Welcome to Null Island

Somewhere in the Gulf of Guinea, where the prime meridian crosses the equator, there's a point that cartographers know well. It's the place where every badly geocoded dataset ends up. Where GPS errors go to retire. Where latitude and longitude are both zero. It's called Null Island, and it felt like the perfect name for a newsletter about the geography of everything.

I'm Chris Lyons, and Null Island Dispatch is my weekly newsletter on GeoAI and spatial technology. If you work with geospatial data, build with location intelligence, or just find it fascinating that satellites and machine learning are quietly reshaping how we understand the planet, this is for you.

Each issue will cover the intersection of artificial intelligence and geospatial science. Foundation models trained on satellite imagery. Open-source GIS tools getting smarter. How governments and companies are using spatial data to make better decisions. And the occasional deep dive into a dataset or technique that deserves more attention.

We're in a moment where AI and geospatial are converging fast. Cloud-native formats are making petabytes of imagery accessible to anyone with a laptop. The tools are democratizing, but the knowledge to use them well is still scattered across conference talks, research papers, and niche communities. This newsletter is my attempt to bring that knowledge together in one place.

The format will be concise and consistent. No fluff, no filler. Just the signal that matters, delivered to your inbox once a week.

Subscribe for free and the first real issue will land in your inbox soon. If you have thoughts on what you'd like to see covered, reply to any email. I read everything.

Welcome aboard. Let's see what's out there.