Generic selectors
Exact matches only
Search in title
Search in content
Post Type Selectors
podcast
Filter by Categories
ArcGIS Pro
GDAL
GeoJson
Map
Python
QGIS
Uncategorized

Indoor mapping and navigation: Manage, visualize, and analyze data

Chris: The geofence is a static boundary of a defined area whereas a proximity service is really as I’m traversing through a building what is around me right now? Is it in a mall, it could be points of interest and that again could be used for triggering messages or just for passive analytics. So there’s a lot of different things we can do.

Daniel: Hello and welcome to the map scaping podcast. My name is Daniel and this is a podcast about people and companies that are doing really exciting things in the geospatial world. Today I’m lucky enough to be talking to Chris Wiegand from Jibestream and he’s here to tell us about indoor mapping and geolocation inside and the challenges that they face doing that and what it’s currently being used for. Hi Chris.

Chris: Hey good afternoon.

Daniel: Thanks so much for taking the time to come along and talk to us today.

Chris: Pleasure is all mine thank you.

Daniel: Maybe you could start just by introducing yourself a little bit and telling us a little bit about your background and what Jibestream is doing.

Chris: Sure, well my name is Chris Wiegand I’m the CEO and co-founder of Jibestream. We’ve actually in our tenth year now so it’s been an excellent journey for us and for me personally it’s always been an entrepreneur. So I’ve put myself in that serial entrepreneur category and starting businesses from a very young age, maybe first time was nine or ten with some sort of painting, grass cutting business and several others after that. Moving into technology for me was a natural segue from working at a traditional print shop that was going digital that was really the beginning of that CRM based one to one messaging which was very interesting for me in terms of how we reach people with the most impact.

Chris: That’s really where we started in shopping malls trying to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time. Our first concepts had facial recognition that would detect age and gender and of course location it was at a kiosk at that time and trying to make sure that we were giving somebody some intelligent wave finding instructions in terms of where are you right now, what are you going to be passing along the way, what’s the weather, the temperature, perhaps what’s the most relevant message to you.

Chris: So from that point on the facial recognition never actually made it through. The idea of delivering the right message at the right time has always stayed with us and now much more impactful with location awareness and mobile. And we moved on to expand our products or our verticals from just shopping malls to include places like NATO headquarters, the Pentagon, hospitals, corporate campuses and really we are now a fully horizontal platform with a myriad of cases that all involved location and mapping.

Daniel: Excellent I think for some of the listeners we were probably a little bit jumped into a little bit deep there right from the start but you mentioned a whole bunch of things there. You mentioned geolocation and the right time messages and so I’m thinking we’re over in some location based services. How are you locating things inside? This is traditionally a really, really difficult thing to do. I don’t think GPS is probably the right tool for the job. Can you explain to us how you’re doing it?

Chris: Yeah absolutely. So everything starts for us. We typically work in large complex buildings and we start with the base building drawings so the CAD drawings and convert them into vector based files so that we have what we consider the building to be addressable. For us addressable means that the map is broken down into objects and layers that can be connected with third party systems. Some of the systems could include things like asset tracking. So, assets as we know are many different things. It could be things or people or devices and we’re agnostic to the different technologies that are out there today in terms of how we capture locations. So depending on what the use case is, if it’s just straight wave finding and getting someone from point A to point B with a blue dot, that maybe done with beacons. If it’s going to be something perhaps more mission critical in a hospital ultrasound in terms of location technologies and really always just sizing up what’s the level of accuracy we need and what’s the right technology and solutioning for that?

Chris: As I mentioned navigation has been a key part of this and always will be, but it’s also becoming as we move into the world of IOT, data visualization and there’s information that has spacial context that today just lives on a list format sort of report and we give that context by putting it on a map and that could be anything from room occupancy to what’s the status of an infusion pump in a hospital. Really anything that has spacial context we give the tools through our platform to put that in reference to a map.

Daniel: How would positioning work with a beacon or ultrasound? What’s the process for that?

Chris: Well first we need to make sure that the building itself is just spatially accurate on the world map so that we not just from beacons and otherwise, but somebody could seamlessly travel from outdoors to indoors and we can continue that journey. Once we’re inside depending on the level of accuracy required it could be BLE beacons that are battery powered that are on the ceiling different places to create a mesh network that we can triangulate from. Or it could be ultrasound which similarly have hardware and the big change is happening now is whether those are powered by batteries or by power over ethernet type of thing. There’s another player in the mix with this usually or always for us when it comes to positioning. We are the visualization tool of that blue dot or device. The indoor positioning companies that are triangulating those sensors and passing us in XYZ coordinates so that we can put that on the map.

Daniel: Wow, it’s pretty amazing. Do you guys make all your own obviously you make your own software and program your own software, what about hardware? How does this positioning work? Do I get a completely different device for this? Is it another completely separate device I have to carry around or does it work on a tablet or what kind of hardware do I need as a user of this?

Chris: Well it works on any device. Our platform itself is a deploy through SDK’s and API’s. We have web and then native android and iOS and it will obviously work on any mobile device with those platforms and we don’t actually own or produce any of the hardware. We’ve kept ourself very open and agnostic to that. It is a fast changing world when it comes to location hardware and we really work with whatever our clients have or we suggest what we think will work best depending on the use case and what they’re looking to do.

Daniel: Okay so if I try summarize this a little bit, you guys do positioning inside we’ve definitely established that. You rely heavily on users coming with data. So they have CAD files or GAS files which you upload to your system in some way and then you decide depending on the level of accuracy needed you choose the hardware for that, either the beacons or the ultrasound or maybe a third kind of hardware and you throw that together and then you do what with it? Okay great people can find their way around. You said something about just in time messaging before was that correct? Is this part of it?

Chris: Yeah absolutely. So there’s many different use cases depending on just to step back a minute, it could be a guest or employee facing application. I’m trying to look for something like a meeting room in a corporate office or it could be even something more back office like I’m a security guard and I need to respond to something. So the types of messages and alerts that somebody might get or even the navigation to get through the building is quite different. It is based on your profile which is a major feature of ours. It’s where the view that you’re going to have on your device is really dependent upon what the rules and rule based access you have to that information meaning a security guard would have information that’s restrictive back of house hallways and things like that versus someone corporate.

Chris: So now that we have that established you exactly nailed it right there. There’s geofences which is a defined boundary within a building or around a building. We treat a whole campus as a big indoor map if it’s going to be the same journey for that customer in terms of how they want to use the maps. That means as I walk into that boundary it would trigger an event. That event could be anything from a pop up message meaning welcome or it could be a security alert if somebody doesn’t have access to that area and they’ve walked into it as a visitor in a building or it could be pure passive analytics and understanding how many people have gone through that area and how long they’re staying there. Perhaps we can start to calculate things like wait times in a hospital based on how long people have been sitting in a certain area like a waiting room.

Chris: Another thing we have is something called proximity service. So the geofence is a static boundary of a defined area whereas a proximity service is really as I’m traversing through a building what is around me right now. Is it a mall it could be points of interests and that again could be used for triggering messages or just for passive analytics. So there’s a lot of different things we can do once we’ve got the map in a digital format and set up all these sort of things like geofences and have location awareness.

Daniel: It’s a really interesting and timely idea. The idea of personalized notifications. It seems to me when I look around the world now that things are becoming more and more personal. I was even listening to a talk the other day, podcast actually. I love podcasts, listening to a podcast and this person was talking about how when we’re online for example our experiences are so, I don’t want to say manipulated but they are designed for us. They’re designed for each and every individual that arrives online apart from our websites and they were talking about how in the future perhaps the website would change depending on who was looking at it and where they’re looking at it from. I mean that happens today with our search results. So I think this idea of personalized messengers, especially depending on where you are. Where your location is, is really really interesting and I think we’re going to see a lot more of that in the future.

Daniel: You said before that this was a seamless, that navigation was seamless so there was no problem going from inside to outside. What kind of companies are using this and what kind of areas? You talked about campuses before and you talked about hospitals. Are they generally bigger locations that are interested in this?

Chris: Yeah absolutely. We think about when we first started designing these systems we were taking it from the perspective of somebody who is already in the building and in a certain position within that building. But the reality is that that journey did not start at the front doors of the building. They obviously start somewhere else like home or somewhere else in the city and you need to get from where you are to where you’re going inside the building. So what we want to do is remove friction from that experience and friction is things like traffic, so integrating with outdoor mapping and traffic. Can help us avoid that. Then also when we look at reaching a building I’m going somewhere inside the building meaning if it’s a hospital, it’s a fracture clinic or something like that often what people have done in the past is they would type in their search bar the address of the building they’re going to which might be the furthest point from where you’re actually going inside.

Chris: So what we do is georeference or geocode all of the indoor locations with the outdoor parking lots or parking garages and that way I can say perhaps I’m at home, hey I’m going to the fracture clinic today and it’s going to take me to the west lot, opposed to maybe the south lot where the mailing address is and I’ve already removed friction because I’m closer to where I need to go. As I cross a geofence, actually the whole boundary of the property or the building itself, it now becomes an indoor map and we can start to rely on managing the look and feel and behavior of the map for that building. We can integrate with on site location services rather than GPS and really be with that person all the way out through their journey. And as things change because often they do. Maybe you’ve come for three appointments and the first appointment is backed up and we know that from maybe an integration from the queuing system in a hospital and we can help them go to appointment number two instead of number one first.

Chris: So we’re trying to do everything we can to always make that as seamless and frictionless experience for people and we do that by integrating with as many third party systems as possible to give is that real time information just like when we’re driving in our car or we’re driving something with Waze, there’s accidents there’s traffic, and we want to help people avoid those things all relative inside as well.

Daniel: Now because we all have devices in our pockets the smartphones that we walk around with and glued to every single second of every single day, and we have something called Google Maps they’ve kind of brought location to the world if that makes sense. It works on GPS and it doesn’t matter where you are you can get those locations. They’ve managed to scale their services globally. This sounds like it’s going to be a really difficult thing to scale. It sounds like it’ll be a long time before we see perhaps one provider giving us the ability to navigate just as easily inside as we can outside. What do you think the future of this kind of technology is in terms of scale, in terms of being able to do this everywhere?

Chris: Well I do agree it will take time but what we are seeing is most of the industrialized world, corporate campuses, hospitals all the major centers we go to they’ve been working on pilots for the last nine years, maybe longer and we’re starting to see much more I would call enterprise deployments happening. So not just a couple sites, but all of the sites and will it be one provider, not sure what that will be comprised of. But we’re certainly seeing that the enabling technologies are becoming much more [inaudible 00:30:08] and that would be the location sensing technologies and instead of always being deployed through a battery based beacon, we’re starting to think about these things before buildings are built. So putting it into the fixtures like lights and all different kinds of things where these sensors can live and then be turned on as needed for not just one use case, but several and I think that’s the big difference as to why this is going to scale is because people are looking at this now as a platform play versus point solutions.

Chris: So in the past we’d see people turn on a whole infrastructure just by turn by turn wave finding and now they’re recognizing hey with addressable maps and location services I can power security, facility management, productivity use cases, facility all these different kinds of things that really extend value across the whole enterprise and I think once you have full recognition of that it becomes a lot faster because there is a business need. It’s not a nice to have anymore, it’s really becoming mission critical and maps and location are being recognized now as a foundational layer to iterative things, maybe a middle wear, but a very important one at that.

Daniel: Yeah I couldn’t agree more. I think location data is just as important as time data has been for the last 30, 40, 50 years maybe longer. I think it’s everywhere and I think… I’m a geographer myself and I can remember the good old days when we used to run around saying spacial is special and I don’t think it is anymore. I think spacial is normal and I think that’s the road we’re going down. We’re just expecting it now. It’s not a nice to have, or an extra thing or something new and exciting. It’s just going to be normal.

Chris: Completely agree.

Daniel: If we go back to this idea of scaling navigation inside, I think about open street map and what that’s done for geolocation and mapping services the world over and I wonder if you could imagine a time perhaps we crowd source or where there’s one source of data for buildings for example. A detailed database where anyone can go to and get that kind of data. I can see that being a huge problem had the opportunity to work with CAD files a lot in my day job converting them to other file formats and the data lost along the way it can be a long road, it can be a bit of a nightmare.

Chris: Yeah it can be and what we’re seeing to solve for that is some standard formats. So first geojson is becoming a universal standard for maps and maybe a point of which different systems are I guess more likely to communicate with each other versus some proprietary versions of different map files. So that’s been a big start. Maybe even more specifically we’ll see what kind of traction it gets over the next couple of years, but the apple IMDF file formats which and essentially Apple is looking for crowd source maps, but under very specific requirements and validation so that they can build up their indoor maps warehouse from providers like Jibestream and others and like I said they’ve got a very specific requirement on those maps and it’s becoming a standard in the industry for how buildings like shopping malls and others that want to share their maps publicly through Apple can do so. So I think that will be a big part. It has been a wild west so far in terms of specifications and requirements for maps and I do see that that is going to get standardized and there’s a big benefit for everybody to follow a standard. The question is what will be the standard.

Daniel: Location data is very personal and we talked about that a little bit before, the idea of getting a personalized message depending on where you are. I’m lucky enough to live in Denmark and the European Union and they’ve just passed some rules around the protection of personal data. Can you see that as being a problem for your industry for this kind of continuous mapping, that this kind of continuous geolocation and tracking I guess you could call it, because it is seamless. It’ll happen your move from the outside to the inside, you’re not safe or protected on the inside. Can you see that as being a problem for your business?

Chris: I think if managed properly like everything else there’s always a risk of privacy when handling any kind of data. Now Jibestream ourselves we’ve always had a clear policy around it. We don’t own the data, we don’t store the data and often it’s really not even in our possession. But it is in somebody’s possession and I think it comes down to always having opt in use cases, when we look at if you had a child birthday and said we’re going to put this chip in their arm so that if they’re ever abducted we would be able to find them immediately and have them back safely and then you’d be excited about that. Now if they did the same thing and said we’re going to put this chip in their arm and we’re going to track all their movements and market to them based on their preferences and track them [inaudible 00:20:14] you wouldn’t be very willing to do that.

Chris: So it’s really going to have to be why am I opting into this which is usually an exchange for value. At work the value is to remove friction from my day, give me the option to turn it on or off. We have clients today that give their employees the opportunity turn on my location to allow my quote friends or colleagues to know where I am all the time or maybe just for a half an hour. So I think that’s going to be some very careful planning on the behalf of the sponsors of these deployments so that they build and maintain trust because I think that once somebody has their trust shaken with a solution and it feels like hey this is not what I intended it to be tracking me for, people have the option to turn it off so I think we all have to be very careful about that. But there is tremendous value on both sides of the equation for us to have these technologies. It’s always take with care, right?

Daniel: Yeah, yeah absolutely, absolutely and I do agree with you. I think there is tremendous value in this kind of thing if managed and used correctly. I could imagine it would be quite easy to be the skeptical consumer and say oh, no all I can see happening here is I walk past Mcdonalds and I get a push notification on my phone that says hey eat now kind of thing. But I think what we’re talking about here an the examples that you’ve given they’re more work-related is that correct?

Chris: Well there’s always the opportunity in what people always think of in what you mentioned if I’m in a shopping environment and that’s not going anywhere but I wouldn’t want it to give the impression that that’s the highest value or the only value proposition. I start to think about where we’re working now is worker safety. So, people who are working in dangerous jobs whether it be in mining or otherwise, they have invested interest to be tracked and want to have someone automatically alerted if they have not arrived at where they should of in the time that they should have. We’ve got unfortunate situations where active shooters and different things like that where we want to know that people are accounted for or any kind of disaster emergency and so those are the types of use cases that we’re seeing come up more often now than the marketing use cases.

Chris: I think the long term value and benefit to people is certainly making it on a must-have versus a nice to have value proposition for our clients.

Daniel: Yes, when I think about location-based services and especially the kind of things that we’ve been talking about here for the last couple of minutes here, I think I wonder when Facebook when Apple when Google is going to introduce their own version of this. Is that something that you think about? Can you see that on the horizon?

Chris: Absolutely, we see Apple has already entered into the space but their model is very different. They work with companies like Jibestream to produce and manage the maps. That’s not the business they necessarily want to be in and I think the same sort of applies for all of these larger companies like Facebook, Google, Apple they’re not typically in the application business. They’re more at the infrastructure platform side and looking to other providers, smaller providers like us to produce really the special sauce around how are we deploying and managing these solutions.

Chris: Many of them it may appear that they’re coming out with their own solutions, but it’s made up of players like ourselves that are driving these technologies in the background and that’s for us no problem. In any case, we’re not completely brand-centric that everybody needs to know this is a Jibestream solution. Our goal is really to drive OEM solutions and to be baked into these products which could include those companies and often many other large corporations as well that want to have their own solution and for a very pragmatic reason. It takes many different components to create the end solution and so they’re taking best of breed of all the different things that comprise that solution and that includes mapping, positioning, but also the user experience and all of the different things that somebody might do with that application a day.

Chris: So it’s unlikely that we’re going to see a fully through and through Google or Facebook solution that’s all internal technology. I think it’ll be a myriad of technologies that make up that end solution.

Daniel: Yeah and I guess I should clarify when I’m thinking of when I think of those larger companies coming into the space, I think of them coming in as creating awareness around it once possible. I think in general there’s a bit of skepticism around just delivering all your data to someone like Google if you’re a large organization if you’re an airport or a hospital or something like that. Not just Google of course but any large corporate entity and I think people will hand over things. They would be more inclined to take more of a solution they can control a little bit more themselves. But I see it as a way of just creating awareness around what’s possible and I think as soon as that’s done the idea, people will start to expect this.

Daniel: They’ll go to an airport so I can see this great solution in front of me where you arrive at the airport, it’s a stressful situation. My flight is canceled, a push notification arrives to my phone and says where walk this way, go this way stand over here kind of thing and where you’re personally guided through the airport and shown what to do is very simple example but I think once we’ve come to expect more then we also, then companies like Jibestream will also step up and start to deliver more.

Chris: Yeah absolutely and you raise a great point about data ownership, data control and working with clients like San Francisco airport they really have a mandate to be their own digital landlord which I think is an interesting model and what that means is they don’t want outside mapping companies or airlines and different vendors for the airport all creating maps of their space for a number of reasons. One is consistency and accuracy and just control of the data. Whereas now that they’ve got their map digitized and combining that with location they’re going to be able to provide an API to anybody who wants maps of their location while being able to suppress proprietary ideas that don’t want to make public depending on who you are. If you’re in emergency services, great you get everything. Sometimes if you’re a different type of provider you might just need basic maps. So now they’re in control of their space and as they make changes and I’m not speaking specifically for them, but going into the future for airports and other venues like them it could even become a revenue model to say hey we’ve got maps as an API that comes with location and pay a fee for that service type of thing.

Chris: So it’s changing dynamics out there and I think we’re going to see just for the reasoning you said nobody really wants to give everything over to any large corporation like Google in terms of their proprietary data. They’ll control it and then they’ll distribute it as they see fit.

Daniel: Can you give me one of your favorite examples of indoor tracking, indoor mapping, indoor geolocation working really well and some of the benefits that have come with it?

Chris: Yeah I think that where I see the biggest benefits is in a place like a hospital. There’s so much going on in a hospital and obviously the reason people there ranges from typical employment to something that’s maybe more life saving so where we know where specific devices are, they literally can save lives or at least dramatically improve the outcome for patients. So that could be things like wheelchairs as a level of comfort, getting someone from point A to point B and knowing where those wheelchairs or beds are to something like an infusion pump. This can really make the difference if a health practitioner goes and grabs a piece of equipment and it’s supposed to be ready but it’s not. Maybe it’s clean, or dirty sorry and has a low battery that can have a huge impact. So that’s what really excites me is when I see mission-critical use cases being carried out with location technologies and in contrast to that in a different environment and manufacturing, again you’ve got buildings that are three, four million square feet with literally millions of things in them, knowing where they are, how to find them. Combining that with worker safety and things like that is what I think is the exciting part about our future is how we’re really going to impact the way people work and live.

Daniel: Could you imagine your system or this idea of navigation inside, could that be integrated with autonomous vehicles at some stage?

Chris: Yes absolutely.

Daniel: I was just thinking when you gave that example I’m assuming it was a warehouse you’re talking about, you’re talking about an incredibly large space filled with millions of objects, I just thought that would be the perfect use case for an autonomous vehicle, a robot of some kind. A pick pack whatever and if it had detailed information about where things were and where things and where the other robots were in relation to it then it could be very efficient I think.

Chris: Yeah absolutely and one of the key pinpoints or ways that we can really help with those sort of things is maps are always changing and that’s largely the most underestimated part about deploying an indoor positioning mapping system is not just getting it out there but the day to the management of those maps. So the way we solve for that is by integrating with third-party systems whether it be tenant management systems or whatever is controlling space or sometimes we become that single source of truth and automating the change or at least making it very easy to make changes so that everything is up to date and accurate. So as in this case, the autonomous vehicle was looking for something. It is where it’s supposed to be and it’s not bumping into any walls. I’m sure it wouldn’t anyways but you get the point that the maps being up to date is a key thing of course and then some of our customers they literally have hundreds of thousands of changes a month that are really largely automated through these integrations.

Daniel: Yeah I completely agree. Maps location is constantly changing and data is only good if it’s correct and up to date and accurate. I would personally rather have no data than inaccurate data. How do you push out these changes? I remember reading on your website at some stage there that this system would work offline as well. So let’s say I’m offline, how do I know I’ve got the most correct, accurate data?

Chris: Well the map loads the first time, so you would need an internet connection or data connection on initial load. But once it has then you have those cached on your device and whether you’re online or offline you’re going to have access to all of the points of interest and the navigation and everything you expect in terms of that experience. What you wouldn’t get offline is any new updates. That being said with our platform we have the ability to push updates across all devices at the same time by publishing a change in our content management system. That would although it’s going out to all the devices, as I mentioned earlier the profiles feature depending on your role and your access what you’re user experience is defined by all of that you would get the updates as well it just may be more in depth if you’re having full access to a map with all of the backup house areas or it may be a limited view. But the point is we manage it all in one place and you publish that change once and then it would be updated and refreshed across the devices that are consuming that API.

Daniel: When I realized we’ve touched on this a little bit in the before in the conversation, but I just wanted to ask you what can we expect of this kind of technology in the future? More of the same, just faster? Or are there new exciting things just around the corner?

Chris: Well I really believe that having the foundational layer of maps and location infrastructure it’s going to be now up to the business units or people that are defining these use cases of what they want to do because really the only limitation if your imagination. We’re seeing people do new and interesting things every day as I mentioned I think it’s becoming much more about these operational mission critical use cases. But I’d say the first thing we’re going to see going back to earlier in our conversation is scale. Where can we expect to see these things? We’re going to really become quite accustomed to having it available to us and most of the environments we go into. We are moving definitely from this pilot stage to more [inaudible 00:40:37] deployment so that’s exciting.

Chris: We still have some hurdles to get over though and that really comes down to interoperability. There are still legacy systems at the facility management level and all levels that maybe still have some modernization to do in terms of the types of maps that they can share from their base building drawings out to systems like ours. Other sets of data that become very important to the use cases need to make sure they can essentially talk to each other as we always say in internet of things. So the next year I think we’re going to see scale and more interoperability. But from there we can expect to see all the things we’re getting outside and I think that’s the big thing is that the indoor world is the next frontier.

Chris: So we’ve got excellent location analytics. We’ve got excellent seamless and frictionless driving because of traffic apps and things like that and all of those same things that we’ve been experiencing outside should be available inside perhaps with more. Maybe there’s going to be more things like augmented or mixed reality and the more data we can share and interoperate with and put it in context with a map just brings so much more value and then new ideas on what we can do next. So I believe that once we have it going it’s going to morph itself and again every day we’re surprised and delighted by the ideas that our customers have to solve their business needs using maps and location.

Chris: The world we’re living in today it’s very real time and also just in time. We’d love to say that we’re all planning ahead for everything but often we’re leaving one meeting room and we’ve got somewhere to be and getting to that room based on an elevator’s down or something like that. Seamlessly navigates around and then the world of automation. I walk into an area of the building, it knows my preferences or maybe I’m the only one there and it’s got different lighting controls. You enter a room and the phone starts dialing, so it becomes this big seamless journey as I keep saying. But the premise of all of it is location.

Daniel: I think that is a fantastic way of looking at it. When you say that we can expect all the things that we have outside today inside, there was I think you really nailed it there. That’s definitely my expectation as well. But like you said maybe just a little bit richer because I think the nuances in a home or in a building or a place of work yeah I think once they’re mapped, once they have a location then yeah I think we’ll be in for some really exciting times. What would you say to someone or what would you encourage them to do, someone who is looking into getting into GAS, into mapping, into geospace for today. I’m at a university what should I study, what should I think about? What kind of skills should I acquire?

Chris: Wow that’s a great question. I guess for me it’s an overused word of course but the internet of things what are the background information I can have to understand interoperability of technologies and systems would be a great place to start because really a map is just a map if you don’t have the ability to push real-time updates and sort of all these other technologies say having a blue dot is just a blue dot without a map and it’s not in context. So we really have to learn how do these technologies come together and what are the ways that it can be deployed? It’s not always about a visual rendering of a map either.

Chris: So starting to look at things like conversational interfaces, very lightweight applications. I’m in a building and looking for a restroom or something like that and it just automatically detecting where I am and then providing directions either visually or through text directions and all of that in the background is systems talking to each other. It knows where you are seamlessly. If it was to do with a room or something like that or a piece of equipment that you needed, which one is closest? What’s its status and I can’t say enough about interoperability. So whatever somebody can do to be as educated as possible in the working knowledge of interoperability I think that’s a great platform and as you mentioned earlier, I don’t think we’re going to be talking about mapping and locations so much. It’s just going to be a given and expected and will just be the canvas in which all of these systems are really presented to the end users.

Daniel: I think we’re slowly but surely coming to the end of our time together. Is there somewhere we can go to learn more about you or more about your company?

Chris: Absolutely. So please visit jibestream.com we have lots of great resources there ranging from just the webpages themselves, but if you really want to dig in we’ve got some excellent white papers and webinars with our end customers which is always great to see and learn from and follow us on major channels Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Daniel: Excellent, thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. I’ve really enjoyed it. I’ve learned a lot, I’m sure our listeners have learned a lot as well. Really appreciate it, thank you.

Chris: Thank you very much.

Daniel: So I really hope you enjoyed that interview with Andy from Jibestream. I think he raised some really interesting points about indoor mapping, the challenges that are associated with it and where it’s going as a technology and what we can expect to see in this area in the future. I apologize for the sound quality on this episode. I had to cut the audio files quite a bit so I realize the sound jumps around a little bit there. That’s something I am working on. So I hope that this will improve in the future. As always if you have any questions or comments about this podcast please find mapscaping on all of the ways, the different social media channels. We’re there just search for us or there’s a full transcript of this podcast on our website, mapscaping.com/blogs/podcast. Thanks very much and we’ll talk soon.

Daniel: Hello and welcome to the mapscaping podcast. My name is Daniel and this is a podcast about people and companies that are doing really exciting things in the geospatial world.

About the Author
I'm Daniel O'Donohue, the voice and creator behind The MapScaping Podcast ( A podcast for the geospatial community ). With a professional background as a geospatial specialist, I've spent years harnessing the power of spatial to unravel the complexities of our world, one layer at a time.

Leave a Reply