do I make the world aware of my amazing thing? And that challenge remains difficult. But that’s what keeps it exciting.
Ed: I should say that not all of those problems — it has gotten simpler, but that doesn’t mean everything is simple. We had a talk a couple of weeks ago from a guy from a gaming background who has this company that just built a virtual reality exact replica of all of Manhattan — getting all the building shapes and profiles from OpenStreetMap and things like that. And a real technical challenge to do this, the massive amount of data, and they’re trying to render it super quickly. He showed us examples where you’re literally walking around Manhattan as you look through these virtual reality goggles. Very cool. So there are definitely still people pushing the technical forefront of what’s possible. But likewise now you also see more and more people whose challenge is, how do I motivate people to use the service, how do I get people to share the service, how do I tap into emotional desires and get people to really become passionate about a service?
Daniel: You’re touching on a really interesting point there, because in a world where everyone can, then everyone will — and we see this all the time in social media. And if everybody is doing it, this makes for a very noisy world. So then the next question is, how do I reach those people, how do I reach my people, how do I find them, how do I tell them what I’ve built? How do you see people solving that problem?
The Street Near You
Ed: There’s no single solution, it’s a combination of many things. But I will say this: there’s always space for creativity, and people are coming up with clever new things all the time. We had a talk two weeks ago in London at our last London event, and the guy who at the end was voted best speaker — we do an informal show of hands for best speaker — a guy named James, he had built an interesting service called The Street Near You. He came from the background of working in museums, and they found a dataset of the addresses and photos of people who had died in World War One — so millions of people in the UK, men, soldiers, who have died. And he took that dataset — it was on physical index cards — and they digitized it and geocoded all the addresses, and then created literally a mashup, as you say, showing that on a Google Map.
Ed: There was nothing really technically that complex or interesting about this service, but it really succeeded in tapping into an emotional current. He did this right around the 100th anniversary of the end of World War One, and he was very adept at using social media to get it out there. One thing it really reminded me of is that people are still — even though we live in a globalized society, and when something happens on the other side of the world you hear about it instantly — people are still very interested in what’s happening near them. And that’s something where location-based services have a key role to play. So with his mashup you could literally type in your address in the UK and see, okay, on my street how many soldiers were there that died, and you could see pictures of them. So very emotional. We’ve actually had many talks over the years of these kinds of historic things where you can visualize and go back.
Ed: We have a talk coming up in Barcelona in January that I’m really looking forward to, where they took old photos of Barcelona, of the old city, from the 1890s, and — I’m not sure exactly how they did this — but through different rendering techniques they created a Google Street View of the old city of Barcelona using these photos. It gives you the effect that you can walk through the city. Really cool. So that’s what I mean, where there’s still a lot of room for creativity. And the people who are doing well are the people who are understanding what data is now available, how to curate that, how to simplify it, and how to apply it to the new technologies in a way that makes it easily digestible for the relevant audience — and then how do you motivate that relevant audience to share it with their peers? With The Street Near You, that was why it exploded: people would check out their own street, or check out their parents’ house or whatever, and then they would immediately mail it to someone or post it on social media, and it just really exploded and really captured the public imagination.
Niche Over Global
Daniel: You mentioned Tobler’s first law of geography — that all things are related, but near things are more related than distant things — and that would definitely tie in nicely with that observation that people are really interested in what’s happening around them, what’s local to them, what happened on my street. And also that observation that if you build it they won’t come; you need to do something else, tapping into that emotional side of it. I wonder if we’re going to see more services like that in the future, as opposed to scaling up. We’re all talking about scale, how can we do this at a global scale — perhaps we’re going to shrink down again and say, well, how can we do this at a very local scale and provide something that’s really relevant to the users?
Ed: I think that very well could be the case, because there’s an adage in product management: if you’re making something for everyone you’re making it for no one. It’s much better to have the thousand people who love your product than to have the hundred thousand people who are kind of, yeah, okay, it’s nice. And obviously local geography is a way to do that. Over the years we’ve had — trying to think of some other services along that line — we had, right when they first launched, Citymapper, which is a successful startup, a well-known brand now in many cities. But it was originally designed as a tool for, as anyone who’s ever lived in London knows, one of the great weaknesses of the city, which is that it’s a huge pain to get around. And so Citymapper’s original premise is just, we help you get around London, and we combine all the different transport services. It sounds like a trivial thing — how do I get from A to B — but because they really adapted it to the nuances of London, it exploded. So there’s definitely room for those kinds of very niche products.
Daniel: Through your involvement with the startups that you’ve invested in, the startups that you’ve created yourself, and Geomob — you’ve been in the industry for a while now. When you look around, what kind of big opportunities do you see out there at the moment?
Ed: This idea of building niche services. And I don’t mean, as we just said before, concentrating on one city — but like targeting one very specific piece of the value chain and executing on that very well. That’s a little bit what we’re trying to do with OpenCage, with our geocoding service. We don’t do maps, we don’t do routing, we don’t do anything — we do geocoding, and that’s it. And so there are more and more companies like that who find their little niche and become the absolute experts on that. I think there’s always going to be opportunity for that.
ProxyAddress
Ed: There’s always room for creativity, there’s always room for people who — the old adage is true — find a problem and then solve it. One of the most memorable talks, and in some ways one of the most meaningful talks we’ve had at Geomob, philosophically, was in the UK there’s a service, and this is one guy’s idea, and again his background was as a designer, not as a software developer, not as a GIS person. It’s a service called ProxyAddress.
Ed: In the UK a big challenge that people have is that everywhere you go, every official interaction you have — let’s say you want to open a bank account or whatever — the first thing they ask is, can you provide your address and proof of address? The problem is if you’re homeless and you don’t have an address. Then that means you can’t get a bank account, and because you don’t have a bank account you can’t get an apartment, you can’t get a job. You kind of fall out of a lot of services because you don’t have this address, and it becomes unnecessarily difficult for you to try to get back into society.
Ed: And so what he said is, look, why don’t we create kind of fake addresses for people — a so-called proxy address — where it will look just like a real address, the postal service will treat it as a real address, but it will know to route that mail to the local council or whatever. And in this way these people will be able to get their foot back on the ladder and not fall out of the system — which obviously, once you’re out of the system, it’s usually difficult to get back into it, and much more expensive. So really amazing how this guy took the simple idea of, how can we find unused addresses? As an example, in many cities there’s a superstition against the number 13, so many streets won’t have a house 13. So what if, in streets that don’t have a house 13, we could create a database entry for house 13, and a homeless person can use that as their address? Really clever, a way of seeing a problem and thinking, okay, how do we solve this with the tools that we have currently?
Ed: The thing I really liked about this is that this guy was really approaching the problem from the design of the whole problem. If you had approached this with a committee and a team of product managers, you might say, okay, well, let’s go to the bank and we can assign this guy some kind of code and we can get the banks to recognize that code — and it’s going to require so much change and it’s going to be so hard to implement. And so instead what he said is, the existing systems out there all expect an address, so how do we give this guy something that is like an address, and that way he can stay in the existing system rather than trying to reinvent everything? Really eye-opening, really cool.
Daniel: It’s almost a little bit scary that we have to spoof a location so this person can get back into the system — that we need a physical address that’s actually tied to a location. You have to have a physical address I can send this thing to, otherwise you’re not welcome in our system. I think that’s really eye-opening and interesting in itself, especially in such a digital world. For me it really highlights the fact that those interfaces between the physical and the digital — we’ve got a long way to go to build all the bridges across there that we actually need.
Ed: Absolutely correct. The reason that stuck out as one of my favourite talks over the years wasn’t — obviously it’s a great cause and he’s helping people — but exactly what you’re saying: it really causes you to reflect on, are we doing this all wrong? Why are we forcing people to have a physical address? It really causes you to question some of the fundamental assumptions of your thinking about geography. And those are the best talks. Actually that’s one of the points: having done this now for 10 years, it’s often very surprising. People volunteer for the talk and they give me the title of the talk, and oftentimes I don’t know the people well, and I just say, okay great, you’re on this day. And ahead of time it’s almost impossible to predict which talks are going to be the most thought provoking. Some people come with seemingly very boring and dry topics, but they really change your thinking and they do such a good job presenting and bringing out the examples.
Ed: And then on the flip side — I hate to say it, but when we first started in London, London has many of the big tech companies, I’m thinking here the Googles of the world and Bing and stuff like that, they all have offices there. And so people were like, oh well, let’s get someone from these big companies — and they were super boring, because usually they weren’t the doer, it was the person reading the press release of what had been invented in California or whatever. And that was when we switched our model to saying, these companies are super innovative, but unless it’s the doer actually coming and talking about it, we don’t just want to have someone read a press release — that’s not teaching anyone anything. So you never know where the interesting topics are going to come from, and you never know who’s going to do a good job presenting. That’s why we have a format where we have five or six talks — and frankly, of the five or six talks every time, there are some that are amazing and there are some that are frankly less amazing. But it’s the mix.
Community, and How to Start Your Own
Daniel: I wonder if the reason why Geomob is growing the way it is — it seems to have grown in the last five or six months, you expanded to a few more cities, things seem to be happening on a more regular basis — I wonder if people aren’t recognizing that problem: okay, if I build it they won’t come, I need to tell someone, I need to be a little bit of a marketer, I need to be a little bit of a speaker. If my project is going to win I need to be able to spread the word somehow. So I wonder if something like Geomob is going to be critical in solving some of those problems for these creators out there in the world.
Ed: I think so. In some ways I think there’s also a lot of value in having a community around you. More and more, one of the trends especially among startups is the remote work trend, and it’s great for many reasons — speaking for myself, as someone who’s a parent, I have two kids and it’s much easier to structure my life if I can work remotely or work from home. But you definitely do miss that sense of community, and so Geomob helps provide that. We have them in all the cities, everyone’s welcome, and every time we get some new people who come, but we also usually have a group of regulars who’ve been coming for a while, and so you do build up that sense of community.
Ed: In some cases it’s interesting because, in London where we’ve done it a long time, people move through the industry at different stages in their career. Sometimes you might be a student, sometimes you might be the employee, sometimes then you maybe start your own thing, maybe then you’re working at a big company — people move through all different roles within the community. So it’s interesting to have that mix of perspectives. But I definitely think there’s a value in the physical face-to-face meeting, the social aspect of it.
Daniel: When I hear you talk about it and describe the community, I can’t help but draw a parallel to what’s happening in the digital space. We see the big trends — this idea of curation over creation of data, the relationships between and among data, between and among services in the online world. And it sounds to me like what you’re talking about is these same sort of relationships but just in the physical world, in between people. And that’s the thing that’s helping to drive the innovation that we see in the geospatial world at the moment.
Ed: I think so. The pace is definitely picking up, and the new ideas come from those interactions. Person A does something and then person B sees it and puts a new spin on it, or takes it a step further, or combines it with a different dataset, and then the next person does something on top of that. And of course that can happen in digital communities, but I think one way to accelerate it is also the face-to-face interaction. So that’s one of the goals of what we’re aiming for with Geomob.
Daniel: So I’m a listener of this podcast and I’m sitting out there thinking, this is great, I’m all in. How do I get involved in Geomob? What would I do if I wanted to start my own chapter, if you will, in the city that I live in?
Ed: First of all, of course, if you’re in one of the cities that we’re active in — and that’s London, Barcelona, Munich and Lisbon — you should come along to our events. Second of all, you should check out our website and get on the mailing list. We have a newsletter that we send out once a month where we send updates about the events and also summaries after the events. It’s only one email a month, so don’t worry, we’re not going to spam you.
Ed: But yes, we’re definitely on the hunt for other people, other volunteers who want to start Geomob up in their city. Over on the website we’ll set up a page where you can see some of the steps. I know what’s worked in the cities that I’ve been in, but there’s no rule that Geomob needs to be the same in every city — there are no hard and fast rules. Maybe in some cities like London it makes sense to have an event every two months because there’s so much going on and so many people; maybe in smaller cities once or twice a year makes more sense. This is not a slick, polished marketing event — that’s not what Geomob is about. Geomob is just about, everyone gathers, a few people talk about what they’re working on, and then we hang out. So as long as you’re trying to keep to that type of ethos, please do get in touch. There are contact forms on the website and we’ll definitely look at how we can get it going in your city.
Daniel: Ed, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to tell us a little bit about what’s happening in Geomob, the trends you see in the industry, and letting us know how we can get involved. Thanks so much for coming along today, much appreciated.
Ed: It’s my pleasure to be back, and congratulations to you on the success of the podcast over the last couple of months. In many ways it’s very similar to what we’re doing, by exposing different voices from the community — very similar to the Geomob ethos. So it’s great.
