Location Intelligence 2012 - Photo Montage

Here's a photo montage of the day's events taken at Directions Magazine's Location Intelligence Conference, May 22, 2012.

Patent Watch: Tracking People Via Cell without Compromising Privacy

Jeremy Wood introduced readers to his method "for tracking cellphones to generate useful demographically-keyed data on the movement of people, without compromising anyone's privacy" back in 2009. Today his patent was granted; it's number 8185131. Will applications that use this methodology be more attractive to potential users? Will the data collected be valuable to marketers and others? 

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TomTom’s New Global Geocoder Targets Power Users

I spoke to Dan Adams, TomTom's vice president of the company's  Location and Live Service group about today's announcement for their new global geocoder. He told me that the new web service had been talked about since the company was known as Geographic Data Technology (GDT). Today, however, with improved bandwidth and  a better understanding why geocoding is so important for businesses, the service is a much more viable than it might have been in the past.

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Location Intelligence and Oracle Spatial UC - Video

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Laying the Groundwork for a Stable and Sustainable Space Environment-U.S. State Department

The following is an excerpt from a presentation by Frank A. Rose, Deputy Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Arms Control, Verification and Compliance, in an address to the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, Space Security Conference, Geneva, Switzerland:

The use of communications satellites to transmit health care data across countries and across the globe is only one of the many uses of space on which we rely. Telephone calls, news reports, television broadcasts, and financial transactions are also relayed through satellites. Financial markets, power grids, and wireless, satellite, cable, and broadcast industries all use GPS satellites for precise timing, and ships, planes, automobiles, and individual people use them for navigation. Meteorological satellites provide weather and environmental forecasts, while remote-sensing satellites provide imagery used in agriculture, resource exploration, land use planning, treaty verification, and disaster relief, amongst other things. Clearly the use of space assets and the information we derive from them permeate almost every aspect of our daily lives. The telehealth scenario I have just mentioned is only one example of how important the utilization of space is, and clearly shows that the loss of space systems, even for a short period of time, can have damaging consequences. Extrapolating from this, we must ask ourselves “What will the consequences be if the space environment were to become unusable?”

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