WEBVTT 1 00:00:07.000 --> 00:01:05.000 Speaker A: Geo Business is back. It's happening on June 23rd and 24th, 2027 at ExCel London. Register your interests now and we will notify you when registration goes live. Here's why you should be there. Whether you work in urban planning, environmental management, construction or any field where location data matters, Geo Business has something for you. You'll discover real world cases of geospatial technology, get hands on with the latest innovations and hear from leading industry experts solving actual business challenges. Experience live demos, insightful seminars and network with thousands of professionals using location intelligence in exciting ways. If you want to stay ahead in this rapidly evolving space, this is where it happens. Join me. It's where the geo community comes together. See you there. 2 00:01:05.000 --> 00:01:17.000 Welcome to the GeoMob podcast where we discuss geo innovation in any and all forms, whether for fun or profit. Good morning, Stephen, how are you doing? 3 00:01:17.000 --> 00:01:20.000 Good morning, Ed. I'm doing great. How are you? 4 00:01:20.000 --> 00:01:32.000 I'm good, I'm good. We're well into autumn here. You know, what have we been up to? We had a very, very nice GMO Barcelona last week, which we're going to recap. 5 00:01:32.000 --> 00:01:33.000 Right. 6 00:01:33.000 --> 00:01:43.000 We've been up to the usual fun at OpenCage. And you've been inventing some quizzes. 7 00:01:43.000 --> 00:01:44.000 I've 8 00:01:43.000 --> 00:01:44.000 been inventing 9 00:01:44.000 --> 00:01:53.000 quizzes and beavering away on mappery. Yeah. And generally destroying the planet by using AI. 10 00:01:53.000 --> 00:01:57.000 All right, well, let's dive right into that. Tell us about your quiz. 11 00:01:57.000 --> 00:04:35.000 Okay, so it all started with Kenfield. It always does start with Kenfield. Right? And we were joking about the fact that Leicester are in League one in the English Football League, which is effectively the third division. And Ken said to me, you don't even know where any of those places are, the clubs that are in this thing. And I went and checked and of course I did know where most of them were, but it prompted me with this idea that you could create a list of cities and that you had to pin on a map. And then to prove that you knew something about them, you had to answer some general knowledge questions. And I set clawed the task and without going through all the efforts to build it, a couple of days of work, not continuous days, but a couple of elapsed days. And I had this Nowhere Cities quiz built. And every day you get five cities, you have to pin them on a map which has got borders but nothing, no labeling. And if you get the city in the right country, you get a bonus. If you get it close to its exact location, you get a bigger bonus. If you get it in a wrong country, you lose points. And if you get it in a very wrong country, that is one that's not bordering the right country, you get minus points and then you get some general knowledge questions. What I thought was smart was that the whole thing is built from Wikipedia data and the questions are extracted from the Wikipedia pages and then the AI made up wrong answers that were varying from stupidly wrong to, well, that could be it. So that you have a multiple choice quiz and one of the answers is almost right and one of the answers is rubbish or something like that. Anyway, it worked well. It got a bit of a flurry. You said to me, daily quizzes are difficult. And you're right and certainly without doing a lot of work on publicity, it's difficult to get a lot of traction for it. But what's interesting is that the stats show that the people who are doing it every day keep coming back. 12 00:04:35.000 --> 00:05:19.000 I have played not every single day, but I played some days. It's a very, very slick, very nice. The aesthetics are very appealing. The geography aspect of it I found quite good of, you know, putting the pin on the map of the city. The questions about the city I found too difficult. I have to say, in some cases they were just, you know, too unless it was a city I had visited and spent time in, they were almost impossible because the answers were, as you say, the answers, you know, the multiple choice. It gives you a lot of answers that are quite plausible, but also some were just super obscure, you know, like what year was this theater made? And it's some theater I've never heard of. So it's like, 13 00:05:19.000 --> 00:05:41.000 I did some work on that. And you've also got clues. You get clues. Anyway, look, I agree with you, the questions are really hard. If they were really easy, they'd be pointless. And just dropping a pin on a map, loads of people have done that before. It's not particularly original, is it? 14 00:05:41.000 --> 00:06:12.000 Anyway, we will get it in the show notes so that everyone can give it a go. I think actually we're recording now on 29 October, which also means our newsletter is about to go out, the monthly GMH newsletter. And I think we're going to, we're going to feature it in the newsletter as well as one of our six links. So hopefully you get an influx of new players. But I don't know, for me the main point was that aesthetically it is quite pleasing. It's a very slickly produced game. So congrats 15 00:06:12.000 --> 00:06:43.000 and thank you. And look out for a variant on the game which I'm in the process of building with a different theme, but the same sort of layout and everything. Because the way we built it, I had the idea that maybe I could make another game in a similar style later on. And I've got one coming, so there'll be another one. Never mind all of my frippery. What about Real Business Ed? 16 00:06:43.000 --> 00:06:44.000 What it was 17 00:06:44.000 --> 00:06:46.000 that brings the money in? 18 00:06:46.000 --> 00:08:16.000 Well, well, first of all, I guess that's a whole separate topic, Stephen. We can talk about the PHP apocalypse and the security apocalyp that's going on, but we had that last week. We don't actually use php. But the underlying problem, that AI can now find all these super obscure bugs and make them. I mean, in some cases, bugs that have been dormant for 20 years or whatever. That problem of course exists across all programming languages. And so we've been spending a lot of time the last few months really tightening down our whole network and things like that. In this case, I need to compliment our friend and colleague Arnaud, who's been taking the lead on this together with Mark Tobias. But basically trying to set up all kinds of firewalls and things like that, which conceptually it's not that complex, but obviously we got to get it just right so we don't accidentally turn things off. So that's been a big ongoing project of the last month. The other thing, Stephen, as a keen student of geography, I know that you are of course intimately familiar with SMDG codes, right? 19 00:08:16.000 --> 00:08:19.000 I absolutely am. 20 00:08:19.000 --> 00:09:12.000 But for those, for those who are not, I am pleased to announce this was my little project a couple weeks ago. So SMDG stands for the Ship Message Design Group, which is a nonprofit association that works on kind of the. For the shipping industry, the global shipping industry, a shipping containers around the world. You know, these big cargo ships full of. Full of containers. Anyway, they. They have various categories of information that they, that they collect and aggregate, including. They publish a list of all the container terminals around the world and they assign each of those a code. So I am pleased to say that on OpenKit you can now enter one of these codes and we will geocode that to the correct terminal. 21 00:09:12.000 --> 00:09:14.000 Brilliant. 22 00:09:14.000 --> 00:09:15.000 That's very useful. 23 00:09:15.000 --> 00:09:19.000 That's so useful for lots and lots of users, I'm sure. 24 00:09:19.000 --> 00:09:30.000 I don't know if it's useful for lots and lots of users, but for the users that do care about this thing, of course it is useful. It's a niche use case. 25 00:09:30.000 --> 00:09:50.000 Yeah, it's nice just on that PHP thing, don't you think? There was, I Mean, did you notice that the whole Internet ground to a halt, that buses stopped working, the banking system collapsed, Nuclear Armageddon. Did any of that happen? 26 00:09:50.000 --> 00:13:02.000 No, it didn't. I mean, there were some services that got taken offline. I mean, you know, if you understand how this, all this works, someone discovers the bug, then if they're responsible, they submit that bug to, in this case the PHP people, they try to work out what the solution is. So there's some period of time in between the bug becoming known and before there's a publicly available solution. Obviously the bug can escape into the wild if someone unfortunately reveals that. And in this case the PHP group, okay, they announced we're going to reveal the solution at this time. And everyone patched their thing and I guess it did slip out a bit before that. So people were in absolute panic. And so out of caution, many large users of PHP did turn their systems off, including here in Germany, various government institutions and things like that. And I believe in other countries as well, which I guess makes sense. It's much less bad to be offline for a few hours than it is to have your system be compromised. The problem with all this, I mean, there were numerous other bugs kind of that week as well. And the problem is, Steven, what really worries me is people are really getting burned out by this, you know, and of course most of these PHP people, as with most open source projects, you know, many of them are just volunteers, right? So, and everyone also has, you know, a day job and a life and people are really getting burned out. You know, I think we commented about this last time on the podcast, but, you know, we've had to suspend our security bounty program where previously we had paid people for submitting security issues to us, which were always pretty minor and trivial, but it's just the volume has just increased so massively because now everyone is just using AI and the vast majority of it is complete nonsense that it spits out. But someone still has to try to parse through that and understand it and have a look at it and decide this is real or this is nonsense. And I mean, we could literally, in our tiny company, this could be a full time job and obviously it can't. We don't have the resources to have someone working on that full time and just to sit there and say 99% of the stuff that comes in is not relevant. So I don't know, I bring that up because also I recently went to a tech meetup and the mood was quite grim and down amongst the programmers of people basically Their job kind of becoming obsolete and, you know, I just feel like the joy has gone out of it to a degree. 27 00:13:02.000 --> 00:13:32.000 Certainly you could look forward 10, 15 years with less and less people taking up coding as a profession and wonder how we're going to fix some of these problems in the future. Because they'll still be there with AI building systems will still have bugs that other AIs will find, but there'll be no other people to actually fix these things. 28 00:13:32.000 --> 00:15:42.000 It is, yes. I mean, that's exactly the issue. As you look into the future, it does become very uncertain and it's unclear how this is all going to work. So, so I don't know. And I mean for us at OpenCage, of course, we also see, just this week we spotted a new, you know, kind of vibe coded competitor who sprung out of the earth and, and in the same way that your, your, your new game looked quite slick, you know, their website looks quite slick and you know, I haven't played with their system at all, but you know, I'm sure. And it's really frustrating, Stephen, because this person, A, the website looks quite slick. B, of course they're using all the open data that everyone uses that we ourselves use. Although we contribute back to OpenStreetMap and OpenStreetMap Corporate foundation members and things like that. They're not at all. It's just one guy, his weekend project or whatever. But you can see this is going to clutter up SEO. It's going to clutter up the AIs, it's going to. And it's just like, oh God, this is so annoying. This is really annoying. It's frustrating when you've invested literally years trying to work creating a business and a service and to provide high value to customers and things like that. And then someone just comes along and the weekend just copies everything. And so, you know, I don't know, I may, I may just be getting down because of the time change and the darkness or whatever. Maybe it's just. But nevertheless, that added up with the PHP apocalypse and all of it and the mood at this meetup I went to. It's, you know, it's, it's. I wouldn't, I wouldn't say it's all, it's all laughs right now. Nevertheless, of course, we can't complain and we do now have SMDG container terminals. 29 00:15:42.000 --> 00:16:22.000 I logged into my hosting provider the day that all that PHP stuff was announced. Within an hour or so of the patch being announced, they had updated all the instances of PHP on all of their client servers. So I mean the response was really fast. And for most people who were running a WordPress site, for example, which is 40 odd percent of the Internet, it was patched and fixed without anybody even knowing about it. 30 00:16:22.000 --> 00:16:36.000 Yeah. So of course we should say thank you to all the people involved in that. It's excellent. On the other hand, it also means of course they, they did that instead of doing whatever else they had planned to work on or whatever. Right. So 31 00:16:36.000 --> 00:16:37.000 anyway, 32 00:16:37.000 --> 00:16:44.000 anyway, let's talk about something more, a bit more, more cheery Barcelona. 33 00:16:44.000 --> 00:16:45.000 Okay. 34 00:16:45.000 --> 00:20:14.000 We had a. We had a great event last week in Barcelona. Before we get into the event, I do want to highlight we were once again very generously hosted at Cowork Idea, which is a co working center right in the center of Barcelona. You've been there, Stephen. The one time. Unfortunately they're going to be changing around their layout and basically the space that we've been using to have the event is going to become offices. And so this means that it's no longer going to be available for us to host events. So, dear listener, if you know of a venue in Barcelona that we can use in the future, of course it needs to be free, please do get in touch because currently we are venueless. But I do want to close by once again thanking Coworkee IDEA for hosting us over the years they have been a fantastic partner and I think we've had, I don't know, 10 or 12 events there over the years and it's really been great. And we wouldn't have been able to get GEOM up going in Barcelona without their support. So thank you to them. All right, let me take you through exactly what we had because if I may say so, I think this may have been our best slate of talks ever. We really had some good ones. First up, we had a project called Green City Index. This is a guy, Lorenzo, and basically he is kind of aggregating various open data about cities across the eu. So I think his definition of city is anything with over 50,000 people. And he kind of categorizes how much green space they have, how is the air quality and things like that. So it's a nice little way that you can compare different cities and things like that. The piece that was entering here is you see how far we've come. Because I can remember 15, 20 years ago the argument was always about that this data needs to be made open. And now it finally is open. And so this is one of the projects that results from that. And you can start to make These comparisons. So that was a nice talk. Second talk, which went on to win the best speaker prize, was a bit different. This is Jono's talk. Jono Khan, he has been a GMO Barcelona participant since the very beginning, one of, of our most loyal participants. But he now, he had previously worked in various kind of geo startups, but now he's working, he's developing a new fintech idea that has to do also with kind of money transfer across, across countries. And so this was a very humorous kind of look at the peculiarities of international financial regulations and all the pains of dealing with the different countries, for example. And he did it in a very. What, what I, what was very good was he did it in a very playful kind of quiz style. So, for example, which EU country has the highest vit? And he talked about all the different challenges of moving money and the regulations and also things like, for example, the sanctions on Russia and things like that and how people move money around. So, you know, it wasn't a strict geographic talk, but it did have a geographic element and it was very well done. 35 00:20:14.000 --> 00:20:18.000 And which, which EU country does have the highest rate of vat? 36 00:20:18.000 --> 00:21:30.000 Hungary. Hungary. Well, actually, it's really quite complicated, Stephen, because obviously in many countries different products have different rates of VAT, but, but Hungary has the highest rate of VAT, I think 27%. Right. So, okay, next talk was one that I particularly enjoyed because this is relevant to our business in that this is a guy Andres of a company called Mapit. He's the founder of the company. And they build a device that you, I guess their niche mainly is kind of a tracking device that is built into motorcycles so that you can. So that the rider can see where the motorcycle is, particularly around preventing theft and things like that, or tracking stuff. And it was quite interesting, the challenges that he described in terms of, you know, this device. I mean, first of all, you have all the challenges of the battery life and things like that. And. But I guess I've been doing this for some years. And he described all the issues of, I mean, dude, these thieves are very sophisticated. I mean, you'll have thieves that like, come with GPS blockers. 37 00:21:30.000 --> 00:21:31.000 Wow. 38 00:21:30.000 --> 00:22:24.000 You know, I mean, because obviously some of these motorcycles are quite valuable, of course, but you also just have the issue of, for example, let's say the motorcycle's parked overnight and because as the satellites are moving or whatever, it has to get a different GPS signal. And so you could have the situation that it looks like the device has moved because it's picking up different Signals, not a lot, but it can drift 10 meters this way, 10 meters that way or whatever. So, and, and you don't want to trigger a kind of false alarm in that case. Right. And, and tell the owner that the bike has moved when it accident actually moved. It's just that the GPS signal has changed. And so lots of kind of edge cases like that. And of course dealing with, you know, it's got to be. You got to track the motorcycle even if it's deep in a parking garage and things like that. I found it very, very interesting, this talk. A lot of things that you would not have thought of. 39 00:22:24.000 --> 00:22:26.000 Right. 40 00:22:26.000 --> 00:23:17.000 Okay, so next we had Alex, Alex Semenoff, who he has spoken at GMO Barcelona before, but this time he was back with a talk. One of the old favorites. He has built a tool to help you try to decide what part of the city to live in. The challenge with this, Steven, is as someone who worked in online real estate for 10 years, first of all, let me say, I mean his tool looked very impressive. I mean the usability of it, it's really. And again, taking all the different types of data that is available, so it was very slick. But as someone who worked on online real estate for like 10 years, it's actually super rare. This use case that someone says, I don't know the city at all and I'm willing to live anywhere in Barcelona. 41 00:23:17.000 --> 00:23:18.000 Yeah. 42 00:23:17.000 --> 00:23:47.000 You know, the reality is most people know where they want to live or they want to live. You know, they know where their friends live or they know that, you know, the five neighborhoods they like. I mean, and so it's not. This doesn't. When I lived in London, this came up all the time that people would build these kind of tools. And it's the perfect tool if you're like the 23 year old who just moved to London and you know nothing about London, however, that represents not that big of a percentage of the audience. 43 00:23:47.000 --> 00:23:58.000 And then all the things about where are the good schools and access to various facilities. Not things that you need anyway when you first move to a city. 44 00:23:58.000 --> 00:24:25.000 Yeah, but there aren't that many people who are like, oh, let me move completely to the other side of the city where I know no one and nothing just because some tool told me it could be nice. I mean, that doesn't. In reality, you want to live near your friends, or you want to live near your family, or you know where your work is. Or so my experience was. I'm not saying this is not a useful tool, but it's useful only For a tiny percentage of the real estate seeking population. 45 00:24:25.000 --> 00:24:31.000 It's also the case that I think several people have built these tools. 46 00:24:31.000 --> 00:25:26.000 Oh yeah, of course we built things like this. I guess the main takeaway there though is that it really did look very slick. The tools, be it the maps, be it the data that's available, they have all gotten much, much better over the years. So it was impressive. I mean, I do encourage people to check it out. It's called. You'll see it in the summary thread. The link to it, timetomap.com is his brand and then I think it's kind of a sub link on that page. Anyway, the final talk was one that I also particularly enjoyed. This was Anton, Anton Venomoser, who longtime podcast listeners may know. He was a guest here on the podcast earlier this year. He is one of the main contributors on Comaps. Do you use Comaps at all, Steve? 47 00:25:26.000 --> 00:25:27.000 No. 48 00:25:27.000 --> 00:26:25.000 Are you familiar with Comaps? So Comaps is the fork of Organic Maps. So basically this is like an app for using OpenStreetMap for getting around kind of a Google Maps equivalent. And they forked off from organic maps about 18 months ago and he gave us an update on how far they've gotten. I am a Comaps user. I love it. It's a great tool. You can download the data and you have it offline. So I use it quite a lot when I go hiking and stuff because it has all the benefits of OpenStream app. You have all the rich data of OpenStreetMap and and you don't need a connection. I mean, it's a great tool, a great app. I encourage everyone to check it out and try it. And it's really impressive what they've been doing over the last couple of years in terms of continually improving it. 49 00:26:25.000 --> 00:26:28.000 Does it have public transport? 50 00:26:28.000 --> 00:27:15.000 They are working on integrating public transport. I mean, of course it has the stations and things like that. It does not yet have real time public transport. They are also working on integrated real time traffic. So I mean this is the tool. You know, very, very often people have somehow heard of OpenStreetMap and then they go to openstreetmap.org and they're expecting some kind of equivalent to Google Maps, which openstreetmap.org obviously is not and cannot be. And then people get frustrated. Ko Maps is the equivalent to Google Maps is the app they should install. Okay, so anyway, it was a great talk, an impressive project and people should check it out, 51 00:27:15.000 --> 00:27:18.000 give it a try. 52 00:27:18.000 --> 00:27:47.000 Yeah, you should. I do recommend you give it a try. It's really nice. Anyway, then we went to the pub and we had some good discussions there. It was good mood in the crowd, good mix of regulars, also new people. And so I hope we can keep the momentum going. We'll probably have our next Barcelona event maybe in the spring sometime, assuming, of course we can find a venue. 53 00:27:47.000 --> 00:27:49.000 Of course, yeah. 54 00:27:49.000 --> 00:27:50.000 But 55 00:27:49.000 --> 00:27:51.000 you will, you will. 56 00:27:51.000 --> 00:28:25.000 I suspect we will. And then, Stephen, I want to give a shout out to everyone who's listening in Cologne. Last night was geomob Cologne. I have not yet had any feedback about how the event went, but it was their second event and I'm sure it went well. It also looked like a very good lineup of speakers, so hopefully everyone had a good time there. And in a couple of weeks we've got a geomob Lisbon coming up, which unfortunately I will not be able to attend. But then we also have a GMO Berlin, which I will be able to attend 57 00:28:25.000 --> 00:28:30.000 and which will be the last year mob of 2026. 58 00:28:30.000 --> 00:28:48.000 It will be the last year mob of 2026, unless someone wants to do something else. And, you know, I had to look. We. That will close out the year and I think. I think we're coming in at about 25 events this year, so across all the different locations. So congrats to everyone. 59 00:28:48.000 --> 00:28:52.000 And you missed a shout out for the guys in Dublin. 60 00:28:52.000 --> 00:29:09.000 Oh, right, of course, of course, of course. Yes. Yeah, yes. The. The night after, after Barcelona, there was event in Dublin and the pictures looked fantastic. And so, yeah, I mean, this is. This is what it's come to, Stephen. I can't even keep track of all the events anymore. 61 00:29:09.000 --> 00:29:14.000 I mean, they had six spe. Oh, they had. They had Ed Parsons there. 62 00:29:14.000 --> 00:29:38.000 Ed Parsons spoke. Yeah. So I have heard it went well. I heard it was a great evening and the pictures seem to confirm that. So it does look like they are getting the momentum going there. So if you have the chance. I mean, first of all, I encourage people always to travel around and go to different events, but Dublin was a very fun one, of course. 63 00:29:38.000 --> 00:29:41.000 Indeed. And the pubs are particularly good. 64 00:29:41.000 --> 00:29:52.000 The pub was excellent. So as a Guinness drinker, I can confirm the pub was very good. So. 65 00:29:52.000 --> 00:30:12.000 So we've talked about the trials and tribulations of a small business owner, but this week we saw the trials and tribulations of a big venture capital funded business owner. 66 00:30:12.000 --> 00:30:46.000 Yeah, this is. You're referring, of course, to the article from Dennis Crowley, the founder of Foursquare, where he kind of reflected on, I guess, a few weeks ago, Foursquare, the brand was Sold again. And the end result is quite depressing for all of the Foursquare employees and people that got nothing for their shares. So a bit of a sad ending to what was once such a, such an innovative and creative brand around Geospatial. So 67 00:30:46.000 --> 00:31:03.000 I know I never got onto the four square thing. I mean that was. They started out where you became mayor of places and all of that and checking in and I never got check ins and all of that. 68 00:31:03.000 --> 00:32:01.000 I did it for a while. The problem is that of course never really caught on in Europe. It was, I felt like it was much more of an American kind of thing. And so at some point the social aspect was kind of missing. But the piece that was interesting, of course, is you could track where you had been and that part I did find you. So you could see how often you went to different places. And I don't know, I feel like they did, they made several mistakes along the way. There was then at some point they split the app into multiple apps and they had this one called Swarm, which was more of the social aspect. And then nevertheless there was a separate app where you tracked your journey. Of course the fundamental problem with all this, Steven, is a huge investment to make this product which people did enjoy, but it was always a bit unclear how they make any money out of it. I guess that's the lesson to be learned here. 69 00:32:01.000 --> 00:32:07.000 If Dennis had been at GeoMob 10 years ago, you know what question I would have asked him? 70 00:32:07.000 --> 00:33:25.000 Well, I would have had to be 20 years ago. I mean, it was quite a long time ago that Foursquare came out. Nevertheless, I am quite appreciative of what they did because this was a great example of getting Geospatial into the hands of ordinary people and showing what I liked about Foursquare. It was one of the first services that re envisioned what was possible. Yeah. You know, like for example, the tools that everyone use, like Google Maps, I mean, of course they're amazing, but essentially it's the old A to Z in a digital format. Right. You know, it's not. Whereas. But with Foursquare it was something totally new, something that was never possible before, that was only capable, you know, in the current, given the current new digital tools. And so that was quite interesting. And we need people that are inventing those kind of new ways of interacting. But it needs to be sustainable. It can't just be. VCs pump in a lot of money on the vague hope that somehow at the end some kind of business model turns up. 71 00:33:25.000 --> 00:34:46.000 Yeah. And I think I'VE got a slightly different take on this, Ed, because I'm sort of horrified that hundreds of millions of dollars, I don't know how many hundred million dollars went into Foursquare in the various fundraising rounds, but, you know, it's $700 million went into that, and basically it's all been vaporized. And the more that. And every time that happens, we hear from founders about their mea culpa about what went wrong, and I stuck with it for too long, or I did this or I did that. But actually, real people's money, investment, pension funds, savings are being just burnt. And it's sort of. I think there's another side to it. It's a bit of a darker side to it. You know, the venture capital push of flooding these businesses with money and the founders who are willing to accept the money or think they need to accept the money. I look at your business, it's probably never going to be a unicorn. But 72 00:34:46.000 --> 00:34:48.000 never say never, Stephen. Never say never. 73 00:34:48.000 --> 00:35:21.000 Well, all right, in my lifetime, I doubt I will see it as a unicorn, but you've built a nice business. You haven't had to fund it with loads of other people's money. You pay wages to a few people, and at the end of every month, you count up the incomings and the outgoings and then more incomings than outgoings. And that seems to me like the nature, sort of the basics of building a business. 74 00:35:21.000 --> 00:36:03.000 Yes, that's true. Although, I mean, I guess the counter argument would be if you have these kind of network effect businesses like which Foursquare was at the beginning, where the service is better, the more people that use it. So you need to push as fast as you can to get as many people to use it. And the way to do that is, of course, with money via marketing or whatever. So, I mean, you can understand the logic that would. That would convince investors to make this bet, that would convince founders to accept that bet. I mean, I can see the logic of it. 75 00:36:03.000 --> 00:36:05.000 I can see. Nevertheless. 76 00:36:05.000 --> 00:37:47.000 Nevertheless, as, I mean, it's a good bet and. Or, you know, the question is, I'm not convinced it was a bad bet. Was it a bad bet or was it bad execution or both? Maybe, I don't know. But, you know, if you see this thing, I mean, I do remember 2009, 2010, whenever, when foursquare was really, really quite popular, and you could see it taking off and more and more people getting into it. And thus you can understand the logic if someone says, you know, this rocket ship has taken off, let me Let me get on board and let me, you know, put in hundreds of millions, because at some point it's going to be worth hundreds of billions. I mean, it's no sillier than things like Instagram or whatever at that time. That all kind of came at that time. And, you know, some of those bets paid out and some didn't. So I guess the question is, is that because people don't really want to become mayor of their local bar, or is it because they executed poorly or whatever the reason was? But nevertheless, I'm appreciative that Foursquare existed and got us all thinking in different ways and showed what is possible. And, you know, we need more innovators that are. That are inventing kind of these new ways of interacting around geospatial. And I'm not sure they all need to be funded with hundreds of millions and that then evaporates. But I don't know. I think the article is well worth reading and we'll have it linked in the show notes. I agree, 77 00:37:47.000 --> 00:37:48.000 and 78 00:37:48.000 --> 00:37:49.000 food for thought. 79 00:37:49.000 --> 00:37:52.000 Props to Dennis for writing the article. 80 00:37:52.000 --> 00:37:55.000 Absolutely. 81 00:37:55.000 --> 00:38:14.000 I can disagree with some of it, but I think the fact that he's willing to write that article and to recognize some of the things that didn't work is good. Yeah. And also, like you said, you know, they were innovative and. And we need more of that. So 82 00:38:14.000 --> 00:39:02.000 who knows, maybe. Maybe we'll be able to get him on the podcast. I would love to chat with them. I interacted with him a few times on Twitter back in the day, but that's quite a while ago. I mean, he himself has been out of the business for five or six years, I think something. And, and I think he was. Even then, he was just on the board. So I think he's out of a operational role for. For over 10 years. So, I mean, he. In the article, it does kind of say one of the reasons he wrote it is to kind of close the. Close the chapter on Foursquare, which, I mean, I can only imagine what a. What a grueling personal toll it must have taken because, I mean, you know, he and his co founders literally invented this idea. And then to see it get so popular and then. And then to watch it slowly collapse must be very, very, very crushing. 83 00:39:02.000 --> 00:39:36.000 And in fact, both you and I have invested in startups at a much smaller scale. Not hundreds of millions, not even millions, probably, but we've invested in startups which haven't worked. And the founders have ground on, tried pivoting, finding different ways, cutting costs, and eventually have had to face the financial reality and close down. And that is a brutal experience for them. 84 00:39:36.000 --> 00:39:37.000 Absolutely. 85 00:39:37.000 --> 00:39:41.000 You know, I mean, awful, awful experience. You know, building 86 00:39:41.000 --> 00:39:53.000 a business. Building a business is very hard, especially if it's a new business as a. New technologies, new new modes of interacting. It's very challenging. Very, very challenging. I'm 87 00:39:53.000 --> 00:40:07.000 bouncing back after. After a failure is really tough. And I think Americans are much better at that than Europeans. 88 00:40:07.000 --> 00:40:29.000 Oh, I don't know. I mean, certainly in the consumer Internet, but there are many other industries that are where Europeans do quite well. Anyway, I do encourage people to read the article and reflect on it and, you know, let's see. Let's see what the next thing is. 89 00:40:29.000 --> 00:41:06.000 So let's finish on a cheerful note, shall we? Because that's a bit glum. So Doug Greenfield, who. You and I both know who he. You'll find him on Mastodon and on Bluesky, and he has a weekly substack called Map of the Week. And he wrote an absolutely wonderful piece about maps in the wild. And I just wanted to have a public shout out and say thank you, Doug. It was a really great piece. Brought a lot of attention to Maps in the Wild. 90 00:41:06.000 --> 00:41:11.000 Did that generate a lot of new subscribers? 91 00:41:11.000 --> 00:41:26.000 Well, you don't really know it. I mean, the email list is very retro, isn't it? You know, I mean, that's not what people do anymore, is it? So, you know, I mean, you know, people following us on. On the socials. 92 00:41:26.000 --> 00:41:27.000 Right, Gotcha. 93 00:41:27.000 --> 00:41:46.000 I don't know. Yeah, probably a few more. And lots of people just go browse to the website, you know, and you can go to the website and. But in. In the big picture, yeah, I think it gave us a little boost, but it was just a lovely piece. And so I wanted to say thank you to Doug at the end of this. 94 00:41:46.000 --> 00:41:51.000 Well, it's always nice when people say nice things about you, so. 95 00:41:51.000 --> 00:41:53.000 Yeah. 96 00:41:53.000 --> 00:42:09.000 All right, On. On that note, keep up the good work, Stephen, and we'll keep doing our best at Open Cage. And I guess we're. I don't know how many more of these we're gonna get recorded this year, Steven. This May, I think, looking at the schedule, we have pretty full schedule in the coming weeks. 97 00:42:09.000 --> 00:42:10.000 Well, 98 00:42:10.000 --> 00:42:12.000 we'll have to do some kind of Christmas special. 99 00:42:12.000 --> 00:42:19.000 We're gonna have to fit in a Christmas special with the other co hosts, I think. 100 00:42:19.000 --> 00:42:20.000 Exactly. 101 00:42:20.000 --> 00:42:22.000 I better get on to that, hadn't I? 102 00:42:22.000 --> 00:42:34.000 Yeah. Actually, after we record, maybe we should discuss that. But. All right. Thanks, everyone, for listening. Hope to see you at gmo Berlin in a couple weeks and Right. 103 00:42:34.000 --> 00:42:35.000 Take care. 104 00:42:34.000 --> 00:42:35.000 See you soon. 105 00:42:35.000 --> 00:42:40.000 By. 106 00:42:40.000 --> 00:43:14.000 Thanks for joining us today on the GeoMob podcast. We hope you enjoyed the discussion. You can get the show notes over on the website, which is@thegeomob.com and while you're there you can sign up for our monthly newsletter and find links to our accounts on Mastodon and LinkedIn so you can stay up to date on all our upcoming events. We hope to see you at an event soon. SA.