In big hardware news...The Air Force awarded Lockheed Martin a $1.5 billion contract to build the military's next generation of navigation satellites. The deal is for two satellites and perhaps 10 more, though the ultimate plan is for 32, per the Pentagon. So, that's a fine income stream for Lockheed Martin.

Boeing is not doing so well on the Air Force front. Boeing ran into delays and cost overruns in building 12 earlier GPS satellites and was not expected to take this contract. Further, Boeing lost the $40 billion deal to build refueling tankers to Northrop Grummand and EADS.

- Washington Post

The map began with eight photographers who canvassed every inch of Disney World for 10 days. Then their images were rendered in 3-D.

Click on Space Mountain, for instance, and you can view a video of the ride and get information such as height requirements. Put your mouse on the Grand Floridian and a video of the resort pops up. You also can check availability and rates and make a reservation.

It will cover Walt Disney Parks and Resorts will make it easy to take a virtual trip to Walt Disney World's Epcot Center, Animal Kingdom, Disney's Hollywood Studios and 22 Disney hotels and resorts, that's some 1500 rides, restaurants and attractions. It's all outside scenes for now, but indoor and other Disney properties are on the list for the future.

- USA Today

We posted this press release yesterday. The Inquirer isn't too keen on Jane's, the media star for defense and industry news, interactive map.

Using software called ESRI’s ArcIMS Geographical Information System (GIS), which apparently is the thing to use if you want dynamic maps on the Internet, Jane’s says it has built “an integrated intelligence picture by exporting events and geospatially fusing them to third party content".

The resource, however, isn’t a free service and to use it, one has to subscribe.

So if the company you work for is planning to ship you off to Colombia, or Nigeria in the near future and is unwilling to pay for a subscription, you might want to either cough up the cash yourself, or find yourself a free Global Incident map somewhere else.

Jane's is well-respected, but can it parlay that into a specific pay service for this map? It'll be interesting to see the uptake. In the meantime, here's a free global incident map built on Google Maps. The Guardian calls that mashup more of a demo.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger yesterday called on his CIO, Teri Takai, appointed last December, to create a task force to help agencies and departments use of geographic information systems to improve public safety. What is the technology like?" kind of like Google Earth, but better."

I thought California was going to get a GIO. What's the status on that? From the California GIO webpage: "Please note that California does not currently have a formerly established Geospatial Information Office (GIO). This page was put up at the request of the acting State CIO, Clark Kelso, in anticipation of the day when this might become a reality." Sounds like this is a good time!

- Government Technology
- San Jose Mercury News
- press release

"Google Maps is evolving from a driving directions and business search tool, to a comprehensive representation of all the world's information, on a map."

- An unnamed Google employee quoted on the Google Operating System blog in response to the addition of more options on Google Maps (houses for sale, Wikipedia entries, geotagged photos...). If Google makes more and more content available on Google Maps will that push mashupers to more analytic offerings?

"The world needs utility companies that create and manage geospatial data," he said. "And these are companies that have fought their way to the top and they're very good: they serve their data and sell their data to our users in the private domain."

That's part of an somewhat confusing article from C|net. The approval of the deal part is ok, but when the author mentions Google Maps being a company and the new deal between ESRI and Google, things get a bit mixed up.

One company that has teamed up with ESRI is Google Maps, which now use digital maps from both Navteq and Tele Atlas. John Hanke, head of Google Maps and Google Earth, said that there is a vast amount of geodata locked up in different government agencies that should be made publicly available.