View from Black Mountain

So what is the industry doing?  Some of the keynotes at the conference touched on this.  Opening the conference was Kate Lundy (Minister for Industry and Innovation) saying that all government data should be linked spatially and also recognising the productivity improvements gained when the location of data is used – such as position agriculture.  Kate reminded us of the work at Office of Spatial Policy that has produced the Foundation Data Themes, 10 themes of authoritative data for Australia and New Zealand.  And the future?  A Space Policy that will encompass how we rely on satellites.  The panel session entitled “Big issues Big talk” started with presentations: Mark Crosweller (Director General Emergency Management Australia), Greg Babinski (URISA), CDRE Brett Brace (Hydrographer of Australia) and Anne Gawen and Sue Vardon of ConnectingUp Australia.  They provided a wide perspective with themes such as: the increase in data from the public (a good and bad thing), trust in data, importance of communities, GeoData does not deliver ROI itself – only geospatial applications provide end user benefits (something Gaia Resources is well aware of), access to time sensitive data, and the importance of remembering who your audience are – the ones using the data or application.

David Dibiase talked more about the ROI of GeoServices and pointed to a few reports that calculated the social, economic and environmental benefits.  One benefit that is difficult to quantify, is the saving of lives.  ROI is just one measure of how valuable the spatial sciences are.  If something is valuable to industry you would expect it to be a skill that people can learn, Universities would have related courses.  50,000 people have registered for a course called Maps and the Geospatial Revolution that starts in July.  The ROI discussions prompted me to ask a few people, ‘Do organisations fully account for the asset that the data represents?’  I had mixed responses, some definite positives – which surprised me.  I’m not convinced that the time and resources required to capture, store, manage, maintain and share data are well accounted for.  Have you seen data listed as an asset in the accounts of a company?

Square Kilometre Array

Another buzz word is Big Data, which was the topic of a fascinating presentation at the conference, and also the theme of the recent GeoRabble in Perth.  The presenters at GeoRabble gave me the impression there are two schools of thought when it comes to BigData: 1) It’s just lots of what we already have, so carry on; 2) the large volumes and various types of data we have now, and will have in the future, need different management structures.  I’m of the latter opinion, especially when I was told that the Square Kilometre Array (super large radio telescope) will – when it’s operational – collect more data that we can physically store.

That’s only one project that will generate vast quantities of data, obviously there are many more, which we are probably ignoring, or at least not fully utilising the data produced, such as Twitter, mobile phone movements, shopping habits etcetera.  Is there value in applying the data, information, knowledge, wisdom pyramid to BigData?  There is an opportunity to make use of this (spatial) data to support the decision making process – as was talked about at the SSSC2013.

Although the Spatial industry is vital, it’s key benefit, applicability, is still not widely realised.  Spatial data can be better understood, appreciated, managed and valued appropriately.  There is work to be done to help organisations and people benefit from the use of spatial data.  I’ve still yet to find an industry that would not benefit from the better use of spatial data, it’s widely applicable – where do we start?

Let me know what you think – below, on Twitter or email.

The post SSSC2013 and GeoRabble BigData appeared first on Gaia Resources.

1. Recent aerial imagery,
2. The on-site knowledge of our client, and
3. Digitising skill.

The key for any digitising work is communications with the client, particularly early on in the project. From the inception of the project with SDGM a clear baseline of disturbance categories were defined and a method for providing and reviewing this information was planned. SDGM decided the method that suited them the most was marking up of hard copy printouts of the mine site imagery. This proved successful for the level of detail required. For clients with more complex mine sites a series of indexed printouts, or training and support can be provided to the client to allow a rough indication of disturbed areas. In this project reviews were able to be kept to a minimum, which helped with meeting deadlines – and in fact delivered a final cost 50% less than we had quoted.

The Department of Mines and Petroleum recently introduced an on-line submission system for AERs.  This was the first time that SGDM was to use this system and we were pleased to provide the summarised disturbance data in a format that was suitable for submission.

Over time, we have seen people increasingly able to perform basic GIS mapping tasks, allowing more and more staff from different backgrounds to create maps. This pushes more of our work as a GIS company to the analysis and modelling end of the spectrum, although we are finding that quality control of GIS data outputs are not as well known.  Perhaps like digitising, this will improve with time for the average GIS user. That being said, it remains essential to distinguish between basic maps to use for field navigation, qualitative reporting and presentation; with a digitised dataset that contains no overlaps, topological errors, or other errors such as incorrect or inappropriate projection. It is these latter outputs that are used for generation of statistics for environmental reporting and should be accurate, defendable and repeatable to keep up with environmental reporting legislation.

Staff from AGAA proved extremely easy to work with and the project fell well within budget and time frames, but both AGAA (and Gaia Resources) are very interested in further improving the efficiency of disturbance capture. As you might have seen from Piers’ tweets last week (here) we are supporting a Masters student at the University of Western Australia.  This student project will use a variety of multi-spectral imagery (including AGAA’s, we hope), as well as final disturbance mapping vectors, to enable research into the automation of mine disturbance capture. This project has the potential to derive a model that will provide highly repeatable, robust and consistent methodology for the annual reporting of mine disturbance saving time, money and improving reporting accuracy by removing the manual capture component. We’ll post another blog on that – guest written by the student – in the future.

Care to comment?  Or perhaps follow Gaia Resources, we’d enjoy hearing from you.

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Why?

The background to this sprint was that a fellow colleague of our client mentioned that the level of detail of their imagery was not good.  We were both surprised by this as the imagery was pretty good, so we did a little more digging to find out why this may have been the case.  It turned out that the colleague probably did not have the ability to view the digital imagery and was likely looking at either print outs or screen shots.  Our team knew we could solve the issue by giving our client easy access to their valuable data.  A perfect example for a sprint, a real-world issue with an opportunity to learn some software.

What we did

After fleshing out the requirement of our day long sprint we thought about solutions.  We were quick to realise that a web-service was the way to go, we had the imagery and only needed to serve it out for our client to access.  It turned out that the devil was in the detail, more later, but we were all pleased with the result.

Technically we would need a environment to host a web page and the software to efficiently serve large quantities of imagery to potentially multiple concurrent users.  The web environment was all ready to go, and Andrew had done some research into which software could be used to serve the imagery.  He found that TileMill and Leaflet were worth investigating.  The way I understand it was that we would pre-process the imagery data into a tile service which Leaflet would serve out to the web page, it hangs together like this:

Sprint day came and we drew up a plan of attack for the team who had volunteered.  Data would have to be pre-processed, the HTML page created and then the data served to the web page.  Am I making this sound easy?  I had the fun part of learning to design the layout of the web page with Mel’s help – oh, and keep the team on the tightly scheduled track.  In terms of design we didn’t have time to completely consider the interesting points Andrew found a while back – here’s a summary of this article (How real people use web maps):

1. Single-Topic maps get 3 times the traffic of the traditional Map Portal
2. 60% of map traffic comes directly from search engine requests.
3. Auto-complete drives clean user queries
4. Map Usage is Spiky
5. People Look Up Info on Maps, and Leave
6. People Actually Interact with Balloon Content
7. People Rarely Change Default Map Settings

Again, something to follow up on.

What we got

Let’s see, unfortunately we can’t let you use the live site as it has our clients data on, but this will give you a impression:

There were a few things that we could improve on, but after one day we had achieved the requirement, we had a web page giving easy access to imagery.  There were various software combinations that could have been used, but TileMill and Leaflet were unfamiliar to us so we were able to discuss the pro’s and cons at the end of the day will everyone at the wrap-up presentation.  We were reminded that imagery data is often large and therefore time consuming to move about, especially when copying to our external web host, so we decided to use a sample area of imagery for the Sprint day.

The format of the sprint worked well.  The short time-frame had to be considered and we careful to check that we all understood our scope and communicated with each other frequently to manage any unexpected events.  Some of the technical outcomes were; a better understanding of alternative software to serve imagery; more people now understand or were re-freshed in design and HTML code; and any nice-to-haves were parked.  There are many other benefits to running such short R&D projects besides the obvious one of testing ideas.  Together as a team we made the best use of the resources we had over the short time.  Communication was important to ensure everyone stayed on task and we all knew of any issues that could have required a re-think.  It was rewarding to hear colleagues talking animatedly about future possibilities, Piers fortunately remembered something I forgot, to test the service on a mobile platform.  What happened?

 It worked – well, but not perfectly, that sounds like an extension to this Sprint!

Summary

So, we spent a day of R&D investigating innovative methods to resolve the issue a client had of not being able to access imagery.  The structure of a Sprint day is adaptable and therefore required management and communication to get the job done within scope.  We learnt much from the day including the potential benefits of software and the infrastructure required to support such a service; project management skills for very short run tasks, and the importance of staying on track.  We succeeded in meeting our objective of the day, to enable easy access to imagery, with a few minor tweaks we will share our results with our client.

Very interested to hear your comments – below, tweet, email, phone 045-999-0257, or catch me at ISPRS in Melbourne Aug 23 – 30th.

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The Super Tuesday crew are well organised and sent my survey form and instructions well in advance once I had chosen my intersection from their on-line map (tough to use on my mobile).  I duly read the instructions and reviewed the survey form.

Easy!  I had weeks before the survey so I filed things away, but firstly I asked some of the Gaia Resources team what they thought of the survey form and whether they thought it could be made digital – for use on a smart phone perhaps.  We agreed that such an App could probably be developed – while the Spatial team aren’t App developers, we still could consider the usability.  I thought I’d test the App idea while doing the count.

March 6th came and I – wearing the supplied T-shirt, stood, leaned, sat in the bushes watching my intersection (thanks Google for the image)  and recorded onto my full-page map the cyclists for two hours.  There weren’t many cyclists to start with so I thought I would individually number them, marking where they entered and  exited – even to the level of whether they were on the road, paths or through carparks.  That was more information than was asked for, but I kept up and recorded 38 cyclists.  I have ideas why there weren’t more cyclists, but that’s another story.

Back to my question, would an electronic App have worked?  Possibly.  By actually going to the field and taking part in the survey I learnt that there may be other information to record, or other factors to consider in the design.  I’m sure Super Tuesday have thought of this themselves but I wondered what the other intersections would be like?  More junctions, with many more cyclists?  Could an App and a device still be usable in all situations?  More testing would be required.

My story does not end there, once you have collected your data you should share it.  I logged onto the Super Tuesday site and was presented with a table to enter my results.  This confused me, I had my map with individual numbers, I would have to summarise my data into a table.  Not difficult (assuming I could read my scribble!) but a little time consuming.  This is when speaking to my father I realised that I had forgotten some of the instructions.  There were two recording pages, one-full page map and the other a page showing a smaller map and a…table.  If I had taken the table to the field I would have had less data, but an easier job supplying it.

Lessons:

1. Instructions could be replaced by a well designed interface to a survey application
2. Interpreting your own hand writing days later reminds me to write neater
3. Understanding what is required is vital
4. (Field) Testing is essential

Cycling has been in the news again over here in Perth, for speeding cyclists, and proposed cycling facilities for the CBD– Cycle Instead Bike Week is this week, March 18 – 25.

Future?

Could the cycle count have been done remotely and automatically by using feature extraction and remote sensing?  Let me know what you think: Twitter, email or leave a comment below.

Tom

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It was great to get back into the RS world and see the various ways that people are applying the science.  When I last dabbled in RS, imagery was expensive and not readily available at the quality people wanted.  Now there are hundreds of satellites providing many types of imagery.  Interestingly, the conference presenters seemed to focus on Satellite imagery with few mentioning air-borne sensors.

The symposium was indeed international with people from China, USA, South Africa, Netherlands, UK, Germany, Italy, Indonesia… There seemed to be some repetition of work between countries, although this symposium is a great way to reduce that through an exchange of ideas, there were several instances when people made suggestions on how to improve others work.  To help people exchange ideas and coordinate and support country’s to develop their use of RS the active industry body definitely helps.  The GEOSS also has some interesting projects on the go including lots of analysis of the recent Japanese earthquakes.  Have a look.

One topic that I was interested to find more about was bush fire detection, modelling and prediction.  There were several presentations that covered this topic, one that stuck in my mind from Philip Frost (CSRI Meraka Institute) was about flashovers.  Flashovers are the arcing between high-voltage powerlines caused by fire events.  The arcs may only last milliseconds, but with any interruption to power supply the effect on industry can be expensive.  Philip gave the example of a printing press that had to be completely re-started following a power interruption.  Philip was investigating the causes of the flashovers and the probability of predictions using weather data (temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction) and vegetation descriptions. The appealing thing about this presentation was that Philip and team notified people of fires by mobile message based on their location.  The necessity of having good base map data is obvious.  Oh, could Philip predict the fires?  Yep, they are 96% correct with their predictions.  There is also a lot of work going on in Australia by various people to predict and detect fires.

Number of hotspots 

What stood out from four days of wall-to-wall presentations?  The enthusiasm of the presenters and the audience, and the breadth of topics.  Fortunately, people are amalgamating the wealth of data available and making applications that give easier access.  A simple example of this is Landsat imagery is now free – years of it.

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Renée started by comparing the traditional view of a GIS, the top down view that is front loaded – the real world is abstracted into layers that are maintained in a desktop GIS. The GeoWeb as the name implies, is collaborative, there is the opportunity for many to create data, or recreate it (mash-ups etc.). GeoWeb data is likely to be stored on a server, and potentially platform independent. Renée explained that GIS v1.0 is about authoritative data, where the GeoWeb is more about non-authoritative producers of data. A more detailed definition of the GeoWeb is here.

An example of the GeoWeb is OpenStreetMap (OSM). Is this ‘non-authoritative’ data useful? Renée gave the example of the recent devastation faced by Haiti after the earthquake, they needed mapping data fast. QuickBird gave out satellite images to a group of volunteers that digitised the data into OSM that was then used in the field. Another example is the reason why OSM started in the UK in the first place. I’ll let you research the details, but essentially as Renée said, that “frustration leads to innovation”.

Perhaps frustration was a driver for some of the projects that Renée and her team have worked on. They have worked on numerous data visualisation projects around the world using Ferret, an OpenSource data visualisation software, in some (if not all projects). An example of how Ferret can be used for visualising climate change was shown, multiple Google Earth images on screen-simultaneously.

Back to the collaborative nature of the GeoWeb using Citizens as Sensors (Piers has blogged about this previously) and the common thought that the data that Citizens collect is not accurate. Michael Goodchild (the Father of GIS), says that non experts can give just as accurate data as experts. A challenge of Citizen Sensor data are the motives for involvement, for example http://www.surfacestations.org/ is a web site for Climate Change deniers to record where weather recording stations are located in positions that may effect the accuracy of their recordings. Another challenge is positional accuracy, for example when Citizens locate a record on a web-map that is obscured with cloud. Renée’s group are working on algorithms to determine the accuracy of Citizen Sensor (or should I say Science) data. You can read more about their work here: http://rose.geog.mcgill.ca/geoide/.

We only had a few days notice of this seminar, but there were 20 or so of us. I took the opportunity in question time to plug the ALA work.  I found the seminar very useful as it gave me a prediction of where the GIS industry is heading.

A final note that stuck in Andrew’s mind (he tweeted it too), “Data portals are dead, the goal is to bring data to the people not people to the data”.

Email me, or Andrew, watch for tweets from Gaia Resources. or leave a comment below.

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3rd November 2010, UWA Geography Department

First day back in the office from my quick trip to the UK and I was asked to give a short presentation to the SSSI (Surveying and Spatial Sciences Institute) members at their Going Places Spring seminar.  I was asked to present  two subjects I could not resist, a course called GIS Program Management, and me!

Back in September I attended a Train the Trainer session for the GIS Program Management course (written by URISA) over in Melbourne (part of the SSSI Vic state conference).  The course was as interesting as the advertisement made it sound.  There was a lot of information to cover in one day and it was useful that the presentation of the course was shared amongst participants so we could share experiences.

Of most use for me was:

  1.  GIS Program Management is similar to IT Program Management, however a GIS program does have some futher challenges.  Many in an organisation do not understand the implications (or benefits) of GISs.  Ever tried to convince the Database Administrator that your GIS database is not the same as any other database?  If GISs are not well understood it is unlikely that an effective GIS program exists beyond individual GIS projects.

  2. Resourcing
a) You may have to hire new staff, allow time to acquire approval and clearly define the job role to get the best person.
  b) Use external contractors where appropriate, but ensure they transfer knowledge back to you in a useful way.

  3. Technology is changing including that of GIS, however we still need to produce the good old paper map.
  a) GIS is becoming more accessible with more user friendly software systems.  This increases the exposure of GIS, but are key principles being adhered to?  Anyone can create a map, but does the map communicate the data accurately and clearly?

There was much to learn and reflect upon from the course and I hope to use some ideas internally within Gaia Resources and also when working with our customers to improve GIS Program Management.  The SSSI will be offering an Australian version of this course from the beginning of 2011.

I was also invited to give a potted history of my career.  Between here and the UK I have worked for Public and Private organisations in wide ranging industries including Mining, Transport, Oil and Gas, Telecommunications and the Environmental sector.  Working for ESRI (UK) gave me experience of almost every other sector of business including Insurance, Military, Agriculture, and Health.  It has been interesting to see how people use GIS differently.  At one point, my job title was Geo-magician!

Energy Efficiency

More great ideas from the team at Great Gardens to save energy around the home, and perhaps around the office.

The team reminded us where most energy is used around the house, like water and air heating / cooling.  If you are wasting energy you are wasting money – the popular reason to change our ways.

Turn the temperature of your hot water system down to 60C, do you really need it any hotter with Summer approaching?  Insulate your hot water pipes with lagging (rubber foam covering), and install a low flow shower head – they start from only $10 (or insert a flow-limiting washer for $4).

Aim for an air temperature of 22 – 24, for every degree either side of this you have to push, it will cost you about 10% more energy.  Seal your drafts, even for summer, stop the hot air coming in.

I could go on, but I suggest getting along to one – or several of the free workshops (in Western Australia), see the link above.

Oh, one thing that I am going to fix this weekend is shading.  Ideally I would plant a small forest to gain from the natural cooling effect of plants, but I will have to start with some shade cloth (or blankets, or any other covering) to reflect the sun from my westerly windows.  Stopping the sun before it hits the house seems obvious.

Here I am: Email me, or watch for tweets from Gaia Resources.

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Can you summarise what you’ve done in the last few months into a 2 minute slot? Especially after having a huge, lovely hamburger? We tried. We updated each other with the work we’ve been doing, and while there was a wide variety there were noticeable similarities. We are all dealing with information or data of a type, and customers. Some projects sounded very similar (e.g. ALA and DEHWA), but had different deliverables. The deliverables were obviously determined by the customer’s requirements. As developers we should not second guess customer requirements, or their relative importance. There is only one way you know what to develop, and that is by engaging your customer. We are going to practise what we preach by running some user engagement exercises with the results of our staff reviews. Everyone is going to tell Piers what is the most valuable thing that can be changed about their job. Will it be: more burgers, bigger monitors, bean-bags or something else?

Continuing the theme of good communication, Mel gave us a brown-paper bag session on her investigations into the Google mapping API. I was not aware of the functions available, no longer is Google maps just about putting your company’s location on the map.

So as the financial year draws in, it’s time to look back to look forward.

Don’t know what a brown-paper bag session is email me and I’ll tell you!

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1. ArcGIS 10 was being shown (recently renamed from 9.4 – why?  Is it that important?),
2. Jack Dangermond gave the key note,
3. I was in the audience (as opposed to presenting at an ESRI conference – something I used to do a lot in my previous role with ESRI)

So, what’s coming in ArcGIS 10?  The highlights for us were changes to the desktop software, particularly the interface of ArcMap, and the way you do editing.  ESRI continue on their path to improve the usability of the software, which is necessary, as anyone who struggles to use it knows that there are loads of buttons and menus, and usually about five ways to solve a problem.  Here are some notable changes, broken down in to categories that might interest you.

In terms of usability:

• ‘Tools bars’ (windows) that are dockable, and auto hide.  There are more windows including a search facility that you can use to look for data sets and map documents.
• Reworked Table Of Contents (TOC).  We used to have three tabs at the bottom, they’re gone!  But, just to the top of the TOC, though with improvements like being able to sort the contents, and categorise layers based on visibility.  Useful when you have 10+ layers with complex symbology, speaking of which,
• Symbology editing has been enhanced, and a simple improvement that will save time, the ability to search for a particular symbol.  I for one can never remember where to find the tree symbols.
• Faster display and seamless panning and zooming.  There was a demonstration of the impressive improvement in the speed of display.  Display performance can be enhanced by creating ‘base maps’ that can be cached.

Tool changes included:

• More tools to work with imagery, such as creating mosaics (alternative to previous methods), and ability to read more formats.
• Map Books, finally, this is in the core software.  You can now make multiple maps from one MXD.  Some good tools to generate and manage map books, and the ability to extend these with code.  This will be a real time saver.
• Geo-processing tweaks include the ability to run processes (on the desktop) in the background.
• Editing has really changed.  It is probably more intuitive for a new user, but for those familiar to edit-tasks and targets it will take some getting used to.  One improvement is that editing is done by feature type, for example, you click on the feature you want from the list (like in the TOC) and start drawing.  You’ll only get access to drawing tools that are appropriate for that feature.  As you draw, you see your feature placed with the correct symbology.  You can also configure which attributes are editable/visible, so with a little practise, the new editing method looks to be another time saver.  Also, some of the more inaccessible editing menus are now available as toolbars (like snapping and vertex editing).

Interested in development? Read on:

• Visual Basic/Visual Basic for Applications (VB/VBA) is out, Python is entrenched.  Based on Microsoft’s lead, ESRI are dropping support for VB/VBA after release 10 (sometime – soon), and want you to use Python or .NET.  Python seems to be their preferred replacement to VBA as it is integrated well with Model Builder and easier to learn.  ESRI are aware of the large number of their customers who have written VB applications and have provided ideas on how to migrate code.  For more info, try reading this article.

Data models and server:

• There are a few changes to the Geodatabase, one of note is a little more clarity about the release of the API for the file-geodatabase.  It’s been promised for a while, and again promised for this release.
• There are a few changes to ArcGIS Server, and ArcGIS Mobile looked impressive (again) and begs the question as to the future of ArcPad.  I’m in the camp that ArcPad is not going away anytime soon, just as ArcView 3x is still clinging on.

There are obviously many more changes to the software due in release 10 (read some more, or watch the videos), which we were told will be out in time for the International User Conference (July 12), but Andrew tells me that ESRI recently announced a slight delay.

The conference was very useful for us, not only enabling us to understand where ESRI are going (jump on the ArcGIS Server wagon!), but also to meet some friends, old and new; and listen to what other GIS users are up to.  Jack Dangermond, in his usual fashion was enthusiastic in his plenary, this year’s topic “Extending the Reach” had a clear message that we ALL play a part in making as much data as possible available so that we can enable more informed decisions.

All that in two days!  I’d be happy to talk to you about what I saw, and I am sure Akeal would be too.  Give us a call (08) 9227 7309, or email me.

The post ESRI Australia Conference 2010 appeared first on Gaia Resources.

I was curious to see how Linux coped running on a netbook as I thought it would not be able to find appropriate hardware drivers, but I was wrong.  Everything I needed worked straight away.  I had wireless networking, blue-tooth, access to my SD memory card, USB mouse, and I could control the screen brightness and volume through the short-cut keys.

So the hardware worked well, what about the applications?  Firefox was preloaded as was Open Office, the GIMP image package, and a media player.  I installed Zimbra desktop (see AJ’s blog article) with a couple of clicks and have not needed to install much else.  Ubuntu automatically checks to see if the operating system and software are up to date and if not gives me a very simple, non invasive update process.  It is so very easy working with UNR that I prefer it to Windows as I get better use of the 10″ screen.

Other considerations that I have taken for granted are the reliability, the speed at which UNR shuts-down, and to a lesser degree starts.  The battery usage is very good which is important as one of the reasons we bought the Asus 1000HE was the 9.5 hr battery life.  UNR will sleep the display, and the machine after a time and re-starting is comparable to windows.  The layout of the screen is intuitive and easy to understand, making it simple to find what you need, it’s similar to the old Asus 701 interface, now that takes me back!

What happens if it all goes horribly wrong?  I have a USB with UNR installed so I can boot the laptop off it, or I can still boot into Windows directly if I am really desperate.

Why wouldn’t you move to Linux?  I can only think of one reason, if some of your applications are not available for Linux.  There are bundles of opensource alternatives to your Windows/MacOS programs so consider using them, but for me I still need Windows as there is a GIS application that I use that is not available for Linux.  However, I have a plan to see if I can use a windows emulator in Linux.  I’ll keep you posted.

From my experiences there are few reasons not to at least try a Linux distribution.  If you want to know more about my experiences, or where to get started with Linux, drop me an email.

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We were also very pleased to award our prize of a Solio Solar Charger to a lucky delegate from the Department of Transport.

If you’d like to contact us, call 9227 7309 or email Tom direct here, and don’t forget to follow Gaia Resources on Twitter.

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We could be the first people in Australia to have the new Pelican iPhone/iPod Touch case (i1015).  It’s life-time guaranteed, water resistant, and crush proof as per usual with Pelican cases, but this one also has an integrated headphone jack through the wall of the case, and a nifty little headphone winder inside to keep everything neat and tidy.  Piers tells me that his HTC phone fits too (see below).

We also received our new pens (picture) made from 100% recycled paper (with minimal plastic).  Beats adding to the over 10 million plastic pens chucked into Australian landfill annually.

Our prize draw this year at the WALIS Forum is a new Solio “hybrid” charger, just like the one Piers has been using.  So come grab a pen, check out the new Pelican case, and enter our busines card give-a-way for a Solio charger at our stand.  See you there!

Tom

email Tom directly here

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