On January 31, 2013 DigitalGlobe, Inc.and GeoEye, Inc. announced the completion of their merger, creating one global leader in earth imagery and geospatial analysis, under the name DigitalGlobe. According to the press release, the combined company will trade on the NYSE stock exchange as DigitalGlobe under the symbol DGI. Based on the closing price of DigitalGlobe stock on January 30, 2013, the combined company has a market capitalization of $2.1 billion.
This story I wrote in July 2012 recounts the background of the two companies up to that time.
“With low-cost developer’s tools becoming available, geofencing is finally coming out of the shadows, moving beyond traditional location-based applications, to form the backbone of a host of new applications and services.
As the back-end complexities of supporting location-based services continues to escalate, developers are increasingly turning to platform providers such as carriers, Google, Qualcomm, Esri, Urban Airship, and others to provide an easy, scalable geofencing service. In its report, “Geofencing: Technologies, Applications, and Revenue Strategies”, ABI Research investigates the full range of carrier and smartphone applications that will utilize geofencing in the coming years, including retail, enterprise, push notification, local search, social networking, ambient intelligence, etc”
Geodesign is a set of techniques and enabling technologies for planning built and natural environments in an integrated process, including project conceptualization, analysis, design specification, stakeholder participation and collaboration, design creation, simulation, and evaluation (among other stages). “Geodesign is a design and planning method which tightly couples the creation of design proposals with impact simulations informed by geographic contexts.”[1] – Wikipedia
Bran Ferren, co-founder of Applied Minds LLC and keynote speaker for the opening session at the Geodesign Summit held at Esri’s Redlands, Calif. Campus, set the tone for the Summit that commenced today.
The Esri Vulnerable Populations Flu Impact Map and Health Information Map are available for media to embed or share as part of ongoing flu and public health coverage. The Vulnerable Populations Flu Impact Map displays crowdsourced flu reports by ZIP Code over Esri demographic data for seniors and children under five.
The Health Information Map shows flu surveillance reports from the CDC and related social media. You can customize the map by zooming or panning and changing the keywords or date ranges to localize geo-tagged social content. Both the default map or your customized version can be embedded on your news site by using the Link button.
As with every release of Safe Software’s spatial data transformation technology FME, the release of FME 2013 Desktop and Server versions offers support for more data formats, in this case over 300 of them, including across point cloud/LiDAR, 3D, raster, database, vector and XML. Notable new formats include the ASTM E57 point cloud format, X3D, Autodesk IMX, PostGIS raster, SpatiaLite, Salesforce, and many more.
Mid-January 2013 air quality proved to be dangerous to the health of Beijing residents and those of many other cities in China. Authorities warned people to stay indoors as the nation faced one of the worst periods of air quality in recent history. Factories were government-ordered to scale back emissions. According to news reports, hospitals experienced more than 20 to 30 percent increase in patients complaining of respiratory issues.
According to NASA Earth Observatory, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite acquired these natural-color images of northeastern China on January 14 (top) and January 3, 2013. The top image shows extensive haze, low clouds, and fog over the region. The brightest areas tend to be clouds or fog, which have a tinge of gray or yellow from the air pollution. Other cloud-free areas have a pall of gray and brown smog that mostly blots out the cities below. In areas where the ground is visible, some of the landscape is covered with lingering snow from storms in recent weeks. (Snow is more prominent in the January 3 image.)
Mladen Stojic, vice president of Geospatial at Intergraph, presented at a virtual press event this week to announce the Intergraph 2013 Geospatial Portfolio.
This review in this morning’s New York Times caught my eye – how many times have I wished for some sort of gadget to find my car in a parking lot? I have tied a hiking stick to the roof of my car to make it more noticeable in busy parking lots. But that’s not always so easy. Cars are all created in about three to four colors unless you customize yours with psychedelic magic bus colors or something.
This article cites several new apps for free or at minimal cost that will find your car for you, using your phone’s GPS and some will even work from photos!
On this first day of the Winter Solstice, it is a time of reflection and quiet, noticing how remarkable it is that the planets are all aligned with the sun. It is also a good time to look at what we might find important geospatial topics for 2013.
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