All posts by Richard Thomas
The Unity Thesis: Trimble’s Case for One Connected Asset Lifecycle
From GIS context and survey-grade positioning to asset management and field capture, Trimble is making the case for one connected asset lifecycle — a system in which precise location, operational software and shared data reinforce one another, and where the AI layered on top is valued less for novelty than for producing consistent, trustworthy results....
Esri User Conference 2026: What the Sessions Add Up To
More than fifteen thousand people filled the San Diego Convention Center for Esri’s 46th annual User Conference this year, with roughly that many more watching by livestream from 117 countries. Taken session by session, the program is a wide survey of a mapping platform still expanding in every direction. Taken together, it resolves into a...
The Chain That Counts
Four specialists on what actually separates a drone data product from a deliverable a surveyor will stamp The unmanned systems industry has spent a decade getting very good at one thing: flying. The airframes are capable, the sensors are capable, and the regulatory framework, while still evolving, is no longer the primary bottleneck it was...
Teledyne FLIR IIS: The Camera Inside the Stack
When Mike Lee, director of product management for the company’s spherical imaging business, sat down with xyHt at Geo Week 2026, he was not pitching a new workflow platform or a digital twin ecosystem. He was describing a company whose job is to provide a visual sensing layer that other companies’ systems depend on —...
Pix4D’s Platform Moment: From Photogrammetry Engine to Enterprise Reality
Fifteen years into the UAV software revolution, Pix4D’s CTO sees Gaussian splatting, AI-assisted editing, and the smartphone-as-surveying-instrument converging into something bigger than any single tool. When Pix4D was founded in 2011 as a spin-off from EPFL’s Computer Vision Lab in Lausanne, the pitch was essentially this: drones are coming, and someone has to turn the...
The Private Geospatial Firm as Data Steward
The MAPPS community sits at the center of a transition most of its clients haven’t fully named yet. The firms that articulate it first will own the conversation. For most of its history, the private geospatial services firm has been defined by what it delivers: orthophotos, LiDAR point clouds, photogrammetric products, hydrographic surveys, corridor maps....