Muthukumar Kumar lives approximately near bulges.become.bowls (Munich, Germany). An active blogger, he has been blogging with Geoawesomeness for the past 5 years and loves talking about everything geo with geo-geeks from across the world. You can reach him on Twitter @muthukumarceg
Muthukumar was interviewed for GeoHipster by Ed Freyfogle.
Q: Muthu, let’s dive right into the meat of the matter. How does someone end up in the position of deciding what is geoawesome? And indeed what does it mean for something to be geoawesome?
A: What does the term “geoawesome” mean? Hmm, that’s a great question. Definitions are a tricky thing. The way I see it, the term “Geoawesome” stands for all the cool and innovative things happening in the geo-industry today.
Take the idea behind What3Words for example. The addressing system that we use today doesn’t work well in many parts of the world including in my hometown, Chennai. With today’s technology, we could say, why not just use GPS coordinates or a complicated set of alphanumeric characters to solve this problem. There are many such (complicated) solutions created by Google and others. These solutions don’t work well in the real-world. Try giving out your GPS coordinates over the phone or even typing it without making a mistake. What What3Words did was to remove all these complicated aspects, divide the entire world into 3x3m grids and give each 3x3m box in the world a unique 3-word combination (in different languages). That’s it. It’s simple, elegant, and it works. Now, that’s what it means for something to be geoawesome.
To answer your first question – you get there by making lots of Skype calls with geogeeks around the world. Talking to all these wonderful people from across the world has been a highly rewarding and enriching professional experience. I would highly recommend it to anyone who is passionate about geo-technologies.
Q: One of the megatrends around geo in the last decade is that with the ubiquity of smartphones and social media more people than ever before are being exposed to geographic tools, location-based services, and geo content. You sit at the top of this trend. What’s your view?
A: Smartphones and apps have changed a lot of things in the geo industry. Without smartphones, we wouldn’t have so much geo-tagged data. It has fundamentally changed what one would even refer to as the geo industry. Just because it’s spatial, it’s not special (anymore). Before you get the pitchforks ready, sure, there is still spatial stuff that can’t be done by people without a geospatial background, but most of the times you don’t need any knowledge of map projections to work with location data, and I think that’s great. It has made GIS/Location intelligence ubiquitous.
Smartphones have also made the lives of the traditional geo industry better. Just a decade ago, if you were a data collector, you would have needed a bulky GPS/GNSS receiver and a laptop to collect geo-tagged data about your points of interest. Today all you need is a smartphone and an app.
It’s interesting that you mention social media. Just the other day we interviewed an amazing startup from Cincinnati – Spatial ai as part of a new series at Geoawesomeness called “The Next Geo” which was started to highlight innovative and enterprising startups working with location data. Spatial was co-founded by an ethnographer who had an epiphany and realized people share things on social media that he would probably never hear when he goes out to interview them for his research. Thanks to social media and location data, Spatial is now able to understand where people live and work and the mobility systems that connect them, among other things. Understanding how we interact and experience our cities is going to have a huge impact on designing mobility systems for the future. And of course, with all this data, Spatial can also answer more fun questions like “Take me to a restaurant in Chicago with an amazing view of the sunset”. All this is happening today, so it is exciting to see what is going to be possible in the next 5 years.
On a more fundamental level, one of the biggest challenges that we as a species face today is climate change and the challenges that come with having to satisfy the needs and desires of 7 billion people. Social media is going to play a major role, as more and more cities have to undertake urban planning projects to mitigate these risks. How do we use location data and social media to help cities make local decisions in a more democratic manner?
It took me a while to understand that sometimes the solutions that have the biggest impact on our communities don’t have to be on the scale of “Jarvis”. It can be as simple as an application that sends an SMS to farmers with the weather information for the day. Not long ago, Fraunhofer institute in Germany published an article announcing the launch of an app that uses your smartphone camera as a remote sensor. Now imagine how useful this is going to be for a small-time farmer who doesn’t have access to satellite imagery and analytics to understand what is affecting his/her crops.
I am personally excited to see how we use all the data we generate from our earth observation satellites, combined together with data from our smartphones and other sensors.
Regardless of whether you like to call it GIS, Location Intelligence, Spatial analysis or whatever today’s buzzword generator calls it, the fact is it’s a great time to be working with location data.
Q: What kind of feedback do you get from your readers?
A: We get our fair share of “bouquets and brickbats” and a ton of spam emails from all the kings in exile with a large inheritance. Jokes aside, the community has been very kind to us. It was feedback from a reader that led to the creation of “The Next Geo” series. It was with the help of a reader that we kicked off the Twitter Q&A idea #GeoChat. So it is fair to say that we have received a lot of great ideas from our readers.
We have had our share of (constructive) criticism as well. Be it the blog post “top masters programs in GIS” or “top geospatial companies”, we have gotten a ton of “why would you leave out this program or this company” emails. However, without these emails we wouldn’t have been able to improve our awareness of the community, so keep them coming!
There is one feedback that we are always trying to incorporate and improve: We would love for more people from diverse backgrounds and from different corners of the world to blog together with us and share their views. We have had 70 people blog for Geoawesomeness and I would love to get that to 100 by the end of this year. So if you are reading this and want to blog together with us, just drop me a line.
Q: What has been your favorite bit of geoawesome content the last few years?
A: There are a lot of really interesting blogs/websites out there that I try to follow on a regular basis – Wired’s Map Lab, CItyLabs, Google Maps Mania, Nat Geo, Digital Geography, Slashgeo (which sadly doesn’t exist anymore), GeoHipster, and of course Geoawesomeness 🙂 The best place to find out about the latest and greatest about the geo industry (imho) is Twitter.
Q: When not working on Geoawesomeness you work on satellite stuff, which is of course also fairly, well, geo awesome. Tell us a bit about that.
A: When you say “Satellite stuff”, you make it sound like I am the sidekick to Elon Musk at SpaceX (that would be amazing though). I graduated with a masters in space application engineering from TU Munich and am currently working as a GNSS software engineer at Trimble. Trimble is one of the pioneers when it comes to GPS/GNSS receivers for high accuracy applications, and I am working at their R&D center here in Munich for the better part of the last 3 years now. If I am right, Trimble is one of the few geospatial companies to be listed on the stock market in USA, so that’s something!
Q: You’re based in Munich. While I used to be a regular around the Glockenbachviertel and the beer tents at Oktoberfest (Himmel der Bayern oder Armbrustschützenzelt, natürlich), I concede it has been a while. What’s the Bavarian geohipster scene like these days?
A: The Munich “geohipster” scene is well and alive. A lot of companies working in the space industry call Munich their home. The geo startup scene is also considerably more active compared to a few years ago, thanks largely to a huge interest in the mobility as a service. It is not on a level like Berlin though – we don’t have a Geomob here in Munich. Maybe we should change that! Now, if I only knew someone who knows a thing or two about organizing a Geomob. Say Ed, do you by any chance have any experience with that?
Q: Heavy is the head that wears the crown. Do you ever have days where everything you see is just “geo normal” and nothing seems quite geoawesome? (Editor’s note: this never happens to us at GeoHipster, everything we do is effortlessly geohip.)
A: “Geo normal”? Hahaha this is the first time that I come across this term. I have been accused of perhaps overusing the word “awesome”, but I would gladly take that over ever using the word “geonormal”. Is there ever a day when things are normal? Let me answer that with a quote from Javier, the CEO of Carto: “There’s never been more location data available. There has never been a better time for geography.” There is never a dull day for geography!
Q: Any closing advice for anyone looking to build a geo media empire?
A: I am flattered that you would call Geoawesomeness a “geo media empire”. I am not sure if I am in a position to give out any advice; however, I will say this one thing: Connect with other geogeeks. It is amazing how much one learns just by talking to someone for 5 minutes. And to those of you who are wondering “Sure that sounds great, but how do I actually connect with others?” The answer is simple — write them an email or a tweet with whatever it is that you want to say (Twitter is amazing). I emailed Esri once asking if Jack Dangermond might be interested in blogging for us and sharing his views about the industry, and guess what? He did! Sometimes all it takes is an email or a tweet 🙂