BUSINESS NOTES

Announcements

ITT Industries has acquired Allen Osborne Associates (AOA) the makers of high performance Global Positioning System (GPS) products for precise time and frequency transfer, surveying, ionospheric calibration, and military receivers. ITT Industries has a long history supporting GPS as a provider of payload systems for every GPS satellite ever launched. This acquisition means that ITT will be able to leverage complementary technology between its space-based capabilities and ground systems for GPS.  

PCI Geomatics was awarded the Small Medium Enterprise (SME) gold award for the Outaouais region by the National Bank of Canada.

Sanborn and Pictometry formed a strategic alliance. The companies will market a combined product offering that incorporates each firm’s technical expertise as part of an overall solution to meet the GIS and mapping needs of their clients. Sanborn’s mapping technology processes will provide fully mosaicked and color balanced enhancements to Pictometry’s orthogonal imagery for clients needing guaranteed mapping accuracy. Pictometry will market the Sanborn-certified orthophotography images to local, state, and federal government agencies, as well as to private businesses.

Intermap Technologies announced that it has entered into a letter of intent to purchase Phoenix, Arizona, based AirPhotoUSA, L.L.C. The acquisition of AirPhotoUSA will allow Intermap to develop and provide a national color image layer to complement Intermap’s NEXTMap USA program.    

Contracts

Pictometry International Corp., provider of a patented information system that captures georeferenced, digital aerial oblique and orthogonal images, as well as related software, announced that it has secured its first and second letters of intent for new license agreements with prominent aerial imaging and mapping firms, Simmons Aerofilms and Compagnia Generale Ripreseaeree Group, which will be the exclusive distributors for the United Kingdom and Italy, respectively. Pictometry also recently announced that it has secured a license agreement for St. James Parish, LA, for providing software and imagery. The parish is situated between New Orleans and Baton Rouge along the Mississippi River.

ORBIMAGE Inc. announced that its OrbView-2 satellite recently passed its seventh successful year of operations with an unprecedented availability rate of over 98%. ORBIMAGE expects OrbView-2 to continue providing service for at least another 3 to 5 years. Since its launch on August 11th, 1997, OrbView-2 has traveled over 1.6 billion kilometers (1 billion miles), made over 37,000 orbits around the Earth, and collected over 500 billion square kilometers of multispectral (color) imagery as it images the entire earth every day. Also, the company announced that it has signed an agreement with Antrix Corporation of Bangalore, India to represent ORBIMAGE for distribution and resale of its satellite imagery products in India.

LandVoyage.com, an online mapping and imagery company, and AirPhotoUSA, LLC, a leading provider of technology-based, nationwide seamless aerial imagery solutions, have announced a strategic partnership to offer AirPhotoUSA data on the LandVoyage.com website.

Space Imaging has signed an exclusive agreement with the International Air Transport Association (IATA), of Montreal, Canada, to sell a new family of aviation geospatial products derived from Space Imaging’s IKONOS satellite, and the Indian Remote Sensing (IRS) and Landsat satellites. Space Imaging also recently announced that it has sold over $1.6 million of IKONOS satellite imagery to the Alaska Department of Veterans and Military Affairs (ADMVA) for the new Alaska Aviation Safety Project (AASP). The ADMVA has contracted with E-Terra, a leading GIS applications integrator, headquartered in Anchorage, to use the IKONOS imagery to develop accurate flight simulation training modules of the 12 key mountain passes for the AASP.  

DigitalGlobe has been awarded a contract to update the orthoimagery base program of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). The award was issued by the USDA’s Farm Service Agency (FSA), Aerial Photography Field Office (APFO), for the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) 2004 Alaska Orthoimagery Project. It represents the first time that satellite imagery has been used in the USDA’s program. The company also announced a contract with the County of Maui to provide cloud-free satellite imagery for multi-departmental use. Data applications include property parcel inventory and management, transportation planning, spatial growth modeling, emergency preparedness, civil defense, and disaster management and assessment. Further, the state of Hawaii acquired a set of DOQQs with 4-band orthorectified data. This purchase enables different state users to gain access to both the color infrared imagery for environmental monitoring and vegetative management applications, and the more familiar natural-color imagery for visualization and analysis.

GE Energy has purchased an Intergraph Z/I Imaging Digital Mapping Camera (DMC) to enhance the quality and accuracy of images for geospatial applications.

Products

Keyhole Corporation announced the introduction of a major upgrade to all components of the Keyhole enterprise system, including the data processing tool suite Keyhole 2 Fusion, the Keyhole 2 Server, and the end-user 3D client software Keyhole 2 EC. The Keyhole 2 enterprise system introduces support for grid networks and enhanced scalability, speed, and ease of use. The company specializes in providing 3D digital earth via the Internet.

Blue Marble Geographics released Geographic Transformer 5.1. The Geographic Transformer allows users to easily establish an “image-to-world” relationship between image and map coordinates and reproject an image into a georeferenced image map. The new version allows up to 128 images to be mosaicked into one raster.

DeLorme announced plans to release TopoWorld, a high-performance map resource providing a three-dimensional view of 14.25 meter color satellite imagery, elevation, and vector map data throughout the world. The product will be provided on a portable external hard drive. The TopoWorld dataset includes approximately 200,000,000 square kilometers of satellite imagery, SRTM elevation data between 60 degrees latitude south and 60 degrees latitude north, major roads, place names, political boundaries, urban areas, land cover types, and more.

Space Imaging announced that imagery from India’s RESOURCESAT-1 satellite is now available to the commercial marketplace. Space Imaging has the exclusive worldwide rights to sell data from RESOURCESAT-1 outside of India. Imagery from RESOURCESAT-1 is available in 5-meter, 23-meter and 56-meter resolutions and is ideal for mapping, urban development, environmental monitoring, agricultural monitoring, land use planning, coastal monitoring, disaster assessment, and risk management. Imagery from the satellite is comparable to imagery from the Landsat satellites.

LizardTech announced that its MrSID format (MG3) is now being supported in GE Energy’s Smallworld product suite.

ESRI’s ArcWeb Services now include GlobeXplorer’s Premium Aerial & Satellite Image Service. This immense online dataset is a collection of hundreds of terabytes of data from the world’s top providers of earth imagery, featuring data from AirPhotoUSA, DigitalGlobe, EarthSat, i-cubed, USGS, Cities Revealed, and many others partners from around the world.

Matrox Graphics, Inc. announced the Matrox Millennium P650 Low-profile PCI graphics card. The card provides advanced dual-RGB and dual-DVI capabilities from laptop docking stations. It’s the smallest DualHead graphics card available.

People

PCI Geomatics announced that Dr. Robert Moses, president and CEO of PCI Geomatics, has been appointed Vice Chair of the Ontario Centres for Excellence (OCE). The company also appointed several new staff members: Jeff Hoedeman joins PCI Geomatics in the position of Director of Marketing; Layton Peck serves as Senior Director of Business Development; and Brad Schmidt takes the role of International Sales Manager.  

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