June 29th, 2010 by admin
We’re always interested in building our roster of bright, reliable software development freelancers to help us meet short-term demands and also to work on longer term projects, with hours to suit and with scope for remote working.
You’d mainly be working on our rich client side web applications, possibly also some spatial data modelling.
- We’re looking for suppliers with solid experience in at least one of the following languages: Java, Python or PHP.
- You should also be comfortable with MySQL or PostgreSQL.
- There is a strong focus on Linux: you should be happy using Linux and not run a mile when you see a terminal window!
- You’ll need to be confident sharing ideas with other programmers, understanding requirements quickly and communicating responses clearly.
We’d also be interested in hearing from skilled GUI designers with strong CSS to support web design and enhancement projects, especially those in reasonable proximity to Bath and able to join us on site for a few days at a time.
If you think you could contribute to our work, please send a CV to rk@geofutures.com (please include ‘Development freelancer’ in the subject line) and let us know your hourly / daily rates. Thanks!
Tags: Jobs
Posted in Recruitment | Comment On This »
June 29th, 2010 by admin
Now recruiting: IT Developers (contract and/or permanent) – Python / Java / PHP
Bath, south west England
Challenging, varied application development roles in a fast-moving data consultancy
Please note that we can only consider applications from candidates who are currently eligible to work in the EU.
The organisation
An independent geographic information science (GIS) specialist, established 2002, with a healthy client pipeline
Varied projects working for government, corporate and third-sector clients, with a growing emphasis on providing sustainability decision tools based on GIS
Requiring strategic development of core technology stack and future product/service code components
A bright and challenging development team, working closely with GIS specialists and client-facing colleagues
Cheerful, informal office in central Bath (12 mins walk Bath Spa station), close to shops, bars etc
The work
Geofutures delivers data to its clients via interactive websites. Projects typically involve two main elements: data modelling and delivery via the web.
The data modelling is where Geofutures really stands out from [...] Continue Reading…
Tags: Jobs
Posted in Recruitment | Comment On This »
June 14th, 2010 by admin
It has been a busy few months, with stimulating projects underway for The Audit Commission, Regen South West, London Climate Change Partnership and The Environment Agency among others. And because these things only happen when you’re busy, we’ve also moved offices – which is itself opening up some intriguing opportunities.
We’re now well settled in a handsome listed building in Bath’s Walcot Street, but the intriguing part is what happens when you start talking to your new landlords and their other business partners. MASCo is a long-established architectural salvage company, and in recent years they’ve applied their experience of sensitive demolition and reclamation of historic building materials to wider sustainability consulting, also recruiting full-time sustainability consultant James Hurley.
We were introduced to MASCo by Bath-based architects and urban planners Nash Partnership, who use their renovation and regeneration experience to maintain the highest standards of sustainable design.
So both these organisations saw the [...] Continue Reading…
Posted in Mashups | Comment On This »
June 7th, 2010 by admin
We’re currently recruiting to fill a post of GIS Analyst, full time, permanent, based in central Bath and available immediately. Please check you have the relevant skills and see below for details of how to apply. We can only accept applications from individuals currently eligible to work in the EU.
GIS analyst – central Bath – min £19k according to experience
Have you successfully completed a GIS degree or Masters course? Do you have analytical ability, strong visual sense and a client service ethos? We’re a small but fast-moving GIS company with a vacancy for a qualified GIS analyst to create maps and data layers, manage and analyse spatial data and deliver under pressure on varied client requirements.
No two tasks are the same, and there’s always scope to think laterally, add value, help build client relationships and contribute to the success of a close-knit, committed and informal team. On-job training and [...] Continue Reading…
Tags: Jobs
Posted in Recruitment | Comment On This »
February 11th, 2010 by admin
Vacant shops have been a tangible sign of recession – but now they are showing signs of recovery. The Local Data Company’s in-depth urban data, analysed by Geofutures and available via Town Centre Intelligence, suggests that the rate of vacancy growth has slowed considerably in Great Britain, with a few major centres seeing overall reductions.
It’s a great example of data made accessible and meaningful, no doubt the reason why so much of the UK’s media ran the story today. The Local Data Company have launched a report for the 2009 year end, Dawn of a Better Market, including a Geofutures retail vacancy rate contour map for Q4 2009, updating the one used by the FT looking at the first quarter of the year.
Side by side, the maps show a contraction in the area of highest vacancy rates in north east England and southern Scotland, though vacancies are still running [...] Continue Reading…
Posted in Mashups | Comment On This »
November 4th, 2009 by admin
Mark Thurstain-Goodwin writes: I like this map. It’s simple, it’s effective, and it’s strangely beautiful – everything a great data visualisation should be.
The analysis takes the number of individual shop premises in the town centres surveyed every six months by The Local Data Company, then visualises these numbers in three dimensions over a map of London’s West End and surrounds.
(Note that a similar analysis could also be done for total floorspace, but this one is for the number of retail units – giving rise to interesting peaks like the one for Brixton in the right-hand foreground).
We can see the highest peaks around Oxford Street and Knightsbridge, with notable neighbours going East to the City, north to Camden and Islington and a clear mountain range along the length of the King’s Road. Through the semi-transparent data layer we see the importance of the road network to peak retail locations, even [...] Continue Reading…
Tags: data, mapping, town centres
Posted in Latest | 1 Comment »
October 27th, 2009 by admin
An exciting new project is underway for Geofutures: working with the Centre for Sustainable Energy, we’re modelling and mapping residential heat demand for Regen SW, the renewable energy agency for the south-west of England.
The aim is region-wide insight into the potential for renewable and low-carbon heat generation and distribution, with outputs at sufficiently fine scales to allow users to identify individual buildings and groups of buildings which could benefit from heat distribution installations.
It’s set to be the most advanced heat mapping exercise undertaken in the UK to date, building on CSE’s proven expertise in modelling heat demand in London, Bristol and West Sussex, with the addition of Geofutures’ experience in using GIS to analyse fine-resolution data, as well as simply visualising results.
An important benefit of starting with data at building level is the ability to aggregate results upwards without losing accuracy, still maintaining the ability to drill down to [...] Continue Reading…
Tags: clients, GIS, Sustainability
Posted in Latest | Comment On This »
October 7th, 2009 by admin
I can get enough of all that sporty-sounding business jargon. “Sweat your asset.” “We’re in the same ballpark.” “Let’s get on the fast track.” At the end of a meeting I feel like I’ve had a workout.
Yet here I am thinking about companies using geographic information science (GIS) and I can’t avoid those clichés. Our industry is certainly becoming more mature – maybe even mainstream – but talking to clients across every sector, it’s clear that many organisations could do much more with their data using GIS. Many could still take it to the max, as it were. Their data is just not feeling the burn.
So I’m going to take on the role of personal trainer (not an everyday experience) and explore why this is so, what most public, private and third sector enterprises are doing with GIS now, and how much more they can achieve.
It’s not generally a [...] Continue Reading…
Tags: data, GIS, technology
Posted in Technology Talk | Comment On This »
September 23rd, 2009 by admin
I spent an interesting day in Stratford ahead of the AGI conference this week, at an Oracle Spatial special-interest group organised by the Oracle User Group. Oracle Spatial is the mapping and spatial analysis add-on to the main platform from the database giant.
Oracle occupies an interesting position in the GI world: at once a significant challenge to established GIS vendors, and also challenged themselves by online mapping and data platforms. Would Release 2 of Oracle 11g make clear how they will move forward, I wondered?
The new spatial features in Oracle 11gR2 are certainly impressive. New functionality includes more complex network analysis including hierarchical shortest path analysis and a travelling salesman algorithm. It all felt good to me, perhaps because it makes the database technology seem more, well, GIS-like.
Enhancing usability
Speakers touched on some intriguing ways Oracle databases are powering applications with enhanced usability. Olivier Bucaille from Autodesk advocated using wizards [...] Continue Reading…
Tags: databases, technology
Posted in Technology Talk | Comment On This »
September 9th, 2009 by admin
As expected, the recent paper ‘Can Totnes and district feed itself?’ (see earlier posts) has started stirring things up. An intriguing response comes from Colin Tudge, a director of LandShare CIC (co-funders of the research) and leader of the Campaign for Real Farming.
Colin’s thesis is that the food security issue is a simple matter of feeding the population as far as practical from local sources, recognising that some trade between specialist production areas will always be necessary. He argues that we simply need macronutrients (energy foods and protein), mainly in the shape of grains, and micronutrients – vitamins and minerals – and that by growing lots of wheat and encouraging more urban horticulture we can feed ourselves. I’m brutally over-summarising, of course, but he is keen to keep things simple.
This desire for simplicity makes him question the value of analyses like the land use mapping Geofutures did for this [...] Continue Reading…
Tags: food security, mapping, Sustainability
Posted in Sustainability | 2 Comments »
