Friday, March 14. 2008

Google Uses Google Earth to Look for Fed $

Marketwatch reviews the history of Google, mostly Google Earth, and its relationship with the U.S. government. Among the tidbits:

According to the Office of Management and Budget's USAspending.gov database, Google's government contracting actually fell from 2006 to 2007. While the company had $394,760 in contracts in 2006, according to the database, in 2007 it had only $129,820 in contracts. Google customers listed in the database range from the Peace Corps to the Homeland Security Department.

A Google spokesperson disputes those numbers.

The NGA spokesman indicated one of the benefits of access to commercial technology and imagery such as Google's is the complementary role it can play: "It's very effective to not have to use our classified satellites that might otherwise be busy." He declined to speculate on Google's future prospects as a contractor.

In the context of a conversation about the company, however, the spokesman acknowledged the agency is going to roll out an initiative later this year "that will in the near term give us the ability to search across all of our databases and storage areas. ... That's a direction we're headed."

Lt. General Wants Blurred/Dated Imagery Where US Troops Reside

Lt. Gen. Michael Hamel, who manages space and missile systems development for the Air Force, told that to military journalists earlier this week.

"...he is pressuring domestic licensing authorities to force satellite imagery providers to reduce the resolution of their images in areas where American troops are engaged, or to delay their image feed so that an adversary can't get up-to-the-minute information on U.S. and allied military moves." Do we have commercial satellite imagery operators that provide up-to-the-minute imagery? Can he force international players to do follow these rules?

The article goes on: "Most free online imaging tools block the resolution of their satellite photos in sensitive regions..." and then notes the recent StreetView incident where Google's vans were allowed to photograph a base. It's Google's policy not to ask to enter, but in this case, as I understand it, the Google folks did ask and were allowed in. Those details were not mentioned.

- Military.com
- discussion about this article

Popular Science offers Animations of How GeoEye-1 Works

There's a detailed illustration and step by step details of what will happen up to when imagery is different. On the next page those steps are animated in a Flash demo. The article mentions a spring launch, but we expect an August or later launch.

Patent Watcher: Google's Future May be in Transportation Routing

Stephen Arnold offered up that analysis at the AIIM (The Enterprise Content Management Association) conference last week in Boston. His basis:

a transportation routing patent already in use in Google's employee bus system in the Bay Area and likely in a Google facility in Korea.

- InformationWeek

Survey Puts Garmin Out Ahead in US GPS Marketshare

The survey by ChangeWave lays out the market this way:

Garmin - 56 percent market share in the U.S. consumer market, 58 percent market share in the corporate market

Magellan - 12 percent share of the consumer market

TomTom - 9 percent share of the U.S. market (consumer I believe)

The economic downturn may hurt them all!

- press release
- Kansas City Star

Microsoft Research Confirms Milgram Study with IM

Eric Horvitz of Microsoft Research along with an intern, Jure Leskovec, used 30 billion Microsoft Messenger conversations among 240 million people during June 2006 to find "degrees of separation" of individuals. (The data did not include personal details.)

Bottom line: "The researchers found that the average shortest number of jumps to get from one Microsoft user to another was 6.6." Stanley Migram's experiments used the mail, but arrived at what is now referred to as "six degrees of separation."


- Asian News International