Wednesday, March 4. 2009

Video: Landsat 5 Turns 25 Years Old

Watch this NASA produced Video commemorating the 25th anniversary of the launch of Landsat 5 and the revolutionary advances of Thematic Mapper.

Netezza by the numbers for 2008...a good year...and 2009 may be better

Netezza (NZ), a new player in the geospatial market with their Netezza Spatial warehouse appliance, reported yearly results yesterday. The company reported revenue of $188 Million for a 48% year over year gain. Their fourth quarter revenue was $54.8 Million for a 28% year over year increase.

Netezza competes with Oracle head-to-head in the data warehouse appliance space and this sector appears headed for a good 2009. Jim Baum, CEO, stated, "First, regarding our market, it continues to be robust. While many sectors of the IT industry have experienced significant downturns, the data warehousing and analytics market continues to grow. In fact Gardner, IDC and Forester have been revising their IT spending forecast downward for 2009, yet they do state that business intelligence and data warehousing appear to be holding steady or poised for growth." Patrick Scannell, senior vice president and CFO, added, "First, the traditional solutions in the market like IBM and Oracle. We win because of performance, cost, simplicity and time to value, and in this market at this time, those propositions become that much more important in allowing our customers to deploy leading edge technology fast, simply, seamlessly while also reducing their IT spend."

The company noted to analysts that it began operation during the recession of 2001-2003 where its clients were looking for a quick ROI.  Directions recently hosted a webinar with Netezza that provides more detail on Netezza Spatial.

Shapefile 2.0 Manifesto

Alex Willmer, a database administrator in the Birmingham, England, offers a blog post on his "Misspelled nemesis club" blog exploring the need for and candidates to be the successor to the shapefile as "the" de facto standard for geospatial data. He suggests three possible options (ESRI's File Geodatabase, Autodesk's Spatial Data Format (SDF), and Alessandro Furieri's Spatialite). In the end, he begs ESRI to open up the File Geodatabase. He chides ESRI for promising a library to read and write the format when the format launched and not delivering.

via @sgillies (on Twitter)

Update: Court Throws out Pittsburgh Couple's StreetView Lawsuit

The Pittsburgh couple is asking for reconsideration after the Judge threw out the initial suit which alleged Google did damage to them by taking SteetView pictures of their house.

- ThePittsburghChannel.Com

Continue reading "Update: Court Throws out Pittsburgh Couple's StreetView Lawsuit"

Geico Gecko on the National Geographic Map

The National Geographic Channel has announced its new lineup (10 new series) along with some insight into its advertisers. One piqued my interest: the Geico (insurance company) gecko. He's a big hit here in the U.S. Why is this interesting to geospatial folks?

Geico is a corporate sponsor of the non-profit Association of Zoos & Aquariums, is a presenting sponsor of NatGeo's Dangerous Encounters with Brady Barr and Wild. In addition to Web content that features Barr and humans attempting to simulate the movements of a gecko, there's a Geico branded insert in the March issue of National Geographic magazine that includes a map of national zoos.

The last animal/mascot branding exercise I recall was from Trimble. At one event they tried to tie a bee's sense of direction to their GPS devices. They gave out foam bees on wires (very cool) but I'm not sure how many got the connection, outside of the fact that bees and Trimble's devices are yellow and black.

-Broadcasting and Cable

Bartz Likes Google Maps More than Yahoo Maps

The upshot is that Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz notes the company has not put a lot of effort into its mapping solution. The "already found a new job" CFO Blake Jorgensen notes that such programs are expensive and he doesn't expect any more money there in the near futrue. As Jonathan Crowe points out in his blog post, this discussion could mean more or less attention for Yahoo Maps at the company. Sorry to say I fear "less."

Or it could be Bartz is positioning herself for a position in the Google Maps team!

- MacWorld, via The Map Room