Gary Gale

Imagine for a moment you're in the city you live in; you know it like the back of your hand and yet you know there's shops, businesses or services nearby that you haven't yet come across. Or maybe you're in an unfamiliar city and you want to explore and stay away from the same old global brands that you see everywhere, in every city and on every street.

Now imagine putting this on a map.

"Ah hah!" you might say, reaching into your pocket and brandishing your smartphone. "I can do that easily" you say triumphantly as you fire up Google's or Apple's or HERE's mapping app.

But no, I'm talking about something a little more focused, a little less broad. "No worry" you say, firing up Foursquare, or Yelp or Facebook or TripAdvisor.

The geo industry has always been a fairly vaguely and nebulously defined industry and it takes a brave conference organiser to try and cover everything that's geo related in a single conference. But that's what GeoBusiness tries to do and it almost succeeds. This year's conference agenda and trade booth sideshow managed to cover the whole lifecycle of all things geo, from dodging drones, centimetre accurate GPS devices and LIDAR cars outside the Business Design Centre in London, through use of geo-data, with far too much BIM for my personal tastes, through mapping and cartography and ending up with crowd sourcing mapping data and using maps for emergency responses.

This year's high points were a jaw dropping talk on using airborne remote sensing to search for illicit nuclear explosions, surely a first for any conference I've been to, if only for the title alone and Chris Sheldrick from what3words recapping his talk on addressing the world. Less than high points were conference coffee that tasted like it had been brewed the month before and wifi that recalled the heady days of a 19.2K baud rate dial up modem. Thankfully the impending coffee emergency was prevented thanks to an espresso machine in the middle of the Leica exhibition stand and some rather fine coffee shops around the conference centre.