Tuesday, September 2. 2008

Washington DC circa 1814...Digitally Rendered

The Washington Post published an article about work completed at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County's (UMBC) Imaging Research Center which shows a fantastic rendering of the landscape as the city would have appeared circa 1814. Central to the work is a depiction of the unfinished Capitol building as it stand in juxtaposition to other geographic features at that time. The work by UMBC is based on topographic maps and generalized paintings from the era to create a psuedo-realistic 3D model. Watch the video created by UMBC; it's six minutes long but worth it.

"Hire a Hubby" Expands Franchises with Location Intelligence

I couldn't resist this story that was sourced from ITNews. Hire a Hubby, an Australian franchiser of "handy-man" services, looking to expand its number of franchisees has employed a location intelligent approach. By looking at the number of households, Hire a Hubby targeted areas where their service would be most in need. However, to pay for adding this type of location intelligence, it was forced to increase its franchise fees but at the same time could justify the cost with increased revenue potential. "We added $3,000 in real expenses to the [standard franchisee] start-up package but $20,000 in gross profitability,” the company told iTNews." The company now segments the price of its franchises based on revenue potential with the higher franchise costs going to the areas with higher potential. I wonder if they employ just men?

Great Public GIS Spawns Private GIS Firms?

I'm not making a direct correlation here, but note that Qatar has won many a GIS award (six at the ESRI conference this year alone). Today news of a newly funded startup: "Qatar Science & Technology Park has awarded a $400,000 to Qatar Navigator, a local start-up company, to develop an automated map of the country." It's to develop a navigation database with POIs to be licensed for use on GPSs, phones, etc. The local university students will be involved and the project is expected to take five months.

- Arabian Business

Off the Beaten Path Geo Conference Speaker Recommendation

I don't know Robert Gaskell but from what I read, he'd make a great keynote speaker at one of our conferences! He maps bodies in solar system to 40 centimeters (yes, higher res than our commercial satellites!) using tereo-photo-clinometry techniques which use light from various directions to develop 3D terrain models. From what I read there's a bit of Photosynth-y stuff going on, too: "Gaskell has created sophisticated software that combines hundreds of spacecraft images of varying resolution to produce the maps." I for one want to learn more about that!

- Astrobio.net

Follow APB, Directions on Twitter

I've set up feeds on Twitter for posts to APB (http://twitter.com/directionsapb) and new articles on Directions Magazine (http://twitter.com/directionsmag). We offer this as yet another way to keep up with our content. RSS feeds and newsletters will continue to be available for those who like those distribution mechanisms. At this time I have no plans to create a Twitter feed for press releases, but let me know if you think that'd be valuable.

Eureka! No More Mylar Maps

Headline: Small rural county comes to rescue of small rural city.

Eureka Springs Arkansas looks like they won't have to use mylar maps anymore. Carroll County in which Eureka Springs is located is willing to help replace some out-dated maps. According to the Lovely County Citizen (yes, that's the name of the newspaper), the county has a contract with a Little Rock firm to fly and map the region and is willing to offer digital data to the city. With the commentary we received on our blog post on Cass County Indiana, it's nice to hear of a situation in which sharing and support can work the other way too.