EOM April 2005 > BUSINESS NOTES

DigitalGlobe

The Arkansas Geographic Information Office (AGIO) recently used DigitalGlobe QuickBird satellite imagery to prepare for the Clinton Presidential Library opening. The AGIO coordinated with numerous city, county, state and federal agencies to plan for the event. QuickBird imagery was also used by the Native Communities Development Corp. to map Tamarisk, an invasive plant species that has infested the banks of the Arkansas River. The effective management of Tamarisk has critical implications for human water supplies, wildfire prevention and environmental preservation.

Pictometry

announced that the Monroe County, New York, Sheriff's Office and the Gwinnett County, Georgia Fire Department have become the first public safety agencies in the country to deploy PictometrySs new touch screen interface with their county-wide image databases on mobile laptop PCs. Also Smart Data Strategies, Inc. (SDS) and Pictometry International Corp. signed a marketing partnership that offers their joint customers and new customers the ability to utilize each other's technology.

NASA and the U.S. Department of the Interior

presented The William T. Pecora Award for excellence in remote sensing to William Krabill of NASA's Wallops Flight Facility, Va. Krabill, a 35-year NASA veteran, is an investigator for airborne LiDAR topographic mapping and GPS applications. His vision of combining airborne laser ranging measurements and GPS has revolutionized glaciology, coastal zone mapping, and measurement of land surface change.

The United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation

(USGIF) welcomed In-Q-Tel, Inc., Safe Software, Inc. and Visual Learning Systems, Inc. as sustaining members. The addition of these three organizations brings the total number of USGIF sustaining members to 51.

VARGIS, LLC

has been awarded the GSA/FSS schedule contract #70 effective November 9, 2004. This 20-year contract, which includes the first base period plus three five-year option periods following, is for general purpose commercial information technology services. The GSA schedule will allow government agencies easier access to the services offered by VARGIS.

Definiens Imaging

announced the availability a new Academic Software Subscription Program for eCognition Professional. Through the program, academic customers may purchase subscriptions for a minimum of three years to run multiple licenses of eCognition Professional.

Pictometry

delivered software and imagery to Etowah County, AL for use in public safety, emergency management, and planning applications.

Woolpert

acquired an ADS40 Airborne Digital Sensor from Leica Geosystems GIS & Mapping.

LiDAR Services International

(LSI) has recently mobilized LiDAR systems for two contracts. LSI, in association with its Malaysian engineering partner Ground Data Solutions Sdn. Bhd., is currently providing LiDAR data collection and data processing services to support a major project in Borneo, Indonesia. LSI also began a LiDAR survey in Ecuador for a large engineering company working on a new highway project connecting the coastal city of Guayaquil to the capital city of Quito.

LizardTech, Inc.

released GeoExpress 5.0 with MrSID, which supports MrSID and JPEG 2000 image compression and offers image manipulation tools designed for geospatial professionals who demand the most from their aerial and satellite imagery.

The United States Geological Survey

(USGS), in cooperation with NASA, has developed a new Level 1G systematic (geometrically and radiometrically corrected) stitched data product from the Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) Advanced Land Imager (ALI). The new ALI product represents an effort to increase the quality and usability of the current ALI data products available from EO-1. The previously available ALI image product was limited to radiometrically corrected (Level 1R) data with no geometric correction or georeferencing applied.

Intermap Technologies

announced a contour dataset derived from and designed to complement its family of NEXTMap Britain digital elevation models. The contour dataset will be of particular interest to engineers and planners who need to be able to present projects in hard copy format and visualize the shape of the terrain over large areas without obscuring underlying mapping.

PCI Geomatics

announced the integration of GeoTango's SmartDigitizer technology for semi-automated feature extraction. This technology extracts feature lines and polygons from a wide variety of remotely sensed images. Users can digitize vectors from a wide variety of image sources, including high- and low-resolution satellite imagery, aerial photos, optical images, hyperspectral images, and even RADAR data. Smart Digitizer will be available in the 2005 release of Geomatica and will be a key component of several GeoCapacity production systems.

Matrox Graphics Inc. and Xi Graphics, Inc.

announced the release of Matrox ParheliaT, Millennium P-Series, and QID display drivers for the LinuxR (Red Hat, SuSE, and Mandrake) operating system. These display drivers support advanced Matrox features including DualHeadR, TripleHeadT, quad-display, TV output, Clone, Multi-Display Zoom, OpenGLR acceleration, and multi-card configurations.

ESRI

added data to its ArcWeb Services, including premium imagery from GlobeXplorer, road network data from NAVTEQ, detailed data for Australia from MapData Sciences, and Italian data from ESRI Italia.

ER Mapper

released a JPEG 2000 compatible version of its free ECW image viewing software, ER Viewer. ER Viewer is used for viewing large aerial and satellite images. ER Mapper is also distributing its JPEG 2000 implementation via the ECW JPEG 2000 Software Development Kit (SDK). This SDK is available for free for the majority of application developers. And, the companyÕs free image compression application has been updated to output to the new JPEG 2000 compression format, as well as to the industry standard ECW format. The free ECW JPEG 2000 Compressor allows users to compress images of up to 500 MB in size.

AlphaPixel, LLC

has released version 1.16 of its debut product, PixelSense. PixelSense is a quick and easy tool for processing remote-sensed imagery such as Landsat TM and ETM bands into realistic natural-color georeferenced GeoTIFF images, ready-to-use in any mainstream GIS or visualization software.

Jim Farley

as joined Leica Geosystems GIS & Mapping as Vice President, Business Development. Farley has spent more than twenty years in the information technology industry in both mainstream IT and GIS, working in the public and private sectors and in academia. For the past four years, Farley was Senior Principal Product Manager, Spatial and Location Products in Server Technologies at Oracle. Farley led Oracle Spatial Product initiatives in raster technology, hosted location based services, and in the integration of location technologies across Oracle eBusiness Applications. He's also on the editorial advisory board of EOM.

Bill Gail

Vexcel Corporation announced that Bill Gail, former Director of Earth Science Advanced Programs at Ball Aerospace, has joined Vexcel as Vice President of Mapping and Photogrammetric Solutions.

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