Thursday, October 30. 2008

GeoGoodies from Microsoft's Professional Developer's Conference (PDC)

Rick Rashid of Microsoft Research hosted the final keynote of the event on Wednesday. Among the geographically related goodies he showed:

Continue reading "GeoGoodies from Microsoft's Professional Developer's Conference (PDC)"

I hope we never have to use it...

I read that sentiment all the time when a municipality sets up any kind of emergency "war room." Take the one for Niagra Falls, Ontario.

Formerly located at city hall, the Niagara Falls EOC is now housed in the former bunk room at the Morrison Street fire station.

In a matter of minutes, the empty room can be transformed into a state-of- the-art command centre complete with laptops, telephones, several large video display screens and an interactive touch board.

In the event of a major disaster, the secured site will be the headquarters for police, fire, paramedics and public works.

"We hope to not ever have to use it, however, the likelihood we will have to use the centre in the future is there," said fire Chief Lee Smith.

If a large-scale emergency occurs, the centre will support response activities in the field and provide direction to the various agencies such as the Red Cross and the public health department.

The centre is already stocked with modern technology devices from Design Electronics. The huge screens can broadcast live feeds and are equipped for video conferencing.

The sentiment is fine, but my sense is that those who would be using such technologies in an emergency should be using them all the time! During an emergency is no time to learn how new hardware and software work.

An analogy: in prepping for long distance running newbies are told not to try anything "race day" they've not tried in training. That includes everything from not wearing new clothing to not drinking a different kind of sports drink. Why does it seem like "special" tools and software are used in emergencies that are not in use all the time?

- Niagra Falls Review

Instant Gratification...

Cities and counties put up interactive mapping websites all the time and most ask for feedback. Earlier this week I checked out the new mapping apps for Rockland County, NY after seeing this article. I was jazzed when one app "just worked" on Safari on my Mac as there were no warning about what browsers or operating systems were supported in the material I read. Unfortunately, the other app (built on the same platform by the same contractor, James Sewall) didn't work. So, I shot off an e-mail.

I received an e-mail back (first noting how the recipient remembered me from my ArcCAD data days) and then saying they'd look into it. Today I received an e-mail saying it was fixed. And it was.

Good job Rockland County on both the app and your communications!

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