The F1 team is excited to welcome Frank Moyer to the family. The growth of the company and the maturation of the GeoIQ platform has made this the perfect time to bring in additional horsepower to take F1 to the next level. Frank brings a great set of management and technical experience to the team. He comes to us from EzGov where he increased revenue by an order of magnitude and positioned the company for a successful exit. In the process he managed some of largest software projects in Europe including the development of the UK’s HM Revenue and Customs (the American equivalent of the IRS) e-commerce solution. Before taking the reins as CEO of EzGov Frank was the CIO managing their diverse deployments and scaling challenges. The combination is great leadership in both sales/marketing and engineering. He’s even been writing code in a pinch! We’ve been seeing great opportunities in our growing government business and the commercial market is really heating up. All in all an exceptional time to have a great group of talent joining F1 starting at the top.

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At the end of July heavy monsoon rains hit Pakistan and caused terrible flooding throughout the country. Many are now struggling to survive amongst the terrible conditions while waiting for floodwaters to recede and aid to arrive. Below is a before and after picture of the devastation of the flooding in the Indus River Valley. (source: Wikipedia)

I came across some data from the situation that I found to be interesting from the National Defense Management Authority of Pakistan. This site has a plethora of information related to the floods in Pakistan. Since the 1st of August the NDMA has been putting out daily reports of the flooding situation in Pakistan. This report has useful information on damage reports, rescue efforts, and available supplies broken up by affected provinces in Pakistan. I was able to upload some of the data into GeoCommons and have been able to create some interesting maps that tell a good visual story. Below is a map that illustrates various types of damage.

View full map

Here are the three datasets that have been created from the data at Pakistan NDMA and Flickr. We will continue to monitor the situation here at FortiusOne and will add more data soon.

Summary of Rescue Equipment in use by Province, Pakistan Floods, 8.17.2010
Summary of Damages and Rescues by Province, Pakistan Floods, 8.17.2010
Summary of Relief Items Provided by Province, Pakistan Floods, 8.17.2010
Recent Uploads from Flickr tagged pakistanflood, with geodata

Try creating your own maps from the data to see how you can get an in-depth look at the situation. Also, search throughout the GeoCommons database to find other data on Pakistan to add to your maps

We are also looking for other types of data related to this tragic incident to add into GeoCommons. By obtaining more data in GeoCommons, people can get a clearer picture of the tragedy and hopefully make decisions to help in the relief effort. Please tag any related data or maps with the tag pakistanflood2010. Thanks

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FortiusOne has been involved in a project to map all the World Bank’s projects. Dubbed “Mapping for Results” it is a collaboration between Development Gateway, AidData and the World Bank.  The initial step is to actually map where the projects are taking place. Geocoding is the process of placing information in its geographic place.  When you enter an address into a routing application to get directions the process of placing that address on the map is a type of geocoding.  The process being utilized in Mapping for Results is far more manual than that though.

A team from College of William and Mary and Brigham Young University have been hard doing this geocoding.  They use a variety of sources on the web in an attempt to pinpoint where projects are taking place.   I didn’t think it was possible to be more excited about geocoding than I, but after watching this video I think they might be.  Where FortiusOne comes into this project is the visualization once the projects have been mapped.

Breaking down aid funding by a variety of geographies and projects it gives a clearer picture of what is being work on where.  This can assist in evaluation of the efficacy of various projects and help determine under-served regions.  You can see video of some of the resulting visualization in the video below:

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I’m excited to announce that Andrei Taraschuk, from UMapper and AFComponents, has officially joined the FortiusOne engineering team. He will be head of our visualization development in building out Maker to encompass the capabilities we’ve been building into the underlying GeoCommons platform for the last few years.

I’ve been friends with Andrei through my work on Mapufacture and he has clearly done ground-breaking work in developing visualization and mapping platforms. He built AFComponents and developed the first ActionScript compatible mapping library for modern mapping providers such as Google, Microsoft, and others. This evolved into UMapper which continued to grow and add features for simple map creation and embedding that’s been used by numerous media and enterprises such as USA Today, National Geographic, and a place we’ve been featured as well, the Huffington Post.

As his role of head of visualization, Andrei will continuing to evolve our map, and non-cartographic, visualization components. We’ve worked with some of the best in the industry such as AxisMaps and Stamen Design, as well as the incredibly bright engineers at FortiusOne to develop some great capabilities you’ll be seeing soon. But we’re really excited about the ideas and energy that Andrei will be bringing to the team – so definitely expect some even more amazing things soon!

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