The Apple iPad Factor

Last month, I wrote about the PDA vs. Tablet war. The tablet computer has been around for a long time and struggled to gain widespread acceptance. I also wrote about how 2010 will be a decisive year for the tablet computer.

I guess my timing was right: with the introduction of the Apple iPad last week, 2010 sure has started out with a bang! Admittedly, we’ve known about the iPad for awhile and I even mentioned it in the PDA vs. Tablet column, but didn’t expect the hype to appear for another month or so.

The iPad might turn out to be a technology that transforms the geospatial industry. The iPhone has made inroads into geospatial, but the iPad is another story altogether primarily because it’s not a mutually exclusive proposition. For example, I’m not an iPhone user and won’t be in the foreseeable future. This is not because I dislike the iPhone. On the contrary, I might like to have one. But all my family phones (parents, kids, spouse) are all under my Sprint account. The pain to change is too great.

The iPad is a different story. Its primary function is not a phone. I could see myself purchasing an iPad, especially at $500-600. I’d use it not only as a digital notebook, but also as a mobile GIS device.

Apple iPad announced last week

There will be a lot of debate in the consumer market about which features were included and which features were left out. But, from a geospatial industry technical perspective, I don’t think that matters. It’s got a large color screen (big assumption that it’s outdoor readable), runs 10 hours on a charge, runs third-party applications (albeit not a Microsoft platform) and can interface to a GPS receiver (or use its own). That covers 90 percent of the battle.

The most important indicator to watch is the iPad’s acceptance in the consumer market. Honestly, I can’t figure out if it’s going to be a Newton or an iTouch. Obviously, it’s too early to say. For the iPad to be a success in the geospatial industry, it’s got to reach the success of the iTouch, of which Apple has sold ~31 million units. The geospatial industry will never support the development of a product like the iPad at the $500 price point. There’s just not enough market size to justify it. The geospatial industry needs to ride the wave of consumer market acceptance to benefit from a product like the iPad.

Acceptance of the iPad by the consumer market could produce marked changes in the geospatial industry. The devices would be readily available and might become a default unit for mobile GIS given the low price point and attractive features. It might even be considered a disruptive technology because it would bring an entirely new host of applications and application development tools to the geospatial industry for mobile GIS.

Changing Gears to Geospatial ETL

I want to touch quickly on the subject of geospatial ETL. I have to admit I was a little ignorant about the geospatial ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) industry…and I still am, albeit a little more aware than I was before. The funny thing is that for many years I’ve been dealing with one of the problems that ETL software is designed to solve.

ETL is an acronym for Extract, Transform, Load. These are software tools that facilitate the extraction, transformation, and loading between software systems. Spatial ETL is the same but focused on ETL between geospatial systems.

Wisdom Technologies Fast Reader

I’ve personally run into this problem many times with mapping projects I’ve worked on. I’ve spent countless hours updating maps of the same project that I maintain in both AutoCAD and ArcView/ArcGIS. Yes, I’ve been down the road of importing DWG files into ArcView/ArcGIS and trying to make that work, and I did to some extent, but never to the point that I could abandon one in favor of the other. Granted, if my projects were large enough, I would investigate this further, but generally they aren’t.

Snowflake Software GML Viewer

The players in the Spatial ETL space are ESRI (ArcGIS Data Interoperability Extension), Dotted Eyes, Geokettle, PCI Geomatics, Safe Software, Snowflake Software, SpatialDataIntegrator, and WisdomForce Technologies, among others.

Just last month, one of the industry leaders, Safe Software, introduced its FME 2010 product. I spoke briefly with co-founders Don Murray and Dale Lutz  about their new product. I’ll be doing more of these sorts of 5- to 10-minute podcast interviews and posting them on the Geospatial Solutions website when the new version goes live in the coming weeks.

Safe Software FME implementation at Washington DOT

In the meantime, click below to listen to my podcast interview with Don and Dale. The interview is about 11 minutes in length. Pay particular attention at the 7:50 minute mark to the discussion about 3D geospatial data.

Click here to listen to my podcast interview with Safe co-founders Don and Dale.

Thanks, and see you next week.

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