Mission

History

GeoSpatial Experts, LLC was founded by Rick Bobbitt in April, 2001. Rick has a Bachelor of Science in Software Engineering and 16 years of experience programming GPS/GIS applications. He worked for several companies including Bendix/King doing avionics software,, II Morrow Inc doing software for avionics for small airplanes and several agricultural companies. GeoSpatial Experts was founded after Rick won a Digita contest for script software he wrote using the Kodak DC290 camera and a Garmin GPS. After selling the script software for a short time, Kodak announced that they would discontinue production of the DC290. Rick then modified the software to work with any camera and GPS and GPS-Photo Link was born.

In 2002, GeoSpatial Experts became an ESRI Business Partner, developing an ArcGIS Extension linking GPS-Photo Link to ESRI’s ArcMap. GPS-Photo Link maps points in ArcMap where the digital images were captured. Points representing each image’s position display a thumbnail when hovered over and the full-size image displays when the point is clicked. This has enabled ESRI customers to easily view and manipulate their digital photos in ArcMap.

In April of 2004, GeoSpatial Experts became a value-added authorized reseller of the Ricoh Pro G3 digital camera system. The primary contribution of GeoSpatial Experts was the customization of GPS-Photo Link to take advantage of camera’s capacity to include embedded GPS and user-defined fields. GeoSpatial Experts also advised Ricoh on changes to the camera that would benefit the GPS/GIS user. The camera, Compact Flash GPS card, and GPS-Photo Link Ricoh Edition offer a one-of-a-kind solution offered only through GeoSpatial Experts. GeoSpatial Experts reached over $300,000 in sales the first nine months of a pilot program re-selling the camera and software bundle. On January 18, 2005, Ricoh formally released this package and is currently promoting the solution with a major print and web-based marketing campaign.

In 2004 GeoSpatial Experts also became a business partner with Trimble. GPS-Photo Link was modified to take advantage of the Trimble receiver's bluetooth capacity linking it to the Ricoh camera. In 2005 GeoSpatial Experts became a reseller of Garmin GPS receivers and Pentax cameras. These products were added to provide complete solutions for GPS-Photo Link: Standard Edition users similar to the bundles purchased by Ricoh edition users. Additional enhancements were added with version 3.5 including the ability to indicate the direction of the photo.