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GeoEye, the company resulting from the acquisition of Space Imaging by Orbimage, began trading on the NASDAQ stock exchange today under the symbol GEOY. The company expects to launch GeoEye-1 in early 2007. It will capture data at 0.41-meters for panchromatic images, and 1.64-meters for multispectral images.
[Update] Stefan at Ogle Earth found more factual errors in the article.
Per ZDnet, Michael Jones announced at AGI in London the company has moved a feature previously only avaiable in GE Pro (which costs money) to GE (free). The feature provides a slider so that users can see data (think of a car in motion) as it moves through time.
The feature is all about context and Jones had to speak to Google not up-to-date imagery:
Google Earth’s tendency to use photographs that are often out of date would not diminish the usefulness of the time-tracking functionality, as the basic application was primarily a tool to provide context, Jones explained.
One oops from the article made me laugh since geostionary satellites stay in the same place over the earth:
Jones also described how the new version would enable users to track all of the geostationary satellites orbiting the earth.
There is new data in GE, too, including “15cm resolution for the first time to areas such as the Netherlands and Japan.”
Microsoft was also at AGI and Vincet Tao showed off Bird’s Eye View (Pictometry data) and StreetSide, which have been around for a while. The new news from Microsoft:
MSN Virtual Earth was also being integrated into Outlook and Windows Live Messenger, said Tao, and users would soon be able to overlay floorplans into the application.
Korea’s New Satellite Better Than Google Earth
First of course that makes no sense since Google Earth is not a satellite. Second, I think the goal is to compare sensors, not satellites. Third,I could find nothing in the text that illustrates that the new satellite’s sensor is in fact higher resolution that QuickBird or the aerial imagery on Google Earth. The Arirang-2 satellite’s sensor is a 1 meter one. QuickBird is .6 m and aerial imagery is .3 m.
This morning National Public Radio looked at the National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) program which uses aerial imagery to be sure farmers are doing (or not doing) what they are supposed to be on their farm lands to received government subsidies. GE Geosaptial does the flying in the story and Surdex the image compilation. (There are many of each type of company in the program.) The story refers to it as spying and notes at the end that much of the data is kept in government hands. That struck me as odd, as did the fact that the audio program, so far as I recall (and see in the transcript) is not even mentioned.
Al Tompkins, writing at Al’s Morning Meeting, a resource for journalists at Poynter.org offers:
Google Earth is everywhere. And the ill-kept secret of the satellite/high altitude photography business is that its biggest clientele is the real estate industry, which uses the photos to help select the next location for a Wal-Mart, a Wendy’s or a subdivision.
I thought the biggest client was the the military/government. And, I thought all those “find the best place for the next Walgreens” analysis were done using mostly vector data, and demographic and traffic data. But, maybe I’m behind the times. Is imagery used this way?
