Support The Geoholics

The guys were joined this week by a very impressive trio of TopoDot influencers! Jennifer Triana, TopoDot Business Development Director, Randy Allen, TopoDot Director of Training & Support and Josh Miller, David Evans & Associates Delivery Leader and TopoDot superuser all added a ton of value to an already packed show. Some of the items discussed include how TopoDot has become an industry standard, AI advancements, the new ground extraction tool, unique user success stories, and the many ways TopoDot continues to support the geospatial industry. Peter H. Diamandis was quoted. Music by Bad Bunny!!!

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https://thegeoholics.podbean.com/e/episode-185/

Sean: This is good stuff. How can you not love that?

Kent: How does that not get you going? 

Sean: Special request by one of our guests here. I love it. 

Kent: I don't think we have any Bad Bunny on the playlist, so this is going to be good. 

Sean: This is the inaugural Bad Bunny. 

Kent: You're right. Now's a good time to mention that. If you were a guest on the show, you have input on the music that is used for that episode. Every single song from every single episode has been added to a playlist on Spotify. 

Sean: What is that up to now? Eleven hours. 

Kent: Thirteen hours of music or something. It's all really good music. If you're on Spotify, make sure you go and subscribe or like or whatever The Geoholics playlist because it is awesome. Good stuff there. Welcome back to episode 185. What do you think in the last episode that McKenna was my guest co-host then? I told her, “When I say the episode, you have to repeat it just like Sean does.” She did. It's so funny. I feel like it's been forever since you and I did this together.

Sean: That's a long time. 

Kent: A part of me was missing.

Sean: There's a KG void going on, and now it is being filled. 

Kent: I feel whole again. How's that? 

Sean: I love that. That's very good. 

Kent: How was your vacation to San Diego?

Sean: A nice little week at the beach is never a bad week. Every year, we go with the same friends and it's always awesome. It’s good times all around. It is hard to get back. 

Kent: You are still in vacation mode, I can tell. You have to get dialed in here. You got a week vacation hangover.

Sean: I'll take that. That means it was a good one. 

Kent: For sure. 

Sean: What's new with you? I haven't talked to you in a little bit. 

Kent: I saw a shitty concert.

Sean: Which one? 

Kent: I was super excited to see this show. We went and saw Big Head Todd in the Monsters and Blues Traveler. I'd never seen Blues Traveler. I was super excited to see him. I've heard nothing but good things. Megan had seen him before and said great show.

Sean: I've seen him before, but it was when they were popular.

Kent: John Popper is a fricking legend on the harmonica and everything. I was so psyched. I had seen Big Head Todd in the Monsters. They opened up and they were fantastic. It was horrible. We left early. It was the worst. John Popper, apparently, they played in Flagstaff the night before. They didn't even show up for the show. He was sick or something like that. He walks out on stage and he looks horrible. He's super thin now. He wears big baggy shirts. He's like, “I'm thankful I'm here for you tonight.” I'm like, “What is going on here?” 

He could not get through a song without walking off the stage for five minutes while the band was jamming. He comes back and he can hardly play the harmonica. It was horrible. I'm like, “What is going on here?” Everybody in the crowd was like, “What is happening?” Everybody was in shock at how bad it was. Probably at least 50% of the people that were there walked out. It was bad, unfortunately. Life is good. No complaints. Quick INTERGEO update. The show officially will be at INTERGEO in Berlin. 

Sean: The show is going international. 

Kent: We are. We've been once before. I was in Canada. Remember, I did some show up there. That's international. 

Sean: I don't count that.

Kent: It's kind of international. What about Vegas? Is Vegas international? 

Sean: Feels like it, but it's not. 

Kent: We will be in Berlin.

Sean: That is in October 2023. 

Kent: We'll be there for nine days, but I think the 9th through the 12th or something like that.

Sean: It's 10th, 11th, and 12th.

Kent: The cool thing is that INTERGEO has given our audience a voucher. 

Sean: We don't know exactly what it would do. There will be more information forthcoming.

Kent: Exactly. This is the voucher number. It's supposed to be good. By the time this episode comes out, it will be active. We'll post it on our social media as well but it's IG23-GEOHOLICS. If you're attending INTERGEO and you enter that code, you will get something amazing. I don't know what it is.

Sean: I just know it's going to be amazing. 

Kent: We got a great show lined up. Let's get on with this. Tell us about that opening number there, Producer Sean.

Sean: Everybody knows this guy. He's a big deal. Bad Bunny.

Kent: That was pretty good. 

Sean: Bad Bunny, whose real name is Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio is a Puerto Rican singer, rapper, and songwriter who gained international fame for his contributions to Latin Trap and reggaeton music. He was born on March 10, 1994, in Vega Baja, Puerto Rico. Throughout his career, Bad Bunny has remained authentic to his roots and has used his platform to address important topics. He’s making him not only a music sensation but a cultural icon. I can tell you before this whole Taylor Swift crazy thing on her tour when Bad Bunny came through town, that was the hardest ticket to get. It sold out all the coliseums. The kids were paying crazy amounts for tickets. 

Kent: He's a big deal. Wasn't he like banging one of the Kardashians or something for a short time?

Sean: That list is getting extensive. 

Kent: Who hasn't? 

Sean: He’s very famous and talented. 

Kent: He is. It’s our first Bad Bunny request, I do believe. 

Sean: I’m pretty excited about that. Moving on. We are in the Get Kids Into Survey Studio.

Kent: We'll talk a little bit more about them. 

Sean: We will be here in a little bit. I do want to highlight that there is a West Coast Get Kids Into Survey franchise that our own, Trent Keenan, is a part of. There are some unique sponsorship opportunities for the West Coast Get Kids Into Survey. To find out more about that, you simply go to GetKidsIntoSurvey.com/USA-West-Coast. Check out that website and you can check out all the cool sponsorship opportunities that are now in the United States, West Coast specifically. We are up to the AirWorks random trivia. What do you get, Sean? 

Sean: This is probably going to be pretty relevant. Four ways BIM and AI are impacting the AeC industry. BIM and AI enable design optimization by enhancing the creativity, efficiency, and quality of the design process. BIM and AI are enabling construction automation by enhancing the planning, coordination, and execution of the construction process. 

They're enabling facility management by enhancing the operation, maintenance, and renovation of the building and project delivery. They're enabling project delivery by enhancing the communication, collaboration, and integration of stakeholders. 

Kent: AI is playing a bigger role in our industry. 

Sean: We talk about it a lot. We're going to continue to talk about it and we're only opening the box there.

Kent: I agree. It seems like every episode, it’s brought up in one way, shape, or form. It's affecting everything. Next up, we have the Advanced Geodetic Surveys, AGS Weekly Words of Wisdom. I mentioned last episode that I'm listening to a book called Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World by Peter Diamandis. It is fantastic. This quote comes from that book, and I love it. There's an old saying in business, “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” Think about that. Put that into perspective. You can include me if you want. 

Sean: You are 1 of the 5 people I spend the most time with.

Kent: Think about that. You're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. 

Sean: My kid is one of those five people too. 

Kent: Your wife and me. How many of them are generates besides me? 

Sean: Through the average of three degenerates, your wife, my wife, and my daughter.

Kent: A solid three-fifth degenerate. I thought that was a really good quote. Let's get on this. Our guests, we have a trio sponsored by xyHt Magazine. I have to mention if you don't have your free subscription to xyHt Magazine, go to the website www.XYHT.com/Subscriptions. It takes 30 seconds to sign up and you get a free subscription to xyHt, which is by far, the best geospatial publication. We have Jennifer Triana and Randy Allen with TopoDot, and Josh Miller with David Evans and Associates. 

Sean: I've never heard of that group. Who are those guys?

Kent: I'm going to let them do some real quick self-introduction. Name who you're with, what you do, that type of thing. Jennifer, I'm going to let you go first.

Jennifer: My name is Jennifer Triana. I'm the Business Development Director at TopoDot. I have been in the LiDAR industry for many years, but I look very young for that, I know.

Sean: I was just about to say that.

Jennifer: I'm a mechanical engineer from UCF. I started at Riegl in 2005, working on the hardware side of the LiDAR industry. Now I have been with TopoDot since the very beginning of its inception. That's also for years now.

Sean: Were you the employee number one?

Jennifer: I want to say employee number 2, but probably 3 because the developer comes first.

Kent: There you go. I got to tell you, any conference we go to, we see Jennifer there. She is everywhere. 

Jennifer: I'm known as Miss TopoDot or whatever. 

Kent: Always handing out the best swag. You’re doing a great job promoting the product. Randy, you're up next.

Randy: I’m Randy Allen. I’ve been with TopoDot since March 2023. I’m the Director of Training and Support. It’s short and sweet. 

Sean: A little bit about that. You were a TopoDot superuser for a long time prior to that. 

Randy: I started in 2014. They are my first employer in the industry. I got to learn the crew at TopoDot and help them on the production side of stuff. I became really good friends with them. It was a natural fit for me to come on board.

Kent: Josh, you're up.

Josh: My name is Joshua Miller. I am a Delivery Leader for David Evans and Associates for the Mountain West region. Essentially, it's a regional manager. My focus these days is to help facilitate training and coordinate work share amongst our regions at the company at a large group of people. We rely a lot on Workshare. As such, we need to spend a lot of effort into the coordination of that background and surveying for many years. I've been in the business a long time. I'm a fairly proficient TopoDot user and I try to keep my hands in the mix all the time. Although I fill the pool to do less production work, I'm still in it and I don't think I'll ever stop doing it.

Sean: TopoDot a great tool. We're going to talk more about that, but before we do, we have to do The Trimble Pro Point Icebreaker. We do this every episode. Even with multiple guests, we're going to do this. This is going to be freaking hilarious. Here's the icebreaker question. We're going to start with Randy. Randy, what is your guilty pleasure as it pertains to food or snacks you ate as a kid that you still find comfort in eating now?

Randy: Anyone that knows me, it's anything sweet, chocolate, cake, or pies. If you're in the inner circle, my guilty pleasure is fair food. Right now, it is the perfect time with the state fair up. If you can throw it in batter and deep fry it, I'm going to eat it.

Kent: What is the most exotic deep-fried food that you have had?

Randy: I don't know. 

Kent: I've seen deep-fried Twinkies, Snickers, or something like that?

Randy: Some Twinkies, Oreos, cheesecake, which I did not like. That’s about anything.

Kent: How about you, Josh?

Josh: I got a couple. I still absolutely love regular ramen noodle soup. I've never grown out of that. I still cook ramen all the time. I will try to cheer it up a little bit these days. Contrary to Randy's sweet tooth, I never had a sweet tooth but more of a sour tooth. Pickles, I don't know if that's a guilty pleasure, but I thoroughly enjoy pickles. I eat more pickles than candy by a ton.

Sean: Interesting. Have you had deep-fried pickles? 

Josh: No. I shy away from deep-fried or anything. I did have oysters once, which were deep-fried. Ramen noodle soup. I'm quite into it.

Kent: Ramen noodles, I lived on those suckers in college. No doubt about it. How about you, Jennifer?

Jennifer: I eat everything and anything. I love trying out different foods wherever I go. What I like every time that I go anywhere in the South is Southern food, especially around New Orleans. I love jambalaya, gumbo, fried pickles, and fried green tomatoes. That's my guilty pleasure I should say.

Kent: Good stuff. How about you, Sean? What did you eat as a kid that you still eat now?

Sean: A lot of things. I probably better list what I don't eat any more than I ate as a kid. I would say Skittles and Domino's Pizza. I feel a little ashamed eating an entire large pizza by myself. When I've had a tough day and I have to feed myself, it's what I go to. What about you? 

Kent: For me, it's hot fries. Remember those Andy Capp hot fries? Little crispy, spicy nuggets of I have no idea what it is, but I don't find the Andy Capp ones anymore. I found the Chester Cheetos hot fries. They're just as good. SpaghettiOs is another thing out of the can.

Sean: Do you still eat that these days? You'll go to the grocery store and get a can of SpaghettiOs and eat it.

Kent: Once in a great while if feeling the urge for some SpaghettiOs. Jennifer, talk a little bit more about your role at TopoDot. As I said, we see you everywhere. How would you describe your role and what do you love about it?

Jennifer: I started with TopoDot in the training on the technical side. I love teaching. I've always loved connecting with my clients, learning what they need, and making them successful. Over time, my role changed a little bit into hosting talks, which we'll talk about a little bit. The Users Conference and organizing talks. In the last couple of years, I started more into the business development side. Not just the sales role but where can TopoDot expand. Where can we fit in in other industries and other types of applications? 

That's pretty much my role. I enjoy it completely. Not only because I get to travel and meet a lot of people. I love being at shows and meeting people in person, but also because every time that somebody approaches me and says, “TopoDot is best. It's helped me out this way,” it gives me this sense of satisfaction. Pretty much, I own TopoDot in that regard. I feel like it's my baby too. It's very rewarding.

Kent: I have to say, anytime that we run into Jennifer at conferences and stuff like that, she’s always in a great mood, super passionate about promoting the product, and has awesome energy. The perfect person for that role is what I'm trying to say. How about you, Randy? You mentioned you came over to TopoDot in March 2023. Prior to that, you were a superuser, would you say?

Randy: I was a project manager with an engineering survey planning group. I went into production and worked my way up to the project manager role. I led a team of 5 to 7 technicians for several years there before coming over to TopoDot. My efforts every day are directing the new training and support organization that they've put together as TopoDot has expanded not only in North America but globally. One of our foundations has always been support and training. I enjoyed it whenever I was a client or a user. Now I'm able to pay that back by working in the company and providing the same level of support and training to our users.

Kent: One thing I would say is I was fortunate to be in TUC 2022 representing the Geoholics. One thing I can say for sure is that everyone that I met who works for TopoDot has amazing energy, like we were talking about and like Jennifer. I'm curious, Randy. You've only been there for four months, but there seems to be a culture within the group. How would you explain that?

Randy: They're very passionate about, not only the software but ensuring that the users know how to use the software. They're passionate about listening to the users. We've always got our ears for our clients and trying to be the solution for them. You can feel the passion.

Kent: It seems pretty infectious for sure. 

Sean: I have to ask real quickly. Do you get a plaque to become a superuser? How do you go from user to superuser? Is that a designation or is it self-assigned?

Randy: You get the ear of the head engineer who writes all the code and you call and bug him every day. You beat him up to create or enhance tools. Finally, they give you something that shuts you up a little bit. 

Kent: It's superuser AKA pain in the ass.

Randy: At TUC, I did get recognized for the most requests for enhancements and new tools or something. It was like a generic trophy gift. It was funny. I enjoyed it. 

Jennifer: I got to say that it's got to be something valid. It cannot be random things. Please don't fill our inbox. Maurice is going to kill us. 

Kent: The TopoDot folks were like, “If we can't appease him, we'll hire him.” They had to hire so many more support people to handle the tickets from Randy that got tired of him. He brought him in-house. Josh, let's bring you in here. You presented at TUC in 2023. Talk about that experience a little bit.

Josh: It was the first time I've ever given a presentation of that scale and certainly to that many people. It was pretty nerve-wracking leading up to it. I had been to TUC at two previous conferences a few years ago. I started as a beginner. The next few years after I went again for the second time, I was in the advanced track and then followed up to the presenter level. Needless to say, I was pretty nervous. Even though leading up to it, I had reviewed my presentation, edited, and tweaked it. I felt like I was way behind the eight ball and thought bad things were going to happen and then couldn't sleep. I fly from Washington State to Florida.

I was a nervous wreck but I hit it well. Once I got up on stage and hit play, things went smoothly at that point. I got a lot of positive feedback after the meeting and a big weight off my shoulders afterward. I was mostly pleased with the interaction that I had with the people who had feedback on my presentation. It was very encouraging. I don't know if it created an opportunity for me to talk to more people than I normally would have because people were coming up and asking me questions about this, that, and the other.

We discovered some interesting things about our company. Unbeknownst to me, even though I've been with DEA for many years now, we were the first, if not one of the first couple of companies that operated in mobile LiDAR units. That was part of my presentation. We had this unit that we built with Jennifer and Ted before TopoDot. They were fully aware of this unit that we had. That's very interesting. Little Easter eggs became uncovered throughout the process. 

Kent: I have to ask as the resident non-lifelong surveyor in the group, but you play one on TV.

Sean: I play one on TV. Can you take a step back? Maybe Jennifer can give me the elevator speech on what TopoDot is and does and a little bit about what you guys think about how it makes it different from other products. 

Kent: it’s a great transition, Sean. You didn't miss a beat. You've been gone forever but that was awesome. Go ahead, Jennifer.

Jennifer: From one non-surveyor to another, TopoDot is a high-performance application for the Bentley platform to bring in all of your point cloud and related information, calibrated imagery, GPS information points, and all kinds of information like that. It helps you extract this information from these point clouds in your models. Your topography models, surface models, or even do data analysis directly on the data. 

If you're doing monitoring of movement, floor flatness, or pavement condition analysis, there are so many applications that you can perform on point clouds. We give you all the tools for you to use this information accordingly. What's great is that you could bring any data. It doesn't even have to be lighter. It could be point clouds created from imagery or path symmetry. As long as it's a point cloud, it can be used in TopoDot. That's the elevator speech.

Kent: I like it. Randy, do you want to add anything to that from your perspective?

Randy: I've tried many software and none of them ever compared to TopoDot. That falls back to them listening to surveyors and trying to develop the tool surveyors in mind. Surveyors can naturally use the tool like they'd be using a tool in the field.

Kent: How about you, Josh?

Josh: I’m pretty much piggybacking on what they said. They took a concept and added it to a product, which is the Bentley platform. Bentley being MicroStation. It’s a major CAD platform that more or less all Department of Transportation use. Bentley had some inherent tools that did some of the things with point clouds, but it was pretty clunky. TopoDot came in and they recognized a market within there and made a high-performance machine that lives within Bentley. 

They even took some of the regular tools that Bentley has that are beyond point clouds and made them better as well. It's like adding a turbocharger onto a car or something like that. I can't say enough about how well the program performs. The ease of use is quite incredible and how fluid it is. It's a pretty great program in my opinion.

Kent: That's awesome. The TopoDot lovefest has commenced.

Sean: For all the conferences that we go to, I always get a general TopoDot lovefest, but this is concentrated.

Kent: It's a bit overwhelming. There’s competition out there, I'm sure. Even before I asked that question, you mentioned that this is applicable to the Bentley platform. Is there anything on the Autodesk side that TopoDot works with as well, or is it strictly Bentley?

Jennifer: For anybody that's tried to use point clouds in the Autodesk environment, you know that's either very difficult or impossible. It's not for lack of trying. We would be triple the size that we are if we had some tools in Autodesk. There are limitations around it. The good news is that everything that you create within the Bentley platform because it's already a CAD environment is transferrable to Civil 3D or any other deliverable platform like RGIS or Carlson, wherever you need to go. 

You're already in a CAD environment that is creating all this line work for you that you can save as a DXF for DWT, be at in the Autodesk platform. It's very seamless to move from one to the other so it shouldn't be a problem. I understand that a lot of people work within the Civil 3D or Autodesk environment and prefer to stay there. Once they see the potential of not only improving their workflows, making more automated workflows, and in general, being more proficient, then there is no discussion. 

Kent: On that note, Randy, what makes TopoDot unique?

Randy: That's a loaded question. I'm going to fall back on my department, the training and support. It's the foundation. You can build tools but if you can't support them or if you're a company accepts a support ticket and you won't answer it for 2 or 3 days, you're leaving your clients behind. That's where the training and support truly shine.

Jennifer: I want to add to what Randy was saying there. In a lot of ways, one side of our business has always been about what the customer needs. Sometimes, you don't know what you need until somebody comes up with it. What makes TopoDot best for surveying and engineering applications is the way that it handles data. In the majority of the industry, you try to clean up data. You have to classify, filter, and remove noise from vehicles and vegetation to create a surface model but then you start losing definition. 

It starts getting a little bit choppy because you have noise associated with obstruction, dirt, water, rain, people, and all kinds of stuff. Instead of trying to clean up the data, what we do in TopoDot is do more statistical analysis of the data, eliminate errors, and look for signatures on the data. What's unique about this feature that you're trying to extract? You're extracting a break line. What does it look like and is it even everywhere? If so, can we automate this process? Because of that, you have so much more room for automation and quality control over that process. That’s what makes TopoDot very unique versus anything else out there.

Kent: Josh, I'm curious to get your perspective. What type of projects do you use TopoDot for?

Josh: Primarily, we use it for transportation projects. I would say it's the lion's share of the work that we go after like large transportation projects, miles and miles, and highway corridors. We also use it for regular small site Topos when applicable. We use it for a lot of energy-related work. We introduce bathymetry to it and use collected bathymetry in TopoDot as well. 

For any potential job that we do, if we use a laser scanner, collect LiDAR, or photogrammetry, we're going to use TopoDot with it. Some projects are so small that it doesn't make any sense or it's not necessary. We do it the old-fashioned way. We're trying to put LiDAR and point clouds on every single project that we do because we realize the benefits and efficiencies that you can gain out of it. Primarily, it would be transportation mapping.

Kent: At TUC 2022, there was a rollout of a new tool, the Ground Extraction tool. Who wants to talk a little bit about that and tell us more?

Jennifer: We usually unveil the latest release during TUC and have our power users tested and be the Guinea pigs. In this last TUC, we unveil the ground routine that uses AI for ground surface modeling. What do you think, Randy? It was a great success.

Randy: It’s very well accepted. 

Jennifer: Traditionally, we never had to clean up data to create a ground surface. The biggest difference with this new tool is that you don't need to create as many break lines. It's very good at detecting changes in elevation, especially in areas where you have a lot of bronchus terrain, like on a cliff side, a query, or natural changes in elevation. You have to create break lines in those areas, but this will reduce the amount of break lines that you have to do. Because of that, it's a great tool for the UAB industry. We've seen the explosion of the drone market using not photogrammetry but lighter and it's being used quite widely. This will come in handy.

Kent: When you roll something new like that out, what does that do for you, Randy? That's something else that you need to support then, right? 

Randy: Several weeks after TUC, the support tickets were coming in. People wanted to know a little bit more about in-depth training on it and understand all the settings. Some people ask, “Could we add this? Could this be added?” Both support and enhancement requests come in.

Kent: I'm curious about how it originated. Was this one of those tools that was born out of necessity or you guys get tired of being asked about it? Did it go from a support idea that Randy kept trying or somehow Randy was involved?

Randy: I don't think I had anything to do with that one.

Sean: For some reason, I find that hard to believe.

Randy: I don't think I did. It wasn't on my radar at that time.

Jennifer: In addition to Randy's requests, we have a roadmap for improving upon our secret sauce, I should say. We have a pretty well-established workflow and a lot of people like the way workflow is established within that process. We're trying to take each tool at a time and improve it on its own. It's been happening for years. In this roadmap, it's not just about what could be changed to this tool, but also how we can use technology.

This tool uses AI to validate those points that are uncertain. It’s training the process so that it recognizes and validates points before it gives you an output. That way the user doesn't have to do a lot of cleanup. They don't have a lot of false positives. It's a lot more accurate. We're trying to integrate technology into the tools to make it better.

Josh: It’s a real-world application. Shortly after the conferences, I discovered the new AI tool. We quickly integrated it into a project where we're doing a quantity survey for a mining client of ours that produces silver. We were under accelerated time deliveries for these projects where they were going to have to get the results more or less the same day that we collected the data or the day after. Right off the bat, I got the team together and said, “Chop it up. It's got this new tool that should eliminate some of the pains that we struggle with break line generation and/or over-saturation of data into the project.” 

We analyzed the way we normally did it with a very tight mass grid of points and manual break line extraction versus the AI tool. We compared our results and we found that we got nominal differences. The size reduction in time savings in it was quite large. We went with it, tested it, and proved itself, and now we implemented a system for every time we get this new layer of quantity to survey. It's a systematic process now. You hit a couple of buttons, you kick it back to AutoCAD, it generates cut-fill and some volume reports, sends it off to the client, and we're done. The timing couldn't have been more serendipitous.

Sean: It sounds like hitting the easy button. 

Kent: I got to interject a little bit and I'm curious what this group thinks. We've talked about this before. I can't remember how it came up but it was the question about, “In the general business model, you have a client, you fly something, and you have to generate some quantities that typically take twelve hours at X fee or whatever.” You say, “Cool, we got this great new feature that I push an easy button and now I can get it to you in and out.” In a consulting business, is that an hour’s of time, it's cheaper, or is that the same time or the same cost to make more money?

That's why I want to ask this group, especially if you're on a type of material or whatever type of project. TopoDot makes it to where, “You don't need 10 hours and 4 people to generate that quantity. You need an easy button and one guy in 30 minutes.” Does your client expect less of a fee even when he is getting it faster? How do you navigate through? Jennifer and Randy are now taking man-hours away. 

Jennifer: If your business model is around man hours, then it's going to affect it. You can make the case, “How much does it cost you or what does it cost you if you get this information sooner?” It adds value to the speed of your processing of your deliverables. I'm going to let them speak. They have more experience on the business side of the deliverables.

Kent: What's the saying? You're not paying me for the hour and takes me to do that task. You're paying me for the 30 years of experience.

Sean: You're paying for the result, however that happens.

Josh: Is it better the way we're doing things now with all the tech that we have? Is it faster? Is it better? It's faster and it's better. In this particular instance, we're always going to strive to find a faster way to deliver things to our clients. What we find is our clients find more work for us to do. That's where it is evolving. You could have the same argument for the advancement in GPS collection versus the old way of doing it with a total station. We can map so much faster with GPS now. Are we taking work away from ourselves? It hasn't been the case. The work is still there.

Kent: What else? Did you have something else?

Sean: No. 

Kent: You didn't? 

Josh: Another thing on that too. The only way we can use this awesome tool that's provided by TopoDot is by us having a drone system, a LiDAR system, and all these other things that we work into the contract. It's not exactly one-for-one. 

Kent: There's a lot that goes into making the easy button give you what you need. It doesn't populate itself. 

Jennifer: A lot of business models have changed with the introduction of LiDAR in the picture. You used to have a larger team in the field collecting information. You might only need to have 1 or 2 people in the field collecting but it's another technology. Now you're going to have a greater amount of information to process whereas before, your CAD files would pretty much auto-generate from the field information. 

Now you have a lot more data to process. Some schedules shift, but in general, you try to make things much faster so that you can turn around these projects a lot faster and that is valuable for the customer.  Instead of waiting weeks to get a survey, they can get it in days or hours. That has a value that you could use to increase your prices. Instead of charging per hour, now you're charging for that technology.

Kent: Talk about some unique use cases that you're aware of that TopoDot has played a huge role in. I know a good friend of the program, Russ Hall. He did something with an F1 track in Miami or something like that. Are there other examples? Is that a good example?

Jennifer: The applications are infinite. That case is pretty special because for somebody to rely on mobile mapping to repay this track, you have to have faith in the technology. The fact that they could prove that they could not only effectively use mobile mapping but also use TopoDot’s technology to evaluate the data, you have a lot more precision in the results. It proved that you could use this type of information, not only for survey applications but engineering-grade applications. That's where we are trying to take the tools to the next level. The next level is on the data analysis side. Less modeling, less break line extraction, surface modeling, and directly using the point cloud.

I've seen a tremendous uptake in the pavement condition analysis for pavement rehabilitation projects. Let's say a city, town, or municipality needs to know where to allocate funds for pavement rehabilitation. They can get a contract for a dedicated payment system to collect information, but it's pretty expensive. They don't know where to apply or get the survey done because they cannot do it for the entire city or municipality. 

Whereas with mobile scanning, you could do a much cheaper price and general information about the quality or the health of the road network for the entire town, for example. You can apply, “I want my dedicated pigment system to only do these roads and give me a good insight on what's the quality of this data.” These are some of the applications where we're taking the technology beyond the topography models and the surface creation into more engineering-grade applications. The applications are expanding and that's where we see it going.

Kent: What are the biggest challenges for you guys? How do you keep up with the advancement of technology? The way we collect data is changing all the time. How do you guys keep up with that?

Jennifer: We’re keeping up pace with technology. For example, I always look at batteries. Systems get faster, bigger, and better, and batteries are always lagging behind. For us, it's not necessarily in the amount and the quality of data. It's in the automation processes and how you make somebody efficient that feature extraction. A lot of times, people want to have the easy button or the modeling button, but is that real? 

For somebody who has experience with processing data, they want to have control over the process. We want to make people confident about what they're doing and give them control over the process, but also make it so much easier and faster to do that they don't have to make a lot of updates or changes. The world out there is not perfect. We're going to have vegetation, water, and all kinds of sources of noise. Even your side might be terrible like broken curves and a mess of a site. Making tools that understand and recognize those challenges and help our users do better is where we see the challenges. I don't know if Josh or Randy wants to say something about that.

Kent: I'm curious, Randy, from a training and support side, about the challenges that you may get. Is it because of the evolving technology and trying to keep the users updated with that? On the problem side, what do you see?

Randy: It is point cloud to point cloud. The technology to obtain that point cloud is changing over time quicker and faster. It is a point cloud inside of us. As far as us training the user on how to process that point cloud, we stay up with it pretty well. It's more of the hardware side that is the biggest challenge.

Josh: That's what we discovered too. It's the computers that we have. The technology for the collection of data is advancing quicker than the computers that we have to process the data, or at least how often we get these new computers that can meet the specs required. Computers are getting pretty expensive. The company is not going to get you a new computer every time you need it. They've got a system. That's been a bit of a hurdle for us but we manage. Data management is probably the biggest challenge that we have being able to process it and use it.

Jennifer: I was going to mention too that another big challenge that we see in the industry is reusing this data. You originally collected this data for Project X, but it's got so much value beyond that. Maybe you collected it for a right-of-way project, but then you have this risk management team wanting to know if there is a crack in this building. Reusing this data, being able to access it quickly, and having multiple people be able to access that information is another crucial point because we could be collecting massive amounts of data and storing it in the cloud. Why would you go and recollect this data if you already have it somewhere where you can use it? 

That's one of those things that we're trying to not only help our customers organize and catalog their information, access it quickly from the cloud and whatnot but also make it available to their customers. Let their customers know what they have with this point cloud so that they can also get excited about the technology and start asking for more.

Sean: That's a double-edged sword. It's the selling point of a point cloud. You can scan everything and get all this data, but then you have to be able to do something with all that. The first thing you want to do is strip it down so you can use it, but then you don't get the multiple or the different uses and the different clients that might need it. It is a very common question that comes up on the show a lot. I would think we've touched on it but to see if you guys have thoughts. What do you think is advancing faster? What's lagging behind? Is it the hardware or the software side? I'm not talking to two people who are on the software side, but I'm just curious.

Josh: Another unique thing that I run into often is the integration of point clouds and how they relate to standards that have been developed years ago that don't account for point clouds. There are a lot of DOT standards out there that have a way of doing things that's more akin to the traditional form of survey. Now we got point clouds and we're collecting data differently than being out there on the road with a prism pole and a total station getting a shot that Jennifer alluded to earlier where you get this point file that's already ready to go. 

Now we're extracting it from CAD. How do we get that to mirror the standard that they want? A lot of times, frankly, may be unnecessary to do it that way. You still have to do it because it's their standard. A lot of DOTs are playing catch up on how to develop standards around the new technology. You can imagine a DOT spent a lot of effort into developing those standards. They're not going to change them every time technology advances. That's another thing. 

Kent: What I relate that to is if you're looking at a standard slope of a road. You have to have 10 shots along that, and each 10 shot has to be the minimum slope.

Sean: In a point cloud, you have an infinite amount of slopes on that same section. That's a million shots. If you looked hard enough, you could find one section that you're working backward there.

Kent: That's a really good point, Josh. I'll tell you what, those DEA folks know their stuff. I don't know what's in the water over there. I do know when it's in the water and it's beer. What are you guys excited about moving forward? What's coming up next? What's the next big technical advancement that TopoDot can be a part of?

Sean: What’s the next easy button? You can’t tell us. I know. It's a secret. Show up to TUC ‘24.

Jennifer: Actually, it’s not. I should see you at the TUC ‘24, but it goes back to what I was saying about sharing the data, being able to access it, and understanding what it does. One thing about this digital twin reality capture world that we're living in, it's about not just modeling everything. You could spend a long time trying to extract every little thing about your point cloud or assuming that your point cloud has everything, which is neither the answer. The answer is knowing what you have on your point cloud and extracting it whenever you need it so that it's not taking you a long time to model it, but also achieving the means for what you need.

That I guess is the next big hurdle. It's letting people know that we want surveyors to have access to the data because nobody knows the data better than the geospatial analyst. Not everybody has to handle a point cloud. You don't want your engineering team creating elevations and things like that because they don't understand where the error comes from, etc. You want to be a geospatial analyst who surveys and understands the data and the tools best to have access to that and create those elevations, clearances, and measurements. However, have that engineering or designing team understand what point clouds can do so that they can request those kinds of deliverables and get more out of their data. That's our next challenge in addition to taking care of the next Randy support requests.

Randy: There is no next Randy. 

Kent: What I'm hearing is the way to get a job at TopoDot is sending a gazillion questions and requests. 

Sean: Be the biggest pain in the ass and it'll work out for you. 

Randy: You'll go to the spam filter.

Kent: Randy, you were shaking your head while Jennifer was talking there. What do you want to add to that?

Josh: She's exactly right. Do we want to plug in TopoShare here a little bit? 

Kent: That's a new name. What do you got there?

Randy: It used to be TopoCloud and now it's been TopoShare for a while. Everyone has a basic version of it included in their license. Companies can store on the cloud and give access internally to their technicians faster and quicker, more organized, and cheaper. I'll let Jennifer take over. I don't want to say too much. 

Jennifer: It is a product. Anybody can access it right now. We have a lot of a lot of our clients already using TopoShare. As Randy said, it's part of the TopoDot license. This is one other great thing about TopoDot. Everything that we mentioned, all the tools for roadway, rail, power lines, oil and gas, construction, and indoor applications is included in your TopoDot. There are no different modules or whatnot. 

A lot of people are already using TopoShare to organize their data and access it quickly. For example, we have international organizations. Jacobs is one of them that has offices here in Denver and Australia, and they share data across the world. Being able to access it directly into TopoDot is one thing. TopoShare Enterprise is basically where we allow the customer to have access to that and visualize what they have and what they can do with the data. It's on a web platform. They don't have to have TopoDot or MicroStation or anything at all. 

They can access web links where they can see their project and the extent of their data. It's a viewer. They can see their pictures and the extracted line work in everything that attributes and all kinds of information. It's very cheap. It is something that you can already offer. You don't have to spend too much trying to create a 3D point cloud viewer. This is the easy way to share that information. It’s TopoShare.

Randy: I can provide a use case example on TopoShare, although we still haven't integrated it into our day-to-day. We need to push that envelope a little bit more. We had a project that was 20 miles of data and we had staff working from California, Oregon, Idaho, Washington, and Colorado on this project. How do you assign that to the individuals working on that? How do you manage that? 

Here's a Google Earth-type image with tiles. This is segment one Colorado person. You're going to do that one. He goes there, clicks it, downloads his portion of data, and goes to work as opposed to trying to figure out who's working on what manually in a non-geospatial look. It’s like, “I know these file types are here. I need you to download this file. It was probably twice as big as you need or maybe not enough.”

Josh: Maybe they have to send them a hard drive because they don't have internet. It's been there, done that.

Randy: In that sense, it's incredibly powerful even as a database for your data with the attributes and information you can tag onto. It can solve a lot of storage and filing issues.

Kent: That's good stuff. What is the business model? Is it a subscription-based thing? Do you have licenses? What does it look like if you're a 5-person company or you're a 5,000-person company? How would you describe that?

Jennifer: That's the best part because it doesn't matter if you're a 1-person company or a 1,000-person company. Anybody can TopoDot because it's a perpetual license and you buy days. When you buy your pool of days, you can install it on as many computers as you want. As I said, organizations like David Evans, have been a client from day one. They only have one license, but they’re installing it in all their offices. 

When they have a lot of projects, they use it a lot and they can expand their organizations. When they're not using it, they're not paying for additional licenses that they're not using it. It's scalable. We've seen a lot of growth for smaller companies that invest in this technology. They're not spending a lot on the software side but it's the key to unlocking the power of your point cloud data or the LiDAR data.

Josh: It's a lot easier for a company to look at a peruse space fee than it is to purchase a large fee for perpetual use. I know that for a fact. There's other software out there that has some extraction capabilities and licenses for as much as $12,000 or $15,000. It's perpetual. There are still maintenance things that come along with it, but that's a hard pill to swallow, especially if you're a smaller company. Even a larger company like ours, we already have five of those. Are we going to justify getting one more unless we know exactly how often we're going to use it? We have a product like that, then we've danced around getting another license for it for a couple of years now. We have never been able to successfully decide to pull the trigger on it. Whereas with TopoDot, that's a non-factor.

Jennifer: There is maintenance associated with TopoDot too but it's only based on usage. It's easy to budget in. You open TopoDot, save Project X, and then you get a report on Project X. Use five days of TopoDot and then you put it as part of the budget of the project. At the end of the year, we tell you that you use 100 days of your license and it's not a surprise. This maintenance provides you with the training, the customer support, the updates, and so you never really have to have an extra budget for training or any other service work. It's included in the maintenance. That's what smaller businesses flourish because it's not overly expensive.

Kent: It's genius, actually. It's a win-win.

Jennifer: I'm going to plug my boss there. It's all Ted Knaak. He was a guest at the show too. 

Kent: he’s a friend of the program. No doubt about it. What else do you want to talk about before we let you all get out of here?

Sean: What are you guys excited about in the future? I know you already shared a little bit, but what drives you and what are you excited about?

Josh: My presentation in 2022 at TUC was called Moving at the Speed of LiDAR. It chronicled where LiDAR started and then where's it going. There's a sane floating around on the internet as a meme, like how it started versus how it's going. Probably you’ve seen that before. What excites me is where it's going because it's entering the realm of science fiction. We have no idea what's going to happen next. It's getting smaller and faster and it's capturing more data at a more affordable rate. 

I can imagine a scenario where there is continuous LiDAR mapping of large urban areas at all times for monitoring of a number. Geo automation is a thing. All these automated vehicles are using some form of LiDAR to keep themselves going. It's the future. Back to my first day on the survey crew, the party Chief told me to start digging a hole right here. I don't know what I'm even digging for. I'm just digging a hole. I find some rebar out there and I have no idea what I'm doing. I can't even fathom what a flying drone with a LiDAR sensor on it from then to now. It's cool. The technology is fun. It's interesting and it continues to become more interesting. It’s all challenging.

Kent: It’s changing all the time. Let's talk about that for a second. We talked about Get Kids in a Survey and talked about making the fun parts of what this is. How is TopoDot connected with that organization, and what are you guys doing to spread awareness for the geospatial community in general?

Jennifer: That's what I'm personally more excited about. I know that the technology side is being well taken care of by the rest of my team. My challenge is expanding the boundaries of the industry. There are two things that I'm focusing on. One is the Get Kids Into Survey. We're very good friends with Elaine Ball and her organization. They're going to be a big part of TUC ’24, FYI. I'm not going to say anymore, but they're going to be there. We're going to have a cool event with kids. We’re working on an interactive feature that is not going to be a poster or a comic book, but it's going to promote how you become a surveyor. What are the steps to take from high school or school in general up to becoming a surveyor? 

That is going to be our goal for TUC ’24. It would be Get Kids Into Survey and hopefully, promote that around all the kids that have access to this information. My other challenge is to expand the use of this technology everywhere else in the world. The United States has always been at the forefront of this technology where we're not only implementing but we're always coming up with new technology and new ways of doing it better, and the rest of the world is catching up. We have a great uptake in Europe as far as mobile scanning goes and it's flourishing. 

I know South America and other places in the world are getting into technology. I’m taking advantage of that I speak Spanish and like Bad Bunny so I want to go. We’ll work in South and Central America a little bit more in the next couple of years and see how we can expand the boundaries of the industry. We had FIG, the international survey conference here in Orlando, and that was an eye-opener for me to see the potential that we have to expand this technology, especially in the Americas.

Kent: That's awesome. Jennifer, you need to get Bad Bunny at TUC ‘24.

Sean: That's what she's excited about. 

Kent: What about you, Randy?

Randy: The current project that I'm probably most excited about is, and the reason I signed on board, TopoDot University, our online platform for our users. It has a ton of information, but over the years, it's been on the back burner as people were busy with other things. It didn't get the love and the TLC that it deserves. We're recreating that experience. I know that made Jen sad. I do apologize. Our goal is to make it more user-friendly, have a more dynamic online and self-paced environment with short videos of our tools, and have more content for our users to be more in-depth training on our tools. That's my current project.

Kent: Before we let Josh go, who's got the better beard? Josh or Brandon Montero (Survey Jesus).That's a close one. 

Sean: I'm going to have to lean on Josh. That is pretty strong.

Josh: I feel good about that because I did a beard competition and I didn't even get in the top three.

Kent: What do they know? 

Josh: I’m a little bit late. Anyway, I appreciate that.

Kent: Before we let you guys go, I do have a question I always ask everybody. With the three of you, it'll be whoever wants to chime in. Do you have a mantra that you live by? Jennifer, I'll let you start since you seem very eager to talk.

Sean: She's got one.

Jennifer: I have mantras to live by, but since this is a business call, the mantra that I live by is data quality drives automation. Everybody wants automatic tools, but do you have the data quality? 

Sean: I’m going to use that one. 

Josh: I'm pretty generic. C’est la vie has been something I have carried with me throughout my life. Work-wise never stop learning. That's a big one. Keep going. C’est la vie works for me. That's life.

Kent: You only live once. What you got, Randy?

Randy: Adapt and conquer. If something is presented to you or a challenge, you have to adapt and conquer, find a solution, and move forward.

Kent: I like that. I thought he was going to go with the persistence pays off thing.

Jennifer: Make it until you make it.

Kent: That's awesome. Thank you, guys. This has been a great conversation. I love TopoDot. They've been involved with The Geoholics since day one. I can't thank you all enough. Josh, thanks for being a part of this as well and providing the User perspective. Here we go. 

Sean: We're on our way out here, Bad Bunny. Adding value in making friends. If anyone would like to be a guest on a future show, or if you have any topical ideas, shoot us an email at Info@Geoholics.com. 

Kent: I believe we're booking into October 2023 so give us a shout on the show. Bad Bunny’s Después de la Playa. 

Sean: It’s something about the beach.

Kent: Until next time, everyone. “Data cloud drives automation.” I like that. Thanks for being a friend of the program, TopoDot. We love you, guys. See you at TUC ‘24. Adapt and Conquer, c’est la vie, and most importantly, be safe and healthy, everyone.

Sean: Goodbye.

Jennifer: Thank you.

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