Hello, and welcome to GeoSpatial Stream. I’m your host, Todd Danielson, and today’s Lead Sponsor is V1 Media.
Today’s Top Story is the recent passing of Roger Lee Easton, Senior, the father of modern navigation. While working on a satellite program in the 1950s, Easton realized that the timing of tracking stations wasn’t synchronized, which lead to several problems. It was his idea to put highly accurate clocks in multiple different satellites, which then would be able to accurately determine the precise location of someone on Earth. He called the system Timation, for Time-Navigation, and the Department of Defense adopted many of its features and renamed it in the early 1970s: something called the Global Positioning System.
Easton was 93 when he died, and his achievements have quite literally changed the world and how we all live in it.
That was today’s Top Story. I’ll be back with more news after this brief message.
The U.S. Geological Survey is introducing a new look for its US Topo maps, featuring a crisper, cleaner design to enhance readability, especially with symbology. The maps also have transparency for some features and layers to increase visibility of multiple competing layers. These images compare a map from 1894 to the new 2014 design. I’m guessing there was more than one update in the last 120 years, but USGS was going for maximum effect on these samples.
In Industry Headlines, Europa Technologies viaEuropamap service was accepted into G-Cloud 5, the latest version of the UK government’s cloud-computing framework.
Esri Press published a new book, “Mapping Time: Illustrated by Minard’s Map of Napoleon’s Russian Campaign of 1812.” If you haven’t seen the original map from 1869, please check it out. Like, right now. Press pause, and come back later. The French army starts as the large brown band on the left, then head to Moscow, and return as the black band. 422,000 soldiers were reduced to 10,000. It’s staggering, and the map has been called “the best statistical graphic ever drawn.”
BlackBridge secured $22 million dollars Canadian from the Bank of Montreal and the Business Development Bank of Canada for its next generation of satellites, RapidEye+.
And continuing the tradition of satellite companies taking pictures of stadiums before something important happens there, Airbus Defense and Space captured images, taken by the twin Pleiades satellites, of the 12 Brazilian stadiums being used to host the 2014 World Cup. That’s “football” for most of the world, and “soccer” for those of us in the United States. Just clarifying.
And here’s today’s Final Thought: Vegas, baby! I’m back in Las Vegas this week for the HxGN Live conference, and if you’ve watched all of my broadcasts, you know the rule about discussing Vegas and wearing strange sunglasses. In case you’re unaware, Hexagon, founded in 1992, is a large parent company for several brands that have been in the geospatial technology space for a long time, including Leica, Intergraph and many smaller companies in worldwide locations. I’ll be at the event interviewing several top executives as well as meeting with many vendors and attendees. Look for these recaps and more in future episodes, and wish me luck …
That’s it for this broadcast, I’m Todd Danielson, and this … was your GeoSpatial Stream.