Monday, November 9. 2009

Northrop Grumman to Sell TASC to KKR

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Northrop Grumman is selling its TASC unit to General Atlantic and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., of leveraged buyout fame. Northrop has a huge geospatial group as did TASC, which excelled in remote sensing and image processing, at the time of the original acquisition. According to the Journal, separating the two units would avoid potential conflicts of interest for military contracts whereby Northrop had been both an advisor and a contractor for services.

Posted by Joe Francica in Intelligence at 00:52 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

Thursday, May 7. 2009

Situational Awareness on a Surface

DRS Technologies offers a Global Situational Awareness solution that includes all the buzzwords: multiple data overlays including "UAV videos, schematics, photos, SAR, IR" and a touch screen built into the table display. But, it has some twists I've not seen in similar devices.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Intelligence at 07:24 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

Tuesday, October 28. 2008

Podcast: Clapper Elaborates on Collapse of BASIC

During the Q&A session at the GEOINT Symposium, Under Secretary of Defense, Lt. General (ret.) Jim Clapper, elaborated on the recently canceled BASIC (Broad Area Space-Based Imagery Collection) program, an effort by the National Reconnaisance Office (NRO) to obtain two earth observing remote sensing satellites. "Depending on your point of view, what happened to BASIC is either a strength or weakness of our form of government. There are many constituencies from which you must derive consensus. When we finally got consensus, we finally got signed for the purchase of two 1.1 meter satellites. But Congress decided that the sense of urgency no longer exists. It’s now over to the DNI (Director of National Intelligence) to decide the way ahead. The DNI has referred back to the NGA andi it will be up to Admiral Murrett, Director of the NGA to study. Clapper said in closing that "but this has been studied to death."

Listen to more of his remarks during his press briefing. (to download, right click on the link at left and choose "save target as")

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Posted by Joe Francica in Intelligence, Podcasts, Events Podcast, GEOINT 08 at 10:37 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

USGIF Launches a Blog

I have mixed feelings about this announcement. I do agree that having a "place" for GEOINT discussions is a good thing and to date to my knowledge, there is no such place. For a time there was a GEOINT focussed publication (not from USGIF, but from the folks behind Geospatial Solutions; I think it still exists in e-mail form) but on the whole that side of the industry tends to be rather close-lipped. Perhaps that's why the publication didn't last too long?

Will a blog do better? Will the blog called "got geoint?" meet the high minded goals noted in the press release?

Hosted and managed by USGIF, got geoint? provides unfiltered access to the views and opinions of intelligence and defense community leaders from government, industry, and academia. In addition, commentary on the latest developments in defense and intelligence will be mixed in with fun, hip and breaking news the about the broad range of topics related to geospatial intelligence.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Intelligence, GEOINT 08 at 08:49 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

Tuesday, April 8. 2008

Podcast: BI and Web 2.0 and the Latest in Location Privacy Lawsuits

This week our editors revisit two themes that continue to pop up as geospatial technology, ideas, visualization and data move into the mainstream IT world and popular culture. First we look at two announcements regarding the integration of Business Intelligence or BI, with online mapping. Then, we'll pick apart the latest data capture privacy lawsuit - where a couple is suing Google over StreetView images of their house.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Google, Remote Sensing, Intelligence, Directions on the News Podcast at 01:00 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

Monday, August 27. 2007

Podcast: Interview with Vice Admiral Robert Murrett, Director, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency

Last week, Editor-in-chief, Joe Francica had the opportunity to interview Vice Admiral Robert B. Murrett, the director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). Adm. Murrett was appointed director of the NGA on July 7, 2006 and leads one of the largest military organizations dedicated to geospatial information gathering and intelligence analysis. Murrett discusses the organization's current mission and the use of geospatial standards within his organization.

His staff of highly trained geospatial technologists are deployed in domestic operations to support natural disasters as well as being deployed in combat zones to support the warfighter. Prior to his appointment, Murrett served as the Director of Naval Intelligence Murrett received his bachelor's degree in history from the University of Buffalo and master’s degrees in government and strategic intelligence from Georgetown University and the Defense Intelligence College, respectively.
The interview was recorded on August 21, 2007 and is 28 minutes in length (10Mb).

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Listen Now (to download, right click on the link at left and choose "save target as") Missed any podcasts? Want to subscribe via iTunes, Yahoo, etc? Here's the index with all the info.

Posted by Joe Francica in Remote Sensing, Intelligence, Directions Magazine, Special Topics Podcast at 10:37 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |