Meeting with a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Company

I met with a GIS company yesterday and they’re doing all this really cool stuff. If you look at Google Maps right now over the Philippines, there’s barely enough data there. The guys I met had EVERYTHING. Geographic features, road networks, points of interests, business establishments.

They’ve worked with companies like ABS-CBN to show flooding areas, the Philippine National Red Cross to put on a map evacuation centers vs drop off points vs warehouses. They’ve even worked with a town mayor to identify constituents, supporters, voting population, barangay leaders and such. Finally, a politician doing analytics!

Maybe a presidential aspirant and his party would be willing to contract my company to do election analytics (which is highly regarded in the US) for about 200 million pesos. I could only dream.

What’s even more interesting is that they’re coming out with a GPS device by the end of this year containing everything. It will speak to you just like any GPS device out there on the market and will retail for about PHP 13,000. Neat stuff.

One last thing I learned from our meeting yesterday was how Dagupan was flooded. Apparently, there are a bunch of damns on the same river flowing to Dagupan. Dagupan is also an area filled with waterways all over. Dams overflowed leading to all waterways and their tributaries inside Dagupan to overflow.