ZDNet dug into the president’s budget looking for where the emphasis will be for technology expenditures. Some of the highlights that they found that were somewhat related to geospatial technology spending were as follows:
The National Science Foundation is getting $766 million for a “cross-agency sustainability research effort focused on renewable energy technologies and complex environmental- and climate-system processes.
Support for the modernization of the U.S. electric grid.
NASA’s budget will increase for funding to science, exploration and aeronautics and space research technology.
The USGS budget of $1.1 Billion has several areas where geospatial technology might be leveraged:
Climate Change Adaptation - $11.0 million - Management and policy decisions made in response to climate change impact
WaterSMART - $9.0 Million - The information will provide tools to address a new set of water resource challenges, including aging infrastructure, rapid population growth, depletion of groundwater resources, water quality impairments associated with land uses, and climate variability.
Increasing Resilience to Natural Hazards - $4.0 million - The USGS Multi-Hazards Demonstration Project in Southern California will continue to support emergency planning by developing earthquake early warning capabilities and conducting impact analysis of environmental, human-health and ecosystem responses to earthquakes and other hazards. This project will be expanded into the coastal communities of Alaska, and the USGS will invest in earthquake, tsunami and volcano science to support community planning in the Pacific Northwest.
Landsat Data Continuity Mission - $13.4 Million - The USGS will accommodate ground-system requirement changes for the Landsat Data Continuity Mission associated with moving the Operational Land Imager to a free-flying satellite and the addition of a Thermal Infrared Sensor on board the spacecraft.
Coastal and Marine Spatial Planning - $4.0 million - USGS mapping, monitoring and research provide information to assess the status and vulnerability of ocean, coastal and Great Lakes resources.
Ambient Industries, the company behind Flook, its location-based discovery tool (described as StumbleUpon for location). The extension of the funding from Amadeus Capital Partners and Eden Ventures totals close to $1 million per TechCrunch. That’s on top of an undisclosed sum from last year. There are updates to the service, too.
Nokia has released its first LBS game: Ovi Maps Racing. It allows players to create a racing track out of their own physical location, based on real maps.
A company called Touchality is using the public APIs to build a Window Mobile version of Foursquare. That leaves only Symbian out of the game, though a version for that platform is in the works.
The invention pertains to location approximation of devices, e.g., wireless access points and client devices in a wireless network. Location estimates may be obtained by observation/analysis of packets transmitted or received by the access point. For instance, data rate information associated with a packet is used to approximate the distance between a client device and the access point. This may be coupled with known positioning information to arrive at an approximate location for the access point. Confidence information and metrics about whether a device is an access point and the location of that device may also be determined. Accuracy of the location determination may be affected by factors including propagation and environmental factors, transmit power, antenna gain and diversity, etc. A location information database of access points may employ measurements from various devices over time. Such information may identify the location of client devices and provide location-based services to them.
The idea, suggests Bnet, is getting location information by going “around” the carrier - which you can already do using Skyhook tools and Skyhook’s database.
Corral, a huge data storage system at the Texas Advanced Computing Center in North Austin was put to work to manage imagery data for a team at UT doing assessment for the Haiti earthquake.
It was a team effort: Gordon Wells, who ran the impromptu project tapped Paul Mann at UT’s Institute of Geophysics and his colleague, Eric Calais of Purdue University, who had done a field study in 2008. That data was used to correct satellite imagery and produce accurate damage-assessment maps which appeared on federal websites.
Wells wrote an article for EOM when I was editor; it’s really nice to see these names popping up and still doing important work.
Last summer I noted an iPhone app that claimed to be the first “GIS for the iPhone platform.” (APB post) I had the founder of the company behind it, Integrity Logic explain how the app that showed California geology was a GIS. Since then, app for other states have appeared.
Yesterday, Geometry, a company from Hobart in Australia announced iGIS, “the first GIS application to deliver true GIS functionality to the iPhone and iPod Touch.” (press release) It’s a shapefile viewer that overlays the data on Google Maps.
For $19.99 you get:
· Great speed, using Geometry’s multi-threaded map renderer;
· Ability to add comments at any nominated point;
· Import and export using ESRI Shapefiles;
· Display of the current location using the iPhone GPS;
· Layer interrogation facility via a simple selection;
· Selected data display; and
· Coordinates of current position in any chosen projection.
Also noteworthy, it supports 3000 projections, so ideally you need not reproject your data. And, notes the website: “
**** A Wi-Fi network is required to import or export data ****”
Apparently the company submitted the app to the AppStore back in November per a note on the website, expecting it to be available for sale in December. I guess it took longer than that.
The demo video is below - be on your toes it goes rather fast!
by Adena Schutzberg on 02/02 at 06:17 AM |
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