The inaugural New Zealand GeoRabble was held in Auckland on Thursday 25^th September with 45 people attending from the Survey and GIS communities. The event food was sponsored by Glenn Stone Insurance, thanks Glenn.

The four presenters gave excellent presentations on a variety of topics:

• Linda Bulk, Director at Aeronavics Ltd, Advance Aerial Solutions gave a fascinating talk on the history of developing her UAS company in New Zealand including the challenges of building UAS vehicles to meet the demand for increasing payloads and very diverse applications.
• Geoff Leyland, Director of Incremental Ltd, spoke about his development of routing solutions for Auckland businesses using a variety of open source databases including OpenStreetMap and how these solutions had delivered significant cost savings to his clients.
• Alex Raichev, talked about how he had seen a number of overseas web sites that involved mapping the location of regional data and personal variables and how he was involved in the development of the Affordability In New Zealand site. Alex did a live demonstration of the site which provides colour coding of the Auckland’s area units by their affordability based on an individual or couple’s cost to rent, commute, park and car ownership.
• Malcolm Archbold, Beca Ltd, delivered a presentation on the creation of 3D models using digital photos taken with a handheld camera. By taking digital photos of an object and using cloud computing software it is possible to develop a 3D model which can be geo-referenced and used in many geospatial applications.

Many thanks to the presenters and attendees who made this first Auckland GeoRabble a very successful event. The feedback was overwhelmingly in favour of doing more of these in the future.