In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

Very Spatial links (picture) to a Rakon announcement of the world's smallest GPS receiver. From the announcement's introduction: "The quest for ever smaller GPS-enabled equipment, such as mobile phones, PDAs and even watches has just taken a giant step forward with the development of the world’s smallest GPS radio frequency receiver module by a New Zealand company. Auckland electronics company Rakon has just developed a module, as tiny as a baby’s fingernail, and is already fielding calls from GPS manufacturers keen to imbed the product in their own new developments. "

From the geowanking list and Spatially Adjusted, the process of starting an "open source geospatial foundation" begins with a face-to-face meeting in Chicago on February 4, 2006, hosted by Autodesk. From Paul Ramsey's announcement: "The following are some general goals for the meeting (subject to
revision/addition/subtraction) [...]: - Agreement in principle on a mission statement or short charter.

- Agreement in principle on a governance model for the foundation.
Deciding whether the foundation should "look like" Eclipse, or
Apache, or The Open Group, or some other model entirely.

- Agreement in principle on a founding Board of Directors. A founding
BoD can start to make concrete decisions on things like a name, logo
and branding, domains, and so on. [...] In general, the goal is to establish enough solid agreement on basic
issues that a founding BoD can proceed confidently in managing the
details in getting the foundation up and running."

GISCafé and GISUser have the press release announcing the completion of Space Imaging's acquisition by Orbimage, and the brand name change to GeoEye. From the PR: "GeoEye is the world’s largest commercial satellite imagery company [...] In addition to the above three satellites already in orbit [OrbView-2, OrbView-3 and Ikonos], GeoEye plans to launch a satellite in early 2007 to service a contract with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA)."

GISUser and GISCafé have the press release where Safe Software announces the availability of FME 2006. From the PR: "FME 2006 incorporates over 1000 evolutionary product enhancements requested by FME users. [...] In addition to tutorials and traditional Help files included with this product release, Safe Software also recently created a new resource for FME 2006 users in the form of an online user community, or wiki, at www.fmepedia.com."

This post on the Geowanking list ask interesting questions about the Left Geographies Conference (3- August - 01 septembre 2006), closely related to the Participatory Geographies Working Group. From the latter website: "Participatory geographers, therefore, often seek to work in bottom-up ways with the goal of actively engaging and benefiting groups outside academia so that traditional barriers between 'expert researcher' and 'researched community' are broken down. A key ethical tenet of their work might be not just to do no harm, but to do good (on participants' terms, rather than academics')." Go read the questions.

Adena at Directions Mag has a great article about the evolution of geospatial technologies and how it is seem by different generations. From the article: "He [Dr. Paul Simkins] made it abundantly clear that the most important part of the four questions of geography ("[1] What is [2] where? [3] why? [4] so what?") was that last part: "So what?" All of us, geographers and non-geographers, of all generations, need to ask that of each of these new technologies. "

The Ogle Earth blog and All Points Blog links to a SFGate article dicussing how desktop satellite tools are changing the way environmentalists work. From the article: "But for environmentalists, Google Earth has turned out to be much more than another gee-whiz software development. Instead, it's starting to look like a killer app that could change the power balance between grassroots environmentalists and their adversaries."

Directions Mag have an article about airborne video surveillance. From the article's introduction: "Real-time video images and videos have become an increasingly important source of information for remote surveillance, intelligence gathering, situational awareness, and decision-making. With airborne video surveillance, the ability to associate geospatial information with imagery intelligence allows decision makers to view the geographic context of the situation, track and visualize events as they unfold, and predict possible outcomes as the situation develops." The Surveying, Mapping and GIS blog has an entry about this booming market.

GIS Café indicates that the Governement of Canada is looking to obtain a new set of images and orthoimages for the 2005-2010 period. Amongst the requirements we find: "The coverage in this call will have a better resolution (10/20 meters) than the Landsat-7 product. This new coverage will not be subject to any restriction for its use, extraction or distribution much like the Landsat-7 project." Which appears to be consistent with data policy of the HERO and SAR-C planned canadian projects (and in opposition to Radarsat-2 in terms of data policy).

GIS Café links to the Matrox press release (with picture) of the world's first single-card solution for digital stereoscopic monitors. From the PR's introduction: "Matrox Graphics Inc. introduces Parhelia Precision SDT, the world's first single-card solution for digital stereoscopic (stereo-3D) monitors like the Planar SD1710. Such displays have 2 LCD flat panels mounted one over the other and a special polarized glass mounted between them. A realistic 3D view can be seen when looking at the glass though correspondingly polarized glasses." Jesse at Very Spatial also offers his opinion on this new hardware.