Joe Francica noted Blue Dasher the other day when we chatted. The company has come out of the shadows in conjunction with CTIA and is the heart of an article in the Miami Herald. Welcome to another player in the "photograph my street and put it on a website/mobile/nav device arena! Already in: Immersive Media, Everyscape and others. Blue Dasher will offer up in photo ads for businesses, but outside that, I'm not sure of it competitive differentiator.

I just caught wind of this acquisition which occurred in January but was announced March 14. EarthMap owns the IP from Resource21 and serves the ag market with remote sensing technology. Several ex-DigitalGlobe employees launched EarthMap as a spinoff in 2004. Monsanto's been a customer of the 7 person shop and now owns the people and tech. Recall that another ag-focussed geo-biz, GeoVantage, went to John Deere in recent years.

- Boulder County Business

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

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.

The U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) commission the report titled, "Independent Study of the Roles of Commercial Remote Sensing in the future National System for Geospatial-Intelligence" early last year. It explores four possible business cases for how the government and private companies might work together to provide needed imagery for those agencies and their government clients. The suggested path is not the status quo and may have implications for the two current U.S. commercial satellite providers DigtialGlobe and GeoEye. Our editors try to tease out what the report means and its implications.

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The Alachua County Property Appraiser Ed Crapo signed a nearly $200,000 deal in May to acquire Multivision's oblique imagery for the county. Just two weeks earlier, the county's Growth Management Department bought similar technology, at about half the cost, from Pictometry. There are allegations of conflicts of interest, and a lawsuit between the vendors. Most people seem to agree that the duplicate systems are not needed.

- The Gainesville Sun