Welcome to GISWeekly! This coming week, I will be traveling to Amsterdam for the Bentley BE Awards. Look for coverage of that event in a future issue.

GISWeekly examines select top news each week, picks out worthwhile reading from around the web, and special interest items you might not find elsewhere. This issue will feature Industry News, Top News of the Week, Acquisitions, Agreements, Alliances, Announcements,  New Products, Around the Web and Events Calendar.

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Susan Smith, Managing Editor 

Industry News
Mobile and Analytics Technology Tracks How Mobile Apps are Used
By Susan Smith

A new mobile location analytics platform has been formed from the partnership of Appcelerator, a platform for developing native mobile, desktop and iPad applications using web technologies and FortiusOne, a location analysis software provider. The resulting Titanium+Geo platform makes it possible for enterprises, marketers and retailers to better understand where, when and how mobile applications are being used. According to press materials, business decision makers can now dynamically measure the impact of location-enabled mobile applications and social media on their company’s bottom line.

“This partnership unites two leading technologies from the mobile and analytics markets," said Frank Moyer, CEO, FortiusOne.  "It leverages GeoIQ, used by US intelligence agencies, to create the first enterprise-grade mobile analytics solution.  By partnering with Appcelerator, we have solved a problem many enterprises face with mobile technology - understanding where, when and how mobile applications are being used." 

Appcelerator’s Titanium+Geo is built on the core location analytics driving FortiusOne's GeoIQ platform and extends its capability to capture, analyze and visualize real-time data from mobile devices and social media services.  This complete data management, visualization, and analysis platform enables intuitive exploration, sharing and collaboration around geo-tagged data. 

The technology from FortiusOne makes it possible for developers to write mobile apps in regular programming languages and deploy them across multiple platforms such as Android, iPhone, Symbion, Blackberry, etc.

FortiusOne co-founder Sean Gorman said that the platform was built in response to users who want to put geolocation capabilities and LBS capabilities into their mobile apps. “Just below 50% planned on using location based services in the apps that they’re developing – from a survey of 70,000 developers,” said Gorman. “They wanted to get better analytics around how the mobile apps are being used and specifically how location is being used.”

A big problem for developers is showing their customers the ROI for building the applications they build. “Who is using it, how they are using it, where using it, what kind of brand recognition, ROI is created through that mobile app?” queried Gorman.

Metrics as well as visualization tools would help these developers show ROI. That’s where Appcelerator Titanium+Geo comes in – an application built on the GeoIQ platform to address those issues.

Developers wanted to know how when and where app being used, to measure location, app usage across their customers and then enable those developers and customers to make decisions about when to launch new products and enhance their products for new customers.

The developer community is seeing the intersection of two potential sources of data from their customers. This community has a lot of internal data being generated on coupons where mobile devices were being used, how they were being used, what functions were being called. They also found a lot of the developers’ customers had databases on where their customers were located as well as where they were instituting a marketing program.

Information collection included Twitter activity by keywords, demographics, and competitive information. Appcelerator wanted to be able to use that to get better data and statistics metrics around running promotions, selling advertising, opening new locations within the variety of customers that their developers were building out for.

“We integrated our location based analytic platform GeoIQ and integrated that into Titanium, which is the name of Appcelerator’s development platform to create Titanium+Geo to go through and fuse these things together and provide metrics their customers were looking for,” said Gorman. “On our end that was a lot of fusing of internal and external data – how we operate within the ecosystem of data. Within the enterprise, Appcelerator has a lot of valuable data in large amounts behind their firewalls sitting within their existing ERP, CRM and BI systems and related data, and external through the organization.”

More and more data is being geoenabled and made available to enterprises but often enterprises have a hard time understanding that information and seeing how they make it operational to their day-to-day needs. 

Information such as sensor data, data coming from the web, geoenabled social media services as well as institutional data for traditional indicators like demographics, economic, political information, environment, weather, climate -- all coming from the public domain and GeoIQ working as the platform to connect into these various data feeds, index them, and make them discoverable so they can be remixed and repurposed and overlaid. Appcelerator Titanium+Geo and mobile device data are the critical components, but also customer relationship management data, information from mobile devices, mentions on Twitters, entries from FourSquare, Census demographic information, latest data releases, and the 45,000 data sets in the FortiusOne GeoCommons data marketplace can be fused together to get better insight on metrics that are important to the customer driving the enterprise.

When a user creates a mobile app within Appcelerator Titanium+Geo, all the apps that are already in there will get dashboards automatically generated for them for all the LBS data they have already. “Any new apps that get created, as soon as you create that app if the data that the app is generating has a location component to it. It will automatically fire up a dashboard and start tracking the key metrics to use to look at those apps,” said Gorman.

A sample scenario was created for the sake of a demo of a mythical corporation named Pizzaland with 14 pizza locations. This business in the San Francisco Bay Area recently started participating in a mobile couponing service. They want to be able to see where those mobile coupons are being serviced, where redeemed, what kind of ROI they’re getting for investing in building this app for investing into a mobile service and then bringing in some additional information that used in context

The scenario shows activity before 7 a.m. - people looking for coupons before work; for lunchtime, you can see a lot of activity in the suburbs outside the city and then it starts to pick up inside the city as they start to go into the city for lunch. The screen shows dots where people look for lunch deals and stays pretty active. Then around the dinner hour, dots start to spread back out to the suburbs as people go back home to get dinner, and some people stay in the city as well. See Pizzaland Mobile Analysis here

Top News of the Week

The United States GIS Data Repository (USGDR), a not-for-profit organization dedicated to “Making Public Data Public”, has partnered with TractBuilder to provide Central Appraisal Districts and certain other county-level GIS programs free licenses of the TractBuilder Tools for ArcGIS, a set of tools counties can use to map polygons and lines according to legal descriptions.

The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation added a new mapping feature to its website to better explain the updated Transportation Improvement Program.

The state Transportation Commission in August approved the updated program, which reflected an expected 24-percent reduction in funding for improvements for highways, bridges, transit, aviation and rail freight.

Esri's newly released ArcGIS Viewer for Flex is a free, ready-to-deploy application for ArcGIS Server and ArcGIS Online services. Built with ArcGIS API for Flex version 2.1, it is designed for developers that want to customize the appearance, functionality, and content of their mapping applications without the need for programming.

Municipal and county officials, service organizations, researchers, and the general public will be able to freely use a wide array of local and regional data about community well-being, DataPlace and the Urban Institute announced.

Originally aggregated for DataPlace by the Urban Institute’s Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center, the data contain important information about mortgage lending, employment patterns, racial and ethnic composition, incomes, housing prices and rents, and more at the metropolitan, county, census tract, and address levels. The data are based on federal government sources, such as the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, the Internal Revenue Service, the American Community Survey, and Zip Business Patterns.

Acquisitions, Agreements, Alliances

Esri announced a partnership with Ushahidi that will improve the collection and use of crowd-sourced information during large-scale emergencies. Ushahidi is a nonprofit organization that allows local observers to submit reports to the Ushahidi Web platform using their mobile phones or the Internet during a crisis. Esri is providing software, services, and training to support Ushahidi's Web platform. The result is better information more readily accessible by decision makers and the public.

PCI Geomatics announce the appointment of Geo-Alliance as Master Distributor of PCI’s solution technologies and Geomatica family of products for the Russian Federation, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries, and the Ukraine.

Rand McNally, with more than 70 years in the commercial transportation industry, and DriverTech, with deep roots in military-grade, in-vehicle mobile computing technology, announced an agreement in which the companies will offer a complete fleet management solution to the long-haul trucking market.

The mobile management solution, called Rand McNally TruckPC, powered by DriverTech, utilizes Rand McNally’s leading IntelliRoute TND truck navigation on DriverTech’s secure, industry-tested, on-board computing platform.

Announcements

Putting the National Land and Property Gazetteer (NLPG) at the heart of Council service delivery in England and Wales can save between £15 and £24m, a recent local government report revealed. The NLPG exemplifies one of a range of uses of geographic information that leads to productivity increases in local service provision.

The adoption of geospatial information resulted in an increase in GDP of approximately £320m higher in 2008-9 than if geospatial information hadn’t been adopted. The report suggests that this could be expected to rise to £560m by 2014-5.

GfK GeoMarketing calculated Germans' regional consumer potential for around 60 retail product lines from the level of federal states down to postcodes. The "GfK Purchasing Power for Retail Product Lines 2010" study reveals stark regional differences in consumer profiles. For example, residents of the federal state of Baden-Württemberg have almost one-and-a-half as much per capita purchasing power available for watches and jewelry as residents of the federal state of Brandenburg.

1Spatial, including other consortium members, RSW Geomatics and Rob Walker Consultancy, has just completed a project for the Joint Research Council (JRC) on Schema Transformation Network Services for INSPIRE. The project involved a review of the current tools and standards available to the community to achieve schema transformation into INSPIRE compliant data structures. The primary objective was to develop Technical Guidance for the practical implementation of the INSPIRE Implementing Rules for schema transformation. 

The recommendation is to base implementations on open standards meaning the guidance is: 

• Vendor neutral and supportive of interoperability aspirations;
• Based on rigorously defined and internationally proven concepts;
• Capable of operating effectively and automatically within the problem domain.

Financials

DigitalGlobe Inc. will announce its third quarter financial results prior to the open of regular market trading on Tuesday, November 2, 2010.

The company will provide a live webcast of its earnings conference call over the Internet at 6:30 a.m. MDT (8:30 a.m. EDT) on November 2, 2010. The live webcast and archived replay can be accessed at www.digitalglobe.com, and will be available as a replay shortly after the call. An audio replay of the call will be available for 30 days. The conference call replay numbers are as follows: United States -- (800) 642-1687, International -- (706) 645-9291. The access code is 1604-7032.

Awards

Jack Dangermond, founder and president of Esri, has been named to receive the Global Citizen Award of the Global Spatial Data Infrastructure (GSDI) Association. The award will be presented on the opening day of the GSDI 12 World Conference, to be held in Singapore October 19–22, 2010. Dangermond, as the recipient, will give the lead Keynote Address on October 19, focusing on a global vision for spatially enabling society.

New Products

Trimble announced the release of its next generation of Trimble TerraSync software, a market-leading data collection and asset management application. TerraSync software is deployed in utilities, public sector, natural resources, and many other organizations throughout the world as a key component of enterprise Geographic Information System (GIS) data collection and asset management projects. The latest release focuses on updates requested by users to better address their changing needs.

Trimble introduced updated versions of its Trimble GPScorrect extension for Esri ArcPad and the Trimble GPS Analyst extension for Esri ArcGIS Desktop. These tools now support the latest Esri technology, including ArcPad 10 and ArcGIS 10 Desktop software.

Trimble introduced additions to its portfolio of Connected Site survey solutions for the field and office. The enhanced tools allow surveyors to collect, share and deliver data faster to improve accuracy, efficiency and productivity.

Trimble introduced its next generation Trimble GPS Pathfinder ProXRT receiver, a versatile decimeter receiver combining dual-frequency GPS with Trimble H-Star technology, along with optional OmniSTAR and GLONASS support. In addition, the GPS Pathfinder ProXRT receiver is now capable of tracking Galileo test satellites for signal evaluation and test purposes.

Carlson Software Inc. has released a new line of GNSS receivers that address most machine types and most machine control and site management applications. The new products are available October 1 as part of Carlson’s 3D machine control system product line.

SpecTIR continues the campaign to make available the ProSpecTIR VNIR/SWIR hyperspectral data collected from the Gulf of Mexico coastal wetlands immediately prior to the oil landing onshore.   The data set consists of spectral and spatial imagery of 2000 sq km of highly sensitive coastal wetlands of the Gulf.   It can be used as baseline environmental data to aid in future impact assessments, as well as monitor changes to wetlands health, and to assist in the detection and mitigation efforts associated with the oil spill.  

Sokkia Corporation announced the addition of two new models to its data collector lineup to expand users’ choices.

The SHC25/25A weighs 11.3 oz (320g) including battery, and measures 3.23 x 5.75 x 1.30 in. (82 x 146 x 33mm). “The SHC25 series is the lightest and smallest data collector available on today’s market which meets the US military standard that withstands extremely rough conditions,” Walker said. “Conforming to the latest MIL-STD-810G, both models have cleared the drop tests from a height of 5 ft. (1.52m). These models are also rated to IP65 of the IEC standard, eliminating powder dust and driving rain as potential problems.”

Applanix announced a new version of its post-processing software for Mobile Mapping and Positioning, POSPac MMS version 5.4. Designed to enhance the productivity of Mobile Mapping, POSPac MMS 5.4 features an all-new Inertially-Aided Precise Point Positioning (IAPPP) engine and enhanced smoothing algorithm.

ArcGIS for AutoCAD offers significant performance improvements in its latest release including faster access and enhanced image quality of map services. AutoCAD professionals can use the free, downloadable tool to find and use geographic information system (GIS) data and imagery either from ArcGIS Online or ArcGIS Server. Build 250 of ArcGIS for AutoCAD has also been updated to support 32-bit and 64-bit AutoCAD versions 2010 and 2011, allowing users to share and exploit GIS content within local files, throughout the enterprise, and in the cloud.

Mapping the locations of photos just got a lot easier. GeoSpatial Experts, developers of photo-mapping software, has introduced GPS-Photo Link version 5.0 and bundled it with the latest GPS-enabled cameras from Sony, Ricoh, and Nikon.

QCoherent Software announced the release of LP360 version 2.0.  This release includes the much-anticipated support for ArcGIS 10 from ESRI.  With an advanced architecture for accessing and processing LIDAR points, LP360 is the LIDAR tool of choice for integrating and processing LIDAR point clouds in the ArcGIS environment.  Version 2.0 includes breakline digitizing integration with the new template-based editing in ArcGIS 10. Customers with current software maintenance agreements can download the new version via “Check for LP360 Updates” on the LP360 toolbar.

Esri released the ArcGIS API for the Apple iOS platform. It is available at no cost from the Esri Resource Center. ArcGIS API for iOS enables developers to build applications that use the powerful mapping, geocoding, geoprocessing, and editing capabilities that ArcGIS Server provides.

Leica Geosystems announced the successful flight testing of its new Point Density Multiplier technology for airborne LIDAR.  The unique scanning system allows the use of a single laser and scanning mechanism to provide over double the data collection productivity of previous systems.  The new technology will be incorporated into Leica Geosystems’ ALS series airborne LIDAR Systems.

Leica Geosystems announced the Leica RCD30, the world’s first 60MP medium-format airborne camera to acquire co-registered multispectral RGBN imagery. The new Leica RCD30 Series offers exciting new features, including Forward Motion Compensation, to ensure highest accuracy with “best-in-class” image quality.

MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates Ltd. announced that its U.S. operation, MDA Information Systems, Inc. has been awarded a contract to provide an advanced information solution to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Army Geospatial Center (AGC).

The information solution will provide a demonstration system to display the capability of receiving MDA’s RADARSAT-2 and DigitalGlobe’s WorldView-2 data using a very small, tactically deployable, mobile ground station.

ALK Technologies, Inc.,  announced the release of PC*MILER|Rail 17, the latest version of the transportation and logistics industry's leading rail routing, mileage and mapping software solution.

Around the Web

GISCafe Today Blog

OSI Geospatial’s Software in Use On-Board by the Royal Navy Logistics Week

Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic, John Markoff, October 10, 2010, The New York Times (registration required)

Finding Your Way Through the Mall or the Airport, With a Cellphone Map, Verne G. Kopytoff, October 11, 2010, The New York Times, (registration required)

Events