Friday, September 5. 2008

ESRI Swaps Land to Allow Growth

ESRI had acquired land including a warehouse used by a charity, Joseph's Storehouse. The City of Redlands Redevelopment Agency, along with a task force and the two parties, helped arrange for a land swap.

Property One, LLC, an affiliate of ESRI, closed escrow on the Stuart Avenue property and, through the agreement, would exchange the property for the current Joseph's Storehouse building at 457 New York St.

The charity, which feeds and clothes those in need, will now have more room and the city is pleased to keep the community resource.

- Redlands Daily Facts

E9 million in funding for "Intelligent City" Research

Professor Stewart Fotheringham from NUI Maynooth (Ireland) leads the project called StratAG – Strategic Research in Advanced Geotechnologies. It focuses on research related to geospatial monitoring and early warning systems. The €9m is from Science Foundation Ireland (SFI). Forty researchers are onboard in Ireland, along with industry partners including "ESRI, eSpatial, PMS and Navtech [sic]."

Fotheringham offers this vision of the future city:

Picture a person walking down the street with a hand-held device, which they point at each building. As they pass the cinema, the device will tell them what’s on; as they pass a restaurant, the device gives them the menu; as they pass an office block, the device tells them what firms are located in the block, their line of business and contact numbers.

- Silicon Republic

Glonass Update

The head of the Russian Space Agency (Roscosmos) announced that the number of satellites in the Glonass constellation will jump from the current 16 to 30 by 2011. That includes six to be launched by the end of this year. Glonass will have strong coverage at the poles, something key for mining natural resources in those areas.

- Novosti

GPS Business News: Magellan Exec Exodus, Marketshare Drop

GPS Business News put the pieces together including:

- CEO Nelson Chan left.
- Christian Bubenheim, who was vice president Product Marketing, left.
- Clay Babcock, who was Senior Director, Product Planning left.
- The Magellan booth at the IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin was cancelled.

Marketshare is down and there's no growth in Europe. The last big Magellan professional campaign I recall was for its MobileMapper mobile data collector.

I'll add another measure of health: the last corporate press release was from April of this year.

Another Geo Company Goes Cloud

The press release from 3Tera is about its global cloud solution. The geo "example" is EveryTrail, a post your trail route and pics app. One of my students reviewed it earlier this semester; that's the only reason I'd heard of it.

"The nature of our application, a Web 2.0 platform where users from all over the world are uploading GPS data and photos to share with others, will greatly benefit from a global cloud solution," said Joost Schreve, founder and CEO, EveryTrail, Inc. "With users and trips from over 160 countries, we find it extremely beneficial to be able to run in multiple locations without having to deal with infrastructure and hardware configurations. AppLogic technology and 3Tera's business model of working with leading datacenter operators has given us the ability to access world-class computing infrastructure. It really removed barriers for our company."

Follow TV Character's Thoughts/Locations via Whrrl

The new marketing deal for Whrrl involves updates via Whrrl for characters on Entourage, an HBO TV show. I guess if the locations in the show were somehow important to me this might be interesting, but this doesn't sound like something that'd prompt me to sign up. That said, this is clever.

The current challenge to such network, offers Venture Beat, is that these location-based networks don't have enough participants to make them interesting. "Fake ones" are a way to up the ante.