GBS has been to a number of conferences recently. We have had a long association with the National Maori GIS group – known as Te Kahui Manu Hokai (TKMH), and we are proud to have supported this group and their conference over the years since its inception in Christchurch in 2009. The Place 2013 conference put on by TKMH was the best yet. There were a lot of new faces and presenters covering a much wider range of issues. GBS was privileged to present on some of the Cloud and SDK options from Esri.
As mentioned in the article above, we were also at the NZEUC which followed on directly from Place 2013. Needless to say, it was a busy week. This was a great conference for us because a number of our clients were presenting work that we had done for them, which for us, are the best endorsements we can get. We also gave a live (as in, really live) presentation around the use of the Esri stack for in-field data capture. This was excellent fun because it was seriously risky, and while it didn’t completely go according to plan, we had a good time doing it. For more information on this, please do not hesitate to contact us.
We have also recently attended the Esri User Group events in Auckland, New Plymouth, Christchurch, Queenstown and Nelson. It was great to catch up with some people who couldn’t make the NZEUC, and to meet some new people. We think the regional User Group events are necessary because you get to engage with others you might not normally see. GBS has helped with sponsorship of a number of the regional User Group Events.
Lastly, we shared a stand with Sektor (Motion Tablet distributor) at the Mobile Tech conference in Wellington. This was the first time this event had been held and it was very successful. There was quite a buzz amongst those attending relating to the potential for Mobility. While this potential is not new, what has changed recently (with the rise of tablets and smartphones) is that it is now much easier to actually implement and businesses are realising that mobility can’t be ignored any longer. This applies to geospatial as well and we think that Esri will inject a burst of energy into the mobility market with the imminent release of their off line capable mobile API’s.