Are There Any Surprises Left at the Esri UC?

Back in the old days, when I was young and good looking, the Esri UC was an event of mystery. Basically, we knew nothing about Esri’s direction and features in new applications. Heck, we didn’t even know what great new extensions were going to show up, or things like MapObjects IMS. I was thinking about this last night when someone asked me what I was most excited to hear about at the Esri UC. After thinking about it for a couple seconds I had to answer, Nothing”. Now that isn’t that I’m not curious about ArcGIS Online (breaking through the marketing speak) or hear about new features of software. It’s just I can’t imagine during the Plenary that there will be anything that I’ll say, Wow, that’s news to me”.

OMGOMG

There are no OMG moments anymore

Is this a bad thing though? I’d say no because I’d rather know Esri’s plans for ArcGIS well before things actually happen. ArcGIS 10.1 is a huge release, but we are all taking that for granted because we’ve heard so much about it over the last few months/year. We’ve known what features in 10.1 are critical to our workflows and we don’t need the plenary to show us what 10 new features of ArcGIS 10.1 might be awesome”. I love that I can plan for updates for my workflow before the UC and then use that time to ask specific questions of Esri staff rather than the stupid, uninformed questions we all asked years ago.

The followup I was asked was what do I get out of going to the Esri UC if I’ve already seen it all and I prefer to go to the Dev Summit? For me, it’s the networking. Meeting WeoGeo’s customer, partners and friends. Seeing fellow developers and geospatial geeks that I rarely see. Meet with Esri staff to talk about how I envision WeoGeo using Esri technology and how we see WeoGeo Market and WeoGeo Library integrating with ArcGIS.

One thing that I’m really excited to show is all the great new data we have in WeoGeo that you can access via the WeoGeo Tools for ArcGIS

http://market.weogeo.com/widget.html?lat=0&lon=-94.92187&zoom=1&layers=BT
WeoGeo Market

We’ve got this great new Coastal Water Quality dataset that I think is going to be awesome for biologists working on human impact on the shores and beaches of the world.

http://market.weogeo.com/datasets/open-ciesin-indicators-of-coastal-water-quality/widget.html?zoom=1&lat=2.109375&lon=7.91015625
CIESIN Indicators of Coastal Water Quality

And we’ve got some great new partners we hope to announce in the next month that will bring unique datasets available in all our supported formats (raster or vector) so you can use it with your applications as you see fit. These aren’t dumb web services that you can’t run analysis on but the actual data that you’ll own and be able to use as you see fit. Summer is going to be great!


Tags
Thoughts

Date
July 18, 2012