December 2009 Archives

And here's just a small selection of what you can expect from Snowflake in the New Year:

• Our Brand New : INSPIRE training course - starting January 12, 2010
• Celebrating the 10 year sucess of EDiNA's Digimap service using GO Publisher WFS
• Visit us at DGI 2010: 25 - 27 January, QEII Centre, London - see us in the exhibition at stand 48
• Look forward to new product releases for GO Publisher & GO Loader

Not forgetting the highlights from 2009:

• Attending the successful GSDI conference in Rotterdam
• Our very own Ian Painter, MD, getting 'ranty' at the AGI Annual Conference
• Resigning our multi year agreement with our German partner, grit.
• Launching our brand new, free, GO Publisher Community Edition.
• Launching our Community Forum - Have you had your say yet?

We're looking forward to more of the same, and even better in 2010.

Happy Holidays.

Melissa Burns | Marketing Manager | melissa.burns@snowflakesowftare.com

It is not often that data makes the news, but amidst the recent controversy about climate change data the UK Met Office released a set of historical climate records collected since the middle of the 19th century (www.metoffice.gov.uk/climatechange/science/monitoring/subsets.html). At Snowflake we quickly spotted that this data is not only related to time, but also location. Seeing that the raw data is in the form of rather dry tables we couldn't resist the temptation to present it in a more visual form using some of the technologies and standards we regularly work with.

Using GO Publisher we have put together a service to serve up the data in the form of KML. This allows the data to be visualised in Google Earth and uses the time slider to show how temperatures change over time. The Met Office data is a large dataset, so our solution is to stream the data from our demo server using a Web Feature Service to serve only the data for the locations you are looking at. Google Earth follows network links to pick up the data and dynamically refresh it as you pan around the globe.

If you have Google Earth installed you can see it for yourself by opening the ClimateKmlLink.kml file with Google Earth.

We recently hosted a series of webinars introducing our new free software: GO Publisher Community Edition.

The great news if you missed any of the sessions is that the recording of the webinar has now been uploaded to our website. So you can watch the webinar in your own time. It's available now.

Watch the webinar recording today

Visit our website to download or stream the recording of the webinar:    An Introduction To GO Publisher Community Edition.

Webinar length: 28.21 minutes ( Intro: 2.25 mins; Demo: 9.15mins; Support: 19.25 mins; Q&A: 23.50 mins) File Size: 49.47 MB Video: Yes Audio: Yes Requirements: Windows Media Player or similar compatible with .wmv files

Questions and Answers

We took alot of questions during the Q&A sessions across the series of webinars, and I've posted the script onto our Community Forum.  Don't forget to use the Community Forum if you have any other questions or need any support.

Melissa Burns | Marketing Manager | melissa.burns@snowflakesoftware.com

I know what you're thinking. Code and creative in the same sentence? (Well that's what I thought!).

If you read my blog on 27 September:  'You can't buy innovation from the innovation shop', you'll remember how I ranted about needing to instill creativity throughout business to drive innovation. Well, the technical team here at Snowflake decided to hold me to it, and embraced a day of creativity led by our CTO, Eddie Curtis.

Fedex Day in a nutshell

A day where all our developers can pretty much code what they like, as long as it's relevant to the company and delivered in a day. The idea which, along with the name, comes from our favourite tools provider Atlassian, its aim is to stimulate creativity and innovation, and it certainly did that. We had an impressive crop of smart ideas for product enhancements.

For those of you (like me) that would like to understand how a 'techy type' coding person can get creative, here's how. Watch the video to understand what we did!

1. Set aside one whole day for creative coding. We called ours 'Fedex Day', taking the initial idea from Atlassian who we like alot!
2. Collect ideas for the day of coding, an opportunity to get those 'wish list' and creative ideas done!
3. Brief the devleopers on the rules of the day, and the all important prizes up for stake!
4. Get going.
5. Have a healthy, brain fuelling lunch (Pizza & Perkin! - Yum).
6. Build pressure. Make sure the developers feel the pressure of time. "Only 15 minutes to go".
7. Finish and present back working code, and how it helps our business.
8. Vote for the winners!

To find out how the day went, and who won from our team, take a look at our video.

Conclusion?

A worthwhile day for team bonding, getting creative, eating Pizza and developing and embedding a real creative flair amongst the team, to drive innovation for customers.

 We've gt our next Fedex Day scheduled in the New Year. Well worth it.

Melissa Burns | Marketing Manager | melissa.burns@snowflakesoftware.com

Wow. Thanks for all of your support.

Since launching GO Publisher Community Edition  just over a week ago, along with a series of launch webinars, we've been overwhelmed with the demand. It's great to see so many of you taking the opoprtunity to get your hands on the software and join us during our webinars.

GO Publisher Community Edition offers a free and easy solution for publishing data to open standards. Whether that be GML, KML, or even application schemas like INSPIRE.

Register for the last few spaces

Due to overwhelming demand for the Community Edition webinars, we've set up some more and there are still a few spaces left for next Friday (Friday 11 December).

If you would like to register for the last few spaces, please contact me at: Melissa.Burns@snowflakesoftware.com. 

 But hurry, the spaces are limited and they're going fast!

If you haven't found out what GO Publisher Community Edition is all about, take a look on our website and why not join in our community forum?

Melissa Burns | Marketing Manager | melissa.burns@snowflakesoftware.com