I think it is widely agreed that Carl Steinitz, over the 50 years he taught at Harvard, has been one of the most important figures in influencing the theory and practice of landscape architecture and the application of computer technology to planning.
Google has been an amazing benefit for our business. People understand the whole world of mapping and want to do more than not get lost. They want to do spatial analytics. It's been fantastic for us.
I am hunting for people who would be a good colleague or a teammate, not someone who works for me.
Web GIS provides us with a whole new window into our information through applications that are easy, 3D, and analytic. These applications are not just casual things, but reach deep into geographic knowledge and apply it.
We aren't into the consumer space because that space is largely dominated by search and advertising, and it has a consumer face to it.
In a nursery, if you don't take care of those plants, your profits get lost real quickly. You have to weed. You have to water. You have to nurture. Also, you have to take care of your employees in such a way that they do the same.
We started with things like locating ski runs or locating a transmission line corridor or locating a new town or doing a coastal zone plan. We ourselves weren't doing the planning work, but we were doing all the mapping work for the landscape architects and planners who would subsequently incorporate the maps into their actual designs.
We shifted our philosophy from being a computer mapping group that would support planners to the idea of building actual software that would be well engineered. Because at that time, our software was not well-engineered at all; it was basically built with project funding and for project work, largely by ourselves.
I have high hopes that GIS will become increasingly relevant for landscape architects as we make the tools easier to use for the design process of just inventory and mapping.
We have been supporting GIS in schools for more than 25 years.
One city can look at other cities relative to their city and learn something. It's a matter of sharing the patterns of what exists in one society based on landscape or cultural values versus other cities.
My parents were immigrants who started a nursery as a way to get us kids through school. I learned around the dinner table about customer service and cash flow and paying bills.
I went on to Harvard and got very interested in computers and studying the earth's landscape.
One thing that has made us so successful is that we've never taken outside investment. That means we can concentrate on what our customers want - not what the stockholders or the VCs want.
I don't understand why young entrepreneurs feel this pressure to take venture capital or go public. Don't get me wrong: Public companies are A-OK with me. I just think there is another way. Staying private is a lot more sane.
I can put tweets on a map to show who is saying what where, which could be used for marketing or social research.
Planning a garden, park, building, or city shouldn't be done in an office.
A location-aware tablet will let us use what's called geodesign to compose participatory, what-if scenarios onsite, using maps that several people can share - something we could always do with paper but that's been a challenge with digital maps in the field.
I am not that good a manager for me to be comfortable borrowing someone else's money.
You have to decide who you are going to serve - stockholders or your customers.
