A fun aspect of working on a business product with a product-led growth strategy that you get to use the your product for in your personal life. I’ve used Fulcrum for creating personal tracking databases, collecting video for OpenStreetMap, and even documenting my map collection.
There’s no better way to build an empathetic perspective of your customer’s life than to go and be one as often as you can.
Last week our team did an afternoon...
Fulcrum’s been the best tool out there for quite a few years for building your own apps and collecting data with mobile forms (we were doing low-code before it was cool). Our product focus for a long time was on making it as simple and as fast as possible to go from ideas to reality to get working on a data collection process. For any sort of work you would’ve previously done with a pen and paper, or a spreadsheet on a tablet, you can rapidly build and deploy a Fulcrum app to your team for things like inspections, audits,...
After about 6-8 months of forging, shaping, research, design, and engineering, we’ve launched the Fulcrum Report Builder. One of the key use cases with Fulcrum has always been using the platform to design your own data collection processes with our App Builder, perform inspections with our mobile app, then generate results through our Editor, raw data integrations, and, commonly, generating PDF reports from inspections.
For years we’ve offered a basic report template along with an ability to customize the reports through our Professional Services team. What was missing...
As if the COVID-19 mayhem wasn’t enough, the Nashville area is dealing with a series of tornadoes that ripped through the area, with a death toll of 26 so far.
The StEER network, who have been long-time users deploying in past disasters, have been active on the ground assessing structural damage.
Today we hosted a webinar in conjunction with our friends at NetHope and Team Rubicon to give an overview of Fulcrum and what we’re collectively doing in disaster relief exercises.
Both organizations deployed to support recent disaster events for Cyclone Idai and Hurricane Dorian (the Bahamas) and used Fulcrum as a critical piece of their workflow.
Always enjoyable to get to show more about what we’re doing...
Today we announced this investment from Kayne and Kennet in Spatial Networks, to help us keep scaling Fulcrum in 2020 and beyond. This effort has been one of my main missions for the better part of 2019, so it’s rewarding to get to this milestone to build from. Our new partners at Kayne and Kennet each bring unique perspectives and experience to help us move faster and expand.
Spatial Networks, the creator of Fulcrum, the leading geospatial data collection and analysis platform for field operations, today announced that it has closed an investment of $42.5 million led...
Donayle put together this summary of what we’ve accomplished this year through our Fulcrum Community initiative. Some great stuff here:
During Cyclones Idai and Kenneth, Team Rubicon’s Medic team went to Mozambique with Fulcrum in hand and served over 1,000 injured during those cyclonic episodes, using our tools to document and communicate those injuries to the World Health Organization.
Our NetHope partners responded to the Colombia-Venezuela border crisis with internet connectivity and communications support, restoring communication for thousands of displaced families while using Fulcrum to share installation information.
Instead of fireworks, an earthquake shook Searles...
This is another one from the archives, written for the Fulcrum blog back in 2016.
Engineering is the art of building things within constraints. If you have no constraints, you aren’t really doing engineering. Whether it’s cost, time, attention, tools, or materials, you’ve always got constraints to work within when building things. Here’s an excerpt describing the challenge facing the engineer:
The crucial and unique task of the engineer is to identify, understand, and interpret the constraints on a design in order to produce a successful result. It is usually not enough...
We just wrapped up our Fall “all hands” week at the office. Another good week to see everyone from out of town, and an uncommonly productive one at that. We got a good amount of planning discussion done for future product roadmap additions, did some testing on new stuff in the lab, fixed some bugs, shared some knowledge, and ate (a lot).
Looking forward to the next one!
I wrote this wrap-up summary of our hands-on workshop we did at the NetHope Summit in San Juan. It was a great joint session with Mikel from Mapbox and John from NetHope. I’d love to do more of these in the future. Hands-on sessions where we can get outside and see our stuff in action always teach you a lot about how your UX works in practice.
I got to see more of what Kepler can do, too — the open source GIS toolkit built by the Uber team. Pretty slick stuff.
We’re in San Juan this week for the NetHope Global Summit. Through our partnership with NetHope, a non-profit devoted to bringing technology to disaster relief and humanitarian projects, we’re hosting a hands-on workshop on Fulcrum on Thursday.
We’ve already connected with several of the other tech companies in NetHope’s network — Okta, Box, Twilio, and others — leading to some interesting conversations on working together more closely on integrated deployments for humanitarian work.
Fortin...
Bryan wrote this up about the latest major release of Fulcrum, which added Views to the Editor tool. This is a cool feature that allows users doing QA and data analysis to save sets of columns and filters, akin to how views work in databases like PostgreSQL. We have some plans next to let users share or publish Views, and also to expose them via our Query API, with the underlying data functioning just like a database view does.
This’ll be a foundational feature for a lot of upcoming neat stuff.
This is a post from the Fulcrum archives I wrote 3 years back. I like this idea and there’s more to be written on the topic of how companies treat their archives of data. Especially in data-centric companies like those we work with, it’s remarkable to see how quickly it often is thrown on a shelf, atrophies, and is never used again.
In the days of pen and paper collection, data was something to collect, transcribe, and stuff into a file cabinet to be stored for a minimum of 5 years (lest those auditors...
This is a cool post on a study done by a research team in the City of Saskatoon, looking at the perceptions of safety in a downtown area. They used Fulcrum to collect survey data using a safety audit developed to capture the on-the-ground intelligence from residents:
Because we were interested in perceptions and fear at a very micro-level, the study area was confined to the blocks and laneways within a four block area. We used our new app to collect information from 108 micro-spatial locations within a radius...
Through Fulcrum Community, we’ve been working with the team from NetHope to support their needs in responding to disasters around the world. In their work, they help first-responders in humanitarian crises around the world with connectivity and communications when it’s knocked out — cellular coverage, phone communications, and internet access.
This week they’re hosting an event in the hills of central California, mocking up a disaster scenario to experiment in how relief organizations can embrace technology and collaborate with one another.
The DRT event is conducted over a five-day period with trainers from CiscoTacOps,...
This is one from the archives, originally written for the Fulcrum blog back in early 2017. I thought I’d resurface it here since I’ve been thinking more about continual evolution of our product process. I liked it back when I wrote it; still very relevant and true. It’s good to look back in time to get a sense for my thought process from a couple years ago.
In the software business, a lot of attention gets paid to “shipping” as a badge of honor if you want to be considered an innovator. Like any guiding...
This is the kind of stuff that gets you out of bed in the morning and really gets the motivators up to do things like Fulcrum Community to support disaster relief efforts.
When Cyclones Idai and Kenneth steamrolled into East Africa beginning in March, the crew from Team Rubicon was deployed to help with EMT response and recovery in Beira and Matarara, Mozambique. They used Fulcrum to record patient data after prior experience with another partner of ours, NetHope:
Earlier in 2019, Team Rubicon deployed...
I use Fulcrum all the time for collecting data around hobbies of mine. Sometimes it’s for fun or interests, sometimes for mapping side projects, or even just for testing the product as we develop new features.
Here are a few of my key every day apps I use for personal tracking. I’m always tinkering around with other things as we expand the product, but each of these I’ve been using for years pretty consistently.
Of course there are apps out there devoted to this task, but I like the idea of having my own raw...
I tried this out the other night on a run. The technique makes some intiutive sense that it’d reduce impact (or level it out side to side anyway). Surely to notice any result you’d have to do it over distance consistently. But I’ve had some right knee soreness that I don’t totally know the origin of, so thought I’d start trying this out. I found it takes a lot of concentration to keep it up consistently. I’ll keep testing it out.
...Our friend and colleague Kurt Menke of Bird’s Eye View GIS recently conducted a workshop in Hawaii working with folks from the Pacific Islands (Samoa, Marianas, Palau, and others) to teach Fulcrum data collection and QGIS for mapping. Seeing our tech have these kinds of impacts is always enjoyable to read about:
The week was a reminder of how those of us working with technology day-to-day sometimes take it for granted. Everyone was super excited to have this training. It was also a lesson in how resource rich we are on the continent. One...
This post is part 3 in a series about my history in product development. Check out the intro in part 1 and all about our first product, Geodexy, in part 2.
Back in 2010 we decide to halt our development of Geodexy and regroup to focus on a narrower segment of the marketplace. With what we’d learned in our go-to-market attempt on Geodexy, we wanted to isolate a specific industry we could focus our technology around. Our tech platform was strong, we were confident in...
I thought this was a great post on how unnecessary “real-time” analytics can be when misused. As the author points out, it’s almost never necessary to have data that current. With current software it’s possible to have infinite analytics on everything, and as a result it’s irresistable to many people to think of those metrics as essential for decision making.
This line of thinking is a trap. It’s important to divorce the concepts of operational metrics...
We’ve been supporting the Santa Barbara County Sheriff through Fulcrum Community this year for evacuation reporting during emergency preparation and response. It feels great to have technology that can have real-world immediate impact like this. The gist of their workflow (right now) is using the app to log where evacuation orders were posted, where they haven’t notified yet, and tracking that with the slim resources available even in time of need. Centralizing the reporting has made a big difference:
All of this information is uploaded in real time and is accessible to incident commanders who can follow the progress...
The NSF StEER program has been using Fulcrum Community for a couple of years now, ever since Hurricane Harvey landed on the Texas coast, followed by Irma and Maria later that fall. They’ve built a neat program on top of our platform that lets them respond quickly with volunteers on the ground conducting structure assessments post-disaster:
The large, geographically distributed effort required the development of unified data standards and digital workflows to enable the swift collection...
We just finished up a several-month’s-long effort updating the design and branding of Fulcrum, from the logo to typefaces, to web design and all. As happens with these things, it took longer than we wanted it to when we started, but I’m very pleased with the results.
Tim’s post here covers the background and approach we took to doing this refresh:
Sometimes it seems companies change their logos like people change their socks. Maybe they got a new marketing director who wanted to shake things up or a designer came up...
I started with the first post in this series back in January, describing my own entrance into product development and management.
When I joined the company we were in the very early stages of building a data collection tool, primarily for internal use to improve speed and efficiency on data project work. That product was called Geodexy, and the model was similar to Fulcrum in concept, but in execution and tech stack, everything was completely different. A few years back, Tony wrote up a retrospective post detailing out the...
We’ve spent the last 6 months or so working with the team at the US Census Bureau on something called The Opportunity Project, a recurring initiative quarterbacked by the Census to bring together creators, government, and local communities to collaboratively build tools to tackle various large issues in the nation. Specifically we’ve been testing out the ability for communities in need to deploy Fulcrum Community for collecting address data. While to an outsider it may seem like address data is a “solved problem,” that’s far from the case in...
I saw this tweet a couple of days back that I thought was interesting:
What’s the most interesting or useful “how I did X” blog post you’ve read in the past year? 🤔
— Ryan Hoover (@rrhoover) February 18, 2019
Examples:
- How I made my first dollar
- How we acquired our first 1,000 users
- How I built my startup without writing code
The topic of “how we got to 1000 users” is an interesting one I thought I could take a stab at…
...We’ve been doing prototyping over the last 6 months using Figma, a tool for building mockups and making them interactive for testing UX designs. This post from Caleb covers some basics in how it works with some great examples of what you can do with it.
Design is an iterative process that involves a continuous cycle of researching, designing, prototyping, and testing as well as communicating with stakeholders along the way.
I wrote up a post for the Fulcrum blog on using OpenAerialMap with Fulcrum Community. As we invest more in building out our Community platform this year, I’m excited to do more with integrating OAM into our tools.
For response deployments using Fulcrum Community, you can also add OpenAerialMap datasets to your Fulcrum account as layers to use in the Fulcrum mobile app.
Using Fulcrum’s map layer feature, you can add OAM datasets using the “Tile XYZ” format. These layers also become available on the mobile app, so contributors on the ground doing damage...
Our friends over at the Santa Barbara County Sheriff have been using a deployment of Fulcrum Community over the last month to log and track evacuations for flooding and debris flow risk throughout the county. They’ve deployed over 100 volunteers so far to go door-to-door and help residents evacuate safely. In their initial pilot they visited 1,500 residents. With this platform the County can monitor progress in real-time and maximize their resources to the areas that need the most attention.
“This...
I’m headed out to San Jose, CA next week for the SaaStr Annual conference. It’ll be my third in a row; definitely one of the events I most look forward to nowadays. It always brings a great combo of interesting content, energy, diverse attendees, and fun side events to enjoy.
I wrote up this preview of sessions I’m looking forward to this time around. They do a great job touching on some of the same things year over year (helpful for tracking industry trends) but also mixing in plenty of new voices each time around.
The last several months I’ve been spending quite a bit of time working on this: our geospatial data and analytical product line called Foresight. We’ve been in this business dating back to 2000 in various forms and using the technologies of the era, but empowered by today’s technology, decision support tools, and the open source geo stack, it’s evolved to something novel and unmatched for our customers.
At its core it’s “data-as-a-service” designed to give customers the insights they need to do more, spend less, decide faster, and reduce their uncertainty, with a focus on international geospatial markets.
...A frequent desire for Fulcrum customers is to maintain locally a version of the data they collect with our platform, in their database system of choice. With our export tool, it’s simple to pull out extracts in formats like CSV, shapefile, SQLite, and even PostGIS or GeoPackage. What this doesn’t allow, though, is an automatable way to keep a local version of data on your own server. You’d have to extract data manually on some schedule and append new stuff to existing tables you’ve already got.
A while back we built and...
With tools like Mapillary and OpenStreetCam, it’s pretty easy now to collect street-level images with a smartphone for OpenStreetMap editing. Point of interest data is now the biggest quality gap for OSM as compared to other commercial map data providers. It’s hard to compete with the multi-billion dollar investments in street mapping and the bespoke equipment of Google or Apple. There’s promise for OSM to be a deep, current source of this level of detail, but it requires true mass-market crowdsourcing to get there.
The businesses behind...
This was a long time in the making. We’ve launched our latest big feature in Fulcrum: photo annotations.
This feature was an interesting thing to take on. Rather than doing it the quick and dirty way, we did it right and built customized framework we could use across platforms. Because the primary interfaces for annotating are iOS and Android, the library is built in JavaScript and cross-compiled to each native mobile environment, which allows us to lean on a single centralized codebase to support both of our mobile platforms. We even have plans to build annotation support into our...
Fulcrum, our SaaS product for field data collection, is coming up on its 7th birthday this year. We’ve come a long way: from a bootstrapped, barely-functional system at launch in 2011 to a platform with over 1,800 customers, healthy revenue, and a growing team expanding it to ever larger clients around the world. I thought I’d step back and recall its origins from a product management perspective.
We created Fulcrum to address a need we had in our business, and quickly realized its application to dozens of other markets with a slightly different color of the...
Using Amazon’s Athena service, you can now interactively query OpenStreetMap data right from an interactive console. No need to use the complicated OSM API, this is pure SQL. I’ve taken a stab at building out a replica OSM database before and it’s a beast. The dataset now clocks in at 56 GB zipped. This post from Seth Fitzsimmons gives a great overview of what you can do with it:
Working with “the planet” (as the data archives are referred to) can be unwieldy. Because it contains data spanning the...