Wednesday, October 29. 2008

NGA's Murrett Emphasizes Commitment to Commercial Satellite Imagery Industry

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency's directory, Vice Admiral Robert Murrett, stongly emphasized, several times during his address at the GEOINT Symposium, that no other agency in the U.S. government supports and is committed to the health of the commercial satellite imagery (CSI) industry than his agency. "The array of sensors we have is getting more and more important all the time; Panchromatic sensors are our bread an butter but other sensors will become important like hyperspectral and LiDAR," said Murrett. "We need to tip our hat to our domestic partner," he said referring to the successful launches of GeoEye-1 by GeoEye and WorldView-1 by DigitalGlobe.

In other comments, Murrett said that the NGA's foundation level data cannot be taken for granted referring to the geodetic control, controlled imagery and elevation data that must first be prepated before any analyses can be perfomed. Having data that is readily retrieved and rapidly adaptable to circumstances on the ground to support warfighters is a key mission of the NGA.

New Microsoft Geovisualization Platform: Microsoft Single View Platform

You can read the press release, but it didn't really help me understand what Microsoft SVP is. I did find this elevator-pitch type sentence from the web area set up for the launch at GEOINT this week.

Microsoft SVP is an open, industry standards–based technology that provides a highly integrated foundation for a variety of data visualization solutions in the area of business intelligence, information sharing, work flow and business processes, project management and systems center.

(I've already contacted my PR person on this matter.)

Digging into the SVP white paper I learned:

The Microsoft SVP foundation architecture is based on the following core technologies:

 Microsoft Virtual Earth™
 Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007; Exchange Server; Office Communications Server
 Microsoft SQL Server®
 Windows Server®

Sadly, when I went to watch the platform overview, I received this message:

The site that you visited was built for an earlier, beta version of Silverlight - not the current one. Please contact the site owner to let them know that they must upgrade to the latest release of Silverlight 2. Let us know if the site is not updated shortly so we can try to assist in upgrading the site to the latest Silverlight technology.

I'm counting on my colleague Joe Francica, who is attending GEOINT, to have a look at the SVP and help explain what it does.

Garmin Beats Estimates, drops outlook but Nuvifone on track for 2009

Garmin's third quarter earnings of 87 cents a share on revenue of $870 million topped Wall Street expectations of 83 cents a share on revenue of $858 million. That's the good news, along with the location-enabled phone now on target for its delayed launch.

As for earnings, for 2008, Garmin is projecting of $3.78 a share on revenue of $3.6 billion dropping from Wall Street's expectations of $4.13 a share on revenue of $3.9 billion.

The longer the Nuvifone takes to get to market the longer Apple's iphone and the various Android and RIM solutions have to get out the kinks and corral developers.

- ZDnet
- press release on earnings

Putin to Post his Whereabouts on the Web

Only recently did his dog get a GLONAA-enabled tracking collar, but now Putin himself will be locatable. You'll be able to keep track, though apparently not via GLONASS-tracking on his website, expected to launch next year.

One of the features of Putin's website will be a timeline with a news ticker and interactive map displaying where the premier is working, the Russian regions and countries he will visit and the agenda for his trips. The website is due to be launched at the beginning of 2009.

- Novosti

Washington Post Launches "TimeSpace Election" for Final Week of Election Coverage

The TimeSpace app allows time (publishing) and subject filtering of content (video, tweets, articles, etc.) about the election from a variety of sources in and outside of the Post. The results are plopped down on a Google Map housed in a Flash/Flex app. Users are invited to share their own election coverage.

Frankly, the app sort of blew my mind - it's a bit overwhelming at first. The help, a several minute video was helpful, but I was really looking for a more traditional set of help.

I could not find a way to filter the content geographically - changing the extent of the map does not seem to limit the results in any way. Keying in locations in the text search box was not successful in my attempts. I keyed in "State College" (Palin spoke there last night) and "Virginia" (Obama was there yesterday) but found no results during yesterday and today's time range. Strange.

- Press Release

An "F" in Marketing Savvy

At GEOINT this afternoon, I approached the Zebra Imaging booth and marveled at the 3-D holographic displays. I wanted to grab a quick photo to use in this blog post but, WHOA..."Excuse me...no photos sir, came the voice." What was that? You're not selling this product? See the press badge? Do you want free publicity? Is it a secret? I know it's holographic but it's not invisible. So, I was handed some marketing literature which quickly made its way into the circular file. That was bad form...So, they still get the blog post but an "F" in marketing savvy. (no hyperlink either)