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This weekend, our Chairman, Peter Woodsford received an MBE for his services to the Geographic Information Industry in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list. The award is recognition of his contribution to the growing maturity and importance of the Geographic Information industry.

Member of the British Empire

For our overseas friends and colleagues, you might be interested to know that an MBE is an order of chivalry awarded by The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. It is awarded by the Sovereign on advice of the Government.

So naturally we're very proud to have him as our Chairman.

“Although the award is to me personally, I see it as a mark of the growing maturity and importance of the GI industry, and of the contributions towards this of my two companies, 1Spatial (formerly Laser-Scan) and Snowflake Software, the organisations I have worked with (AGI, EuroSDR, OGC and ISPRS) and universities I have been associated with (UCL, Edinburgh and Nottingham) to name those that come most readily to mind".

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

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

GO Publisher 1.4 - the limited Halloween Edition.

• Publish your WITCHML straight out of the box into the cauldron.

• Be INSPIRE compliant - publish your spooky data to INSPIRE data specifications

• Extend the reach of your data - Publish your WITCHML into consumer mapping applications such as Bing™, Google™ and Yahoo!™.

• Take our trick or treat at the bottom.

Take a look at our Snowflake Software Flickr site for an example of our Halloween Edition getting to work and publishing the following feature types;STONEHENGE,  PUMPKINPATCH, HAUNTEDFOREST, GINGERBREADHOUSE, BROOMLANDINGZONE, RUINEDCASTLE, WITCHESCOVEN, HOLLOWTREE, BROOMTAKEOFF and much much more...

 OK so we're just having a litte bit of Halloween fun, but wouldn't it be great?

Thankfully, there is no spooky data to publish. Infact, if you find the thought scary, why not get in touch with us? We can help you bring your data to life, help you translate your data into open standards and make it easy to share.  

With our latest version of GO Publisher  (version 1.4 - and no, it's not the Halloween Edition) you can publish data using our off the shelf product. It works with your existing infrastructure so you don't have to invest in costly software development or bespoke software products. And, our latest version of GO Publisher can help you:

• Be INSPIRE compliant - publish your data to INSPIRE data specifications
• Extend the reach of your data - publish your data to consumer mapping applications such as Bing™, Google™ and Yahoo!™.

We're a data exchange company, which means we've also got tools to help you load data. Take a look at our GO Loader webpages for more information. Halloween (or any other time of year) means you don't have to be afraid, and if you just need a bit more help in understanding, well we can help you with that too. Our industry experts offer a range of training courses from XML primer or GML fundamentals to INSPIRE essentials. Why not take a look and see what we have to offer on our training webpages.

Happy Halloween.

Take the Halloween trick: TRICK

Take the Halloween treat: TREAT

We wanted to take the opportunity to thank you for visiting us at the AGI conference. The exhibition was busy, and we were delighted we got to meet so many of you.

If you didn’t make it to the conference, or perhaps you didn’t get around to visiting our stand, you don’t have to miss out. Here’s a snapshot of our latest news and items we showcased at the event:

GO Loader 1.6 released – get a free trial

• Work with SQL Server 2008 and PostGIS as well as Oracle
• Load and manage the latest INSPIRE data
• Adopt new OS products (support for OS VectorMap™ Local)

GO Publisher 1.4 released – get a free trial

• Be INSPIRE compliant – publish data to INSPIRE data specs 
• Extend the reach of your data by publishing to Bing™, Google™, etc.

·     

        Our managing director picked up an industry award! 

• With his fabulous geo rant in the geo bar! - check it out here

With our expert business consultants and product agnostic training programs, don’t forget we can help you with more than just our innovative technology.

Thanks to the AGI for putting on a great event.