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 Hexagon Live 2014, the recently held annual user conference for the international parent company of several major brands in the geospatial, measurement and imaging arenas, such as Leica, NovAtel and Intergraph. Hexagon has a long list of acquired companies, about 3.7 per quarter lately, and it’s now pushing hard to put all of them under the Hexagon umbrella.
Visit the Web sites of Sensors & Systems and Informed Infrastructure for specific details, but look no further for some video highlights of the event:
That was today’s Top Story. I’ll be back with more news after this brief message.
NASA is preparing for the July 1, 2014, launch of its Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 mission, its first spacecraft dedicated to studying carbon dioxide. That seems surprising, but the first such satellite was destroyed in a rocket-launch mishap in 2009.
And here’s some amazing and scary footage from a massive mudslide in rural Mesa County, Colorado. The slide, 3 to 4 miles long and 2 miles wide, was caused by heavy rainfall in the area. I also included some “before and after” satellite photos from DigitalGlobe. Three local ranchers are missing and presumed buried in the slide.
In Industry Headlines, Skybox Imaging, which built and launched the world’s smallest high-resolution imaging satellite, agreed to be acquired by Google.
Sokkia introduced the GHX2 network rover to its GNSS surveying solutions in the North American market. It’s designed to pair with the Sokkia SA300 external antenna.
Esri added its contribution to World Cup hysteria with a collection of interactive maps, such as this one examining the Brazilian World Cup Stadiums and this Dashboard, which should provide a fun and geographic way to keep tabs on the action.
And here’s a quick clip about Google’s Project Tango and its work with NASA.
And now for today’s Final Thought: Sure, I’m a sucker for open-bar cocktail parties and fancy finger food by the pool, especially in Las Vegas, but I liked what Hexagon was saying at their recent conference. It’s a “really big” international company, and the many pieces are sometimes difficult to follow on the organizational chart. But it seems like they’re working on this, splitting the organization into a few major departments, with smart and successful people at the helm. It will take a while for the new Hexagon-universal branding to work itself into users’ vocabulary, but how many people remember that Verizon started as Bell Atlantic and Vodafone? Memories are short, and I expect good things to come from Hexagon after the upcoming transition period.
That’s it for this broadcast, I’m Todd Danielson, and this … was your GeoSpatial Stream.
