“Reflect upon your present blessings — of which every man has many — not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.”
– Charles Dickens

A Year Changes You

A year ago I was helping run a startup, determining how we would sustain and grow our business in a competitive market. At the same time we were a happy, childless (yet expecting) couple enjoying complete freedom of schedule. Within twelve months our lives have dramatically changed.

We sold the company and I’ve change from a track of decreasing company size back up to a large company. I no longer have to worry about making payroll, taking out the trash, and maintaining server uptime. Fortunately this relaxing of responsibility coincided with the biggest gain of responsibility nearly anyone can have – a kid.

Over the past 6 months we could not have asked for a better experience. Sayge is continually happy and laughing, a model of happy child. The stability and support of a well-established company have allowed me the flexibility to shift my schedules to be the attentive and caring father that I want to be.

Live’s Lived

The year has also included unfortunate experiences. Corrie’s grand-father finished his 96-year amazing journey. Who else have you met that was at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, earned a Law Degree, an MBA from Harvard, served in World War II, was a representative in government, and successfully ran his family business for 40 years.

A long-time friend passed away far too young from women’s cancer. Rachel was an incredible attractor – able to easily bring and connect friends. She helped my sister get her first job at HHS and was a fearful Carcossonne player. I wish Sayge could have met her.

Living Forward

Perhaps the theme of the year should be “relative”. The dichotomy of life and loss, of success with stress. Responsibility is just beginning. There is much to accomplish and improve for our and the next generations.

Next year I’m excited about even bigger dichotomies – solving large, important problems in technology and society while making sure to enjoy and live through the simple pleasures and new experience of life. If we commiserated or celebrated this year – thank you, it was wonderful to be with you. And for those of you that I have not yet met, I look forward to celebrating with you in 2013.

Two amazing events in my life coincided last week: our company was acquired on Monday, and our first son arrived on Friday. Together these were tremendously fulfilling occasions that I am fortunate to experience. These events are point times within a much longer continuity of stories that spanned months, and even years of effort, learning, frustration and hope.

The real success behind these events are the people that worked together to make them so successful. Together we developed deep trust and shared perspective that permitted us to overcome personal and external differences that otherwise would have prevented us from success.

At GeoIQ we formed a tightly integrated team that is able to accomplish industry impacting vision and technology for the world’s biggest customers. Since 2005 and through many iterations we built an online community and concept that sought to open access to data and tools for people to make important decisions; whether that was global climate change, international development, or the ever popular personal analysis in buying a house. It was a fun and exhilarating escapade that provided unexpected experiences.

A startup company requires diligent work, flexibility, and collaborating with people that have different needs and attitudes to come together to achieve something bigger than ourselves. I found the parallels between running a startup and building a family amazingly similar. You constantly seek to understand and control situations, but in reality you are preparing for whatever happens to be able to respond positively. The fun is learning to take advantage of those opportunities and weave them together to create a story to be proud of.

Personally, I am intensely satisfied with what we’ve achieved. Thank you to everyone: foremost my wife for enduring so many difficult and long days, as well as family, friends, teammates, and the community for making these experiences so rewarding.

Update: We’re happy to announce that on Friday, July 13 Sayge Clark Turner was born and is extremely healthy, and quite hungry.

As a very outward facing technologist, I tend to be very open with a lot of my information on location, work, and thoughts. I do keep personal things very private, but sometimes there are things that I am too excited to not share.

Corrie and I are eagerly expecting our first child in the very near future. Being in DC we found it fitting that he is due on July 4, 2012. And fortunately for those who are familiar with DC summer weather the sooner the better to avoid the heat.

I have a number of projects in mind and will share details as they are relevant. In particular I’m investigating a few concepts of “quantified children”. And all the discussion of location privacy sharing depending on context will become much more personal.

We’re looking forward to soon introducing you to our newest Neogeographer/Rocket Scientist/Environmental Engineer or whatever he wants to be.

…and so should you. And why not take a photo to capture your exercising democratic choice. Make sure to check out and add your “ivoted” photo to the Flickr ivoted group.

If you’re not sure where to go, I posted a dataset in KML (and CSV and Shapefile) to Finder! of Early Voting Locations for the US so you can find your nearest polling location.

The fact that I’m writing this “year in review” is indicative of the kind of year it’s been. At the end of 2006, I thought that it was a crazy year – getting married, writing a book, winning the MapQuest contest – and life would finally settle down a little bit. I was wrong. 2007 was an exciting, amazing, and incredibly busy year.

So here is a quick post-mortem on the major events of 2007:

• Traveled around New Zealand for 3 weeks on honeymoon
• Dual Neogeography Tutorial at Location Intelligence Conference, and Geo on your Website talk at Web2.0 Expo in April in San Francisco
• Mapufacture incorporated
• Published 2 MacTech articles and Make Magazine article
• On the Where2.0 committee and gave a talk on the GeoStack in May
• WhereCamp fun
• FooCamp fun in Sebastapol in June
• Week vacation at a beach house in Kauai, Hawaii
• 2 weeks in the UK speaking at State of the Map in Manchester an GUADEC in Birmingham in September, both on GeoClue
• Mapufacture joined the OGC
• Lightning talk on Neogeography Data Collection at FOSS4G in Victoria, BC Canada in September
• Spoke at GISDay at University of Kansas on Neogeography & GIS
• Traveled for 3 weeks around China – doubled Mandarin vocabulary
• Lived at 5 different addresses during the year

There was a smattering of other events, the most important being Corrie finishing her dissertation! I’m very excited what 2008 will bring, already looking like Africa and Vietnam are on the itinerary at some point and several conferences. Of course, knowing where I’ll be living after January will be a definite plus.

Thanks for a great year 2007!