In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

Our last poll asked "Does the public realize the omnipresence and importance of geospatial technologies?" Out of 137 answers, 50% answered either not at all (23%) or not really (27%), while the other half said 'yes to some extent' (42%) and only 8% believe that the public is fully aware of the omnipresence and importance of geospatial. As as user indicated in the comments, we had to make big assumptions and generalizations to answer that one.

Our new poll asks your opinion on today's impact of Esri on geospatial.

Here's the results our latest poll on driverless cars. Out of 89 participants, 22% answered it won't happen or at least won't happen in their lifetime. That leaves out 30% believing the technology is almost ripe, 19% see driverless cars only on safe route, and 28% go to the point where insurance companies won't allow humans to drive anymore.

Those 78% of optimists seeing driverless cars happening are not alone. Forbes shares a 3-parts article named Fasten Your Seatbelts: Google's Driverless Car Is Worth Trillions: "Driverless car technology has the very real potential to save millions from death and injury and eliminate hundreds of billions of dollars of costs. Google’s claims for the car, as described by Sebastian Thrun, its lead developer, are:

1. We can reduce traffic accidents by 90%.
2. We can reduce wasted commute time and energy by 90%.
3. We can reduce the number of cars by 90%."

Part 3 of the article claims that this will happen much sooner than most think, Another article from the O'Reilly Radar is titled The driverless-car liability question gets ahead of itself.

The new poll we offer you asks Does the public realize the omnipresence and importance of geospatial technologies?, as much as we can guess what's in "the public's mind". Is was directly influenced by the recent story named Mapping Creates Jobs and Drives Global Economic Growth.

Our previous poll on Google's Augmented Reality 'Project Glass' gave the following results, out of 88 answers - much less than usual - we have 39% optimists seeing it as a success, with 10% of those anticipating it will dramatically enhance our lives. The rest, 61%, is much less enthusiastic about AR glasses, with 25% going to the point that augmented reality doesn't that much value.

Our new poll is also related to technology where Google is involved, driverless cars. In a recent NYTimes article, a Google engineer claims that driving cars “is the most important thing that computers are going to do in the next 10 years.” What's your take?

The previous poll has been running for much too long, finally, here's the results! Out of 168 votes, there's clearly two camps. 58% of answers indicated that geospatial is special, at least a special type of data or that its overarching nature makes it special. That said, 20% (that's still 1 out of 5 of us) say that geospatial isn't special at all. In the 'neutral' answers, an additional 13% chose the option indicating that too many people deal with geospatial data without considering its spatial nature, and 10% admitted that no matter what, geospatial is special to them anyway! Yes yes, I will eventually write a followup on my entry named Is Geospatial Special? in order to provide precision on my point of view :-)

You are also invited to participate to the new poll on Google's augmented reality 'Project Glass'.

Remember the interesting discussion in January on whether geospatial is special or not, well, that's the topic for our new poll! I do plan to write a followup updating my own views on the matter, when some free time will show up... Meanwhile, share your own perceptions about geospatial special or not! The poll section is found on the right hand column of Slashgeo webpages.

Our previous poll was entitled 'Cloud GIS is'... and out of 238 answers, 43% believe that it's the natural evolution of GIS, 16% think the cloud will engulf everything, 16% anticipate it will rule enterprise GIS. On the opposite side of the spectrum, 13% claim this is a buzzword that will pass away and another 13% say it's going to be useful only to a few. Overall, the results seems to indicate that 'Cloud GIS' is here to stay and make a larger footprint in our day to day work!

Thanks to Andrew who found out that the poll engine was strangely behaving, it gave me an excuse to offer you a new poll on 'cloud GIS'.

The previous poll on Esri ArcGIS Online vs Google Earth Builder generated 213 votes. 42% of users anticipate that both will be successes in their own way, and funnily enough, two distinct groups made of 24% of users believe that one will prevail on the other. For what's left, 7% think neither will gain momentum and there's even 2% of users that wish that Bing Maps will prevail over the two front runners.