Celebrating a Major Project Milestone

Last Thursday, the Seattle-based team members on a major Gray Hill Solutions project (yes, the one we can't talk a lot about) celebrating finishing the first major milestone in the project on-time and under budget. We celebrated at Cremant (for a map, our menu, and a list of attendees, see the Platial write-up of the event).

The food and the company was wonderful.

We are currently writing up a presentation for Agile 2007 about the process. I'll include the paper and (hopefully) a screencast of the presentation on this blog later. 
11:26 AM

Move.com contract Extension

Gray Hill Solutions is doing more data manipulation and GIS work with Move.com from the greater LA area. When this work starts to make it out the web, I'll post links and longer descriptions. Since it's pre-release, we can't say much more ... yet. 
10:24 AM

Upcoming in 2007 and The Frustrations of Stealth Mode

Tomorrow morning we have a code freeze on our current project ... the project that we can't talk about. It's the first major deliverable on the project and the software looks great and is perfectly on time. But, it's just the first deliverable in a year's full release cycle. So we can't actually show you anything.

In 2007, however, Gray Hill has both internal and external projects that will yield some great web applications. These include:

1) Expansion of the web based ATIS system we developed with PB for TravInfo - another rollout will happen in San Diego in the next few months.

2) Refinement and potential redesign of the system for Intercity Transit in Olympia, Washington. We extended our previous contract with them and signed another.

3) Rollout of EasySignals. The first builds of EasySignals will go live in 2007.

4) Small internal projects. We've planned a series of small ATIS applications that will be released on the Gray Hill web site. These will be both web and desktop based.

There's other projects and products floating in the pipeline that we'll announce as they officially emerge.

Here's to a great 2007! 
4:31 PM

Value of the Backchannel

It's another day at Gray Hill Solutions, today is an iteration planning meeting. As I've mentioned before, we use Skype for these meetings as we have staff participating in Colorado, Washington (multiple locations), British Columbia and Ontario. While we discuss things in Skype, we all have our web interfaces for Subversion, Cruise Control, Version One and Bugzilla up in Firefox. We use these tools to guide discussion as we step through issues in the code, schedule, unit testing and bugs / coding issues.

As pictured above, we also have a "backchannel". This is a group text chat that allows the group to easily send information that either needs to be clicked on or stored - or announcements that cannot be voiced. For example, Dennis was not initially in the voice chat, he showed up late and announced in the backchannel that he was available and ready to be added to the voice conversation.

Blogged at Gray Hill Harbor Offices in Seattle using Windows Live Writer

 
10:35 AM

Vector Vernacular

Vector Vernacular

Not long ago, when I told people my company built software using GIS, people would ask what GIS was. I would tell them that it was mapping things on a computer. Making maps, showing relationships, analysis...

I would get blank stares.

Then Google came out with Google Maps and suddenly everyone was doing mashups, everyone expected mapping to be in everything. This is great becuase it makes it easier to describe what we do. But lousy because we lost our "wow". People just expect it now.

Google Earth and Google Maps have been nice products, but they are visualization toys that don't do much actual data analysis. Google is getting closer to the analysis realm by buying Endoxon, a swiss mapping company that sounds like a pain reliever.

Says Google Operating System Blog:

Endoxon has been working on a technology called "blue", that will work worldwide. "blue is visualized information on the web. blue is the clever linking of a world map server, a search engine and a GIS. blue is a high-quality, comprehensive points- and map server, a virtual worldwide marketplace, a search and services platform. The user can search for information or he can visualize his own collected information. The download of selected blue data onto the mobile phone is possible. But blue is not only a vision. Its reality: Endoxon has been collecting, enhancing and geo referencing worldwide satellite and aerial images for a couple of years now."

One can assume that Google will continue to roll out increasingly complex GIS tools that allow mashups with actual data analysis behind them.

 
2:08 PM