Mapping the future: Jack Dangermond, founder of Esri, the market leader in geographic info systems, says passion and good old-fashioned business values are behind

April 11, 2014 Leave a comment

PUBLISHED MARCH 29, 2014

Mapping the future

Jack Dangermond, founder of Esri, the market leader in geographic info systems, says passion and good old-fashioned business values are behind By Anna Teo

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JACK Dangermond is one of the world’s most influential people who isn’t a household name. For that matter, Esri, his company, is probably little-known outside the mapping software world that it rules. That despite Esri’s technology – the brainchild of Mr Dangermond – being a driving force across a myriad functions and processes that touch everyday living.

Here in Singapore, the Land Transport Authority uses the technology to better understand commuter behaviour across different modes of transport. The Urban Redevelopment Authority

(URA) employs it in a map-based application that helps users search for information to buy or lease a property. URA will also be using Esri’s 3D smart city technology for urban planning and design simulation. And over at the Botanic Gardens, every tree planted is “organised” using the billion-dollar California company’s flagship product.

“I’m very proud of our users in Singapore, particularly the Botanic Gardens here,” Mr Dangermond tells BT. “It’s one of my best GIS users here in Singapore. Every tree that they plant they put in a database, they visualise the Gardens, they do the facility management of the Gardens, so GIS is everywhere. It’s interesting because there are probably a hundred major botanical gardens around the world – the big ones like Kew Gardens in England; the (Kirstenbosch) in Cape Town, South Africa; Arnold Arboretum at Harvard – they all use GIS to manage the location of their living collections.”

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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