The Angle on Obtuse
Obtuse Software, LLC was founded by the developers of zigGIS to support the continued development and improvement of zigGIS. Obtuse is headquartered in Richmond, Virginia (in Abe's living room to be specific) but development is performed in a distributed manner from Virginia, Maryland, Rome, Italy or any place else that Abe, Bill and Paolo may be sitting.
Our goal is to continue enhancing zigGIS with new features and new data sources. We may develop other products in the future as well.
The content of this site will be expanded somewhat organically based upon the direction of zigGIS and Obtuse. We look forward to your feedback on zigGIS, Obtuse, this site or just about anything else.
Abe Gillespie
Abe has been writing code since the womb. How? Technology. His love for GIS blossomed at college while working for a small Engineering Services company. You could often find him there slaving into the wee hours creating countless Avenue scripts and ArcIMS / ArcObjects hacks.
Abe first cooked up zigGIS in Blacksburg, Virginia circa 2005 in a kitchen. Literally. (It was a small apartment). Fortunately the internets have a good memory and zigGIS was not forgotten. Abe rejoined the project after moving to Richmond, Virginia for a soulless job which he promptly quit. Currently he is the president of Digital Pulp and part owner of Obtuse Software. GIS consulting and zigGIS are now his full time job.
Bill Dollins
Bill wrote his first computer program at the age of 10. It was a D&D character generator for the Commodore 64. This fact gives him double geek points in any conversation.
Bill has worked in GIS software development since the paleolithic era. He is officially technology-agnostic and is happy to perform coding calisthenics in whatever language/platform combination you care to throw at him. He has been developing on the ESRI platform since before it was pronounced "Ezree." He joined the zigGIS project to help Paolo save it from bit-rot while Abe explored his blue period.
Bill is a Senior Vice President and partner in Zekiah Technologies and a part owner of Obtuse Software. He also maintains the GeoMusings blog and is still known to occasionally sling code.
Paolo Corti
Paolo is a GIS fanatic living in Rome, Italy. He has been glued (without hope of freedom) to a computer since the early 80's when he was developing some Zork-like adventures game on his Commodore Vic20/64/Amiga. He landed in GIS in the late 90's, writing some (now museum-worthy) AML code for ARC/INFO and then migrating to ArcObjects and Open Source GIS. He aims to be technology-neutral. His conversion to GIS is so complete that he is the author of the "Thinking in GIS" blog.
When he is not developing GIS or Web 2.0 applications, he enjoys going out for the weekend with his wife, watching football (that's soccer to you Americans) matches of his favorite team (Roma) and eating a lot of pizza and pasta.
