GeoIQ Powers the World Bank's "Mapping for Results" Initiative

The World Bank announced the Mapping for Results initiative, a mapping and data sharing platform powered by GeoIQ's geospatial visualization and analytics. Mapping for Results is a project developed by the World Bank and AidData to empower citizens and local communities to directly participate in the development and implementation of World Bank programs. As part of the Open Data Initiative, the World Bank is publishing the precise location of Bank-funded activities at the provincial and district level, allowing users to view project information at an unprecedented level of detail.
GeoIQ's geospatial platform, a version of which is available for free and public use through GeoCommons, enables easy collaborative sharing of data, visualization and analysis. The GeoIQ platform is used by Federal Government Agencies, NGOs such as the United Nations, World Wildlife Fund and InterAction, and enterprises and marketers.
"The objectives of Mapping for Results are to visualize the location of investment projects, better monitor project results and impact on people, enhance transparency and strengthen country dialogue and civic engagement," said Aleem Walji, World Bank Institute Innovation Practice manager.
Mapping for Results overlays poverty and Millennium Development Goal (MDG) data such as infant mortality rates, with the geographic location of World Bank financed projects and those of other multilateral donors. In leveraging the capabilities of GeoIQ, Mapping for Results allows for intuitive visualization and analysis of more than 16,000 project activity sites for 2,277 active Bank-financed projects across 79 of the poorest countries.
"In a geo-enabled world, many people can create maps and different maps will tell different stories," Walji said. "Mapping for Results is about geo-enabling the Bank and creating the foundational data that will allow for all kinds of analysis, better planning, better monitoring and eventually direct engagement with citizens based on actual data."
"Mapping for Results is leading the way for transparency and accountability in the development community to deliver measurable results," said Frank Moyer, CEO at GeoIQ. "For the first time ever citizens, project managers and donors will be able to independently explore and analyze the relationships between local need, project funding and results achieved."

Esri Signs Strategic Contract with GeoEye

GeoEye and Esri to Create a Base Layer of Multi-source, Multi-resolution Global Imagery to Serve Desktop Users via ArcGIS.com

HERNDON, Va. -- GeoEye, Inc. (Nasdaq: GEOY), a leading source of geospatial information and insight, announced today that Esri has signed a strategic contract to license a large amount of GeoEye's high-resolution IKONOS archive imagery. Esri, based in Redlands, Calif., will blend this highly accurate imagery with its current imagery data from multiple sensors to produce a global, static cache map layer. This imagery base layer will be displayed and served to Esri users via ArcGIS.com, an online system for working with geographic information through a range of GIS desktops, Web browsers and mobile devices. Esri will begin building this imagery base layer within the next few weeks and expects to complete it in early 2012.
Esri and GeoEye are working together to make GeoEye's imagery archive more accessible to Esri ArcGIS users. In addition, improved search and discovery of GeoEye's content will provide Esri users with a fuller, richer user experience. This foundation marks the beginning of a new direction in the partnership, as it will bring new solutions to both ArcGIS and GeoEye imagery users. The two companies plan to announce joint offerings and other initiatives later in the year.
"Esri has been GeoEye's trusted partner for more than a decade, so we are very excited to embark on this new project with them," said Chris Tully, GeoEye's senior vice president of Sales. "This innovative GIS solution will deliver a better user experience to Esri customers by providing easy access to GeoEye's satellite imagery in their everyday tools."

Acquisition of Lagen Spatial pty Limited

15 April 2011, 1:23pm

1Spatial, a holding company focused on improving the quality and access to business critical location-data across the globe, is pleased to announce that on 15th April 2011, it entered into a binding share purchase agreement relating to the acquisition of Lagen Spatial pty Limited (the “Transaction”). Lagen Spatial pty Limted ("Lagen"), based in Sydney, is one of Australia's leading distributors of spatial and location based software technologies. The acquisition will provide 1Spatial with a critical mass in Australia on which to launch the Company’s planned expansion in this developing economic powerhouse. Lagen reported profits before taxation of Aus $268,000 in the year to June 30th 2010.

The acquisition will be funded out of 1Spatial's working capital and will not result in any dilution of existing shareholder equity.

Completion of the Transaction, which is subject to the provision of certain standard documents by the Company and Lagen, is scheduled to take place on 19th April 2011 ("Completion").

The total consideration paid by the Company will be Aus$1.0m, consisting of $765,000 in cash and $235,000 in clearance of existing Lagen loan liabilities

Five U.S. nuclear reactors in earthquake zones

At least five U.S. nuclear reactors are in earthquake-prone seismic zones, potentially exposing them to the forces that damaged the Fukushima plant in Japan, a new analysis shows.

The at-risk reactors are the Diablo Canyon Power Plant and San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in California; the South Texas Project near the Gulf Coast; the Waterford Steam Electric Station in Louisiana; and the Brunswick Steam Electric Plant in North Carolina.

They appear in an analysis by the mapping and geographic data firm ESRI Inc., based in Redlands, Calif. The online map, the first of its kind to let the public search potential danger zones by address, includes U.S. Geologic Survey (USGS) seismic information and earthquake history for every nuclear plant in the USA.

After the Fukushima disaster, President Obama ordered the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to evaluate the earthquake risk of every nuclear plant in the nation, said Victor Dricks, an NRC spokesman. Dricks said NRC regulations require companies that build nuclear plants to take into account local seismic history and fortify the plants against the largest quake that is likely to occur.

Dricks said the U.S. has taken proper precautions to ensure the safety of its plants. San Onofre, for instance, is built to withstand a magnitude-7.0 earthquake within 5 miles of the site, he said. In addition, the plant is 30 feet above sea level and has a reinforced concrete sea wall that is 30 feet tall and could withstand a 27-foot tsunami.

Japan's Fukushima Dai-ichi plant suffered major damage from a magnitude-9.0 earthquake and 46-foot tsunami that hit March 11. The disaster triggered nuclear radiation leaks and an extensive evacuation in the region around the plant, which was built to withstand a 19-foot tsunami.

The ESRI map aims to help Americans determine their risk. It allows users to plug in their location and find the five nearest nuclear plants.

• INTERACTIVE MAP: Find out how close you are to a nuclear plant

Users can also determine whether they live within 10-mile or 50-mile U.S. evacuation zones of any nuclear plants and whether the region around the plant has been jolted by any major earthquakes, measuring magnitude-7.2 or higher, in the past 30 years.

"All of the earthquakes on this map are significant," said ESRI analyst Bronwyn Agrios, noting that the analysis was eye-opening for those on ESRI's staff. "We found that we're just on the cusp of the evacuation zone of the San Onofre plant, just down the coast on the ocean side. Right around our area there have been three earthquakes. We're in a highly dense area for faults. We can feel that. We can feel tremors every week."

William Leith, acting associate director for natural hazards at the USGS, said it's impossible to predict the precise timing, location and magnitude of an earthquake, in part because quakes have been measured in the USA only for a century.

Although most nuclear plants are in the central and eastern USA, where earthquakes are rare, the USGS ranks 39 states as having a high or moderate earthquake risk, Leith said. New studies have shown that at least 20 magnitude-9.0 earthquakes have struck off the coast of Northern California, Oregon and Washington in the past 20,000 years, most recently in 1700, he said.

"We don't want to alarm anybody," he said, "but it can happen here."

Pitney Bowes Business Insight: trying to put its stamp on the software world

Pitney Bowes has long been a goliath in the metered postage market with around an 80% share in the US and 65% internationally. The need to diversify beyond the stagnant postage market has seen it venture into the software world. This venture has been far from smooth as it continues to try and carve out a niche beyond its traditional dominance in the mailroom. 

The company has spent over $2.5 billion on software acquisitions since 2000 – including MapInfo (location intelligence), Group 1 Software (data management and customer communications) and most recently Portrait Software (customer analytics). These are managed by Pitney Bowes Business Insight (PBBI), which was formed in 2007 from the merger of the Group 1 Software and MapInfo businesses. However, the various acquisitions have created a patchwork product portfolio and a complex set of offerings. PBBI is now competing with far more competitors than it is used to, so must simplify its messaging and focus on the core capabilities across its product range.
PBBI’s strategy is to help its customers enable lifetime customer relationships through the application of Customer Communication Management (CCM). PBBI’s CCM comprises a set of core capabilities—data, insights, strategy and communications that help businesses acquire, serve and grow the lifetime value of their customer base. CCM particularly focuses on creating and delivering cost-effective multi-channel communications—including print, email, web, SMS and call centre interactions.
A complex product range
PBBI’s products for CCM include solutions for document composition, archive and compliance, web self-service and interactive communications for customer service representatives. PBBI’s MapInfo has long been widely regarded as the leading product for location intelligence and geographical information systems (GIS) while its latest acquisition, Portrait Software, fills a gap in PBBI’s customer and data analytic capabilities—which include data integration and data profiling, along with analytics products such as demographic and psychographic data.
PBBI now certainly has a range of products to enable businesses to gain real customer insight, particularly through geo-demographic and psychographic analysis. PBBI’s advantages over some of its competitors are the ability to go beyond traditional analytic segmentation using either geo-demographics or advanced predictive modelling as provided with Portrait Software. At one end of the scale, PBBI is competing against standard CCM vendors such as HP Exstream, Thunderhead and GMC, while at the other end is also competing in the business intelligence space with many smaller analytics companies and the large players, many of who have made acquisitions in the last few years (e.g. IBM/Cognos, Oracle/Hyperion, SAP/Business Objects). If PBBI can simplify its messaging, it can certainly be a real contender in these markets.
Exploiting the convergence of digital and print communications
As the communications landscape continues to become more complex, as online and offline channels converge and the use of social media grows, businesses must find a way to manage business processes across all these channels. Many of its customers are undoubtedly operating print and digital communication processes in silos and are probably using some elements of PBBI’s CCM suite—either for document composition, data quality, production or archival. PBBI must now encourage these customers to move to a single enterprise CCM platform, and thereby reduce the waste and inefficiency associated with decentralised communications processes.
But, ultimately, the biggest opportunity for PBBI is to pull together its wide and somewhat disjointed portfolio, and provide a unified CCM enterprise platform that can identify the “hot pockets” of customers by both geography and buying habits. Such highly targeted capabilities can lead to far higher conversion of prospects to customers, so reducing the cost of sale and also “buyer fatigue” caused by over marketing of different approaches to people who have no interest. Such an approach avoids the need to sell to multiple different groups within the organisation, as it provides a single approach that can be used directly by sales and by marketing, yet provides all the analytic and reporting capabilities as needed throughout the rest of the business.
PBBI certainly has the technology and the breadth and scale of products to enable businesses to create personalised multichannel communications but it cannot ignore that other players are snapping at its heels, particularly HP and GMC who both offer end-to-end CCM platforms. Along with the many vendors in the customer interaction space, PBBI has certainly got its work cut out in establishing a strong position in the market.

Congressional Action Could Create New Demand for Geospatial Data

Two pieces of legislation working their way through Congress could create new demand for geospatial data that may result in more business opportunities for MAPPS member firms.  Provisions adding guy-wires and freestanding towers as features shown in FAA aeronautical charting data and adding x,y, and z coordinates to structures on FEMA flood insurance rate maps have received initial approval in the U.S. House of Representatives.

FAA Authorization

Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R-TX) had noticed that in recent years, low-flying aviators have faced an increased threat of uncharted, man-made obstructions that are difficult to see and avoid. There have been a number of pilot fatalities caused by collisions with unlit and unmarked guy-wire and freestanding towers. The most recent fatality occurred on January 10 when an agricultural aircraft collided with a guy-wire tower in Oakley, California.

 

Aviators who routinely operate aircraft at low altitudes face the threat of colliding with these structures, some of which have a diameter of only six to eight inches and are secured with guy-wires that connect at multiple heights and anchor to the ground. Affected pilots include Emergency Medical Services, firefighters, agricultural crop dusters, fish and wildlife service aircraft, mosquito control and many others.

 

Rep. Neugebauer offered an amendment to H.R. 658, the FAA Reauthorization and Reform Act, to direct the Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration to conduct a feasibility study on the development of an internet-based public resource that would list the exact height, longitude, and latitude of potential low-altitude aviation obstructions. The provision of this data would enable the public and pilots who fly at low levels to know where these structures are located. The data would allow aviators to obtain the information necessary to avoid these structures in their flight plans.
 

MAPPS supported the amendment.   When FAA conducts the study, we will have a seat at the table.  H.R. 658 subsequently passed the House.  A companion bill, S. 223, has passed the U.S. Senate, without the tower and guy-wire provision.  A House-Senate Conference Committee will soon meet to reconcile differences between the two chambers’ bills.
 

FEMA Flood Insurance Reform

 

The House Financial Services Committee has begun work on H.R. 1309, the Flood Insurance Reform Act of 2011, introduced by Rep. Judy Biggert (R-IL), chair of the Subcommittee on Insurance, Housing and Community Opportunity.  The Subcommittee reported the bill to the full committee on April 6 with a provision approved as an amendment offered by Rep. Steve Stivers (R-OH) to study the collection display of the vertical positioning of structures on FEMA flood insurance maps. The bill re-establishes a Technical Mapping Advisory Committee (TMAC), of which there would be members from the private mapping community.  The Stivers Amendment asks the TMAC to do an analysis of collecting vertical positioning data.
 

To view the webcast of the subcommittee mark-up, go to http://financialservices.house.gov/Hearings/hearingDetails.aspx?NewsID=1838, where the Stivers amendment can be found at 5:45 to 10:25.
 

This was the result of Ken Scruggs' (Midwest Aerial Photography, Galloway, OH) visit with Congressman Stivers during the Federal Programs Conference.
 

This is evidence that grass roots, individual citizen/MAPPS member contact with your elected representative WORKS!

Business gets on the map

Through spatial solutions, businesses can easily visualise their enterprise business intelligence data, says Mike Steyn of Aspire Solutions.

A lot of organisations are moving to display data geographically through mapping, as it gives a completely different insight to a business in a highly visual and impactful manner, say business intelligence (BI) experts.

Mike Steyn, director at Aspire Solutions, maintains that spurred by the Internet revolution, virtually every organisation has a geographic component to its business.
In addition to mapping, he adds, an organisation's own data such as distribution of clients, sales figures and other value-adding datasets can be overlaid on the map to assist with business decisions.
“The dataset extends to items such as competitor facilities, retail tends, lifestyle measures, crime and other socio-economic data.”
Steyn also points out that spatial solutions allow companies to pinpoint positions on the map to obtain 'clean' addresses and GPS coordinates which can be integrated into an organisation's enterprise resource planning (ERP) system automatically.
He believes that the key component is to generate GPS locations of clients, suppliers and other relevant data in the GIS, and store these in the ERP system along with the address information.
“Once this is done, these locations can be fetched from the ERP, displayed on the map and linked to any data within the ERP through simple queries. The result is a very light integration between the GIS and the ERP on a database level, but with a powerful outcome.”
Steyn is of the view that companies can then take all the data and generate spatial trend reports on what is going on with their business.
“The solutions depict and predict geographic trends on items such as turnover, stock and requirements; through that, you can see how powerful the tool is because you can easily visualise your enterprise business intelligence data,” he says.
The biggest benefit of implementing spatial technology, Steyn believes, is that it is able to identify business problems and provide viable solutions.
Describing how spatial technology can provide viable solutions from a logistics and delivery stand point, he says: “Using a GIS map viewer to confirm a client location and to yield a correctly formed address along with a GPS coordinate is key to assisting any company that delivers any product.”
He explains that there is a wide distribution of companies with poor address books which yield incorrect deliveries of product.

“Using a spatial placement of the address reduces incorrect deliveries, which saves money, time and embarrassment.”
According to Steyn, mapping also provides viable solutions from a geo-planning and geo-marketing point of view.
“Displaying BI data on a map gives a comprehensive view of where best to concentrate marketing efforts. Mapping current locations versus competitor locations and adding data such as lifestyle measures, income brackets and other such data allows for good planning of new locations,” he says.
Routing and supply chain management is further enhanced by having a spatial view of the business, Steyn adds.
According to Etienne Louw, MD of MapIT, the demand for geographically located goods and services on 'content-rich' maps is growing at an astonishing pace.
He says there is an increased need by users for maps that 'talk back' or respond to specific human needs.
“We're ultimately talking about 'intelligent' maps that feed off 'live' incoming data; maps that interrogate the environment and deliver tailor-made information onto a smartphone, a navigation device or an office PC,” Louw explains.