Hilarious, Obama's car stuck! Check this out!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13507728

Spatial Energy Spins Off European Subsidiary

- Spatial Energy Spins Off European Subsidiary

Monday, May 23, 2011
Spatial Energy

Spatial Energy announced the opening of a European subsidiary. Spatial Energy made the announcement at the 2011 EAGE (European Association of Geoscientists and Engineers) Conference & Exhibition in Vienna, Austria.

Chris Carlston, co-founder and Vice President of Sales for Spatial Energy in Boulder, Colorado, USA, has accepted the new position of Managing Director, Spatial Energy GmbH, which will be based in Vienna. Spatial Energy GmbH is the fourth global office opened since the parent company's founding in 2005.

With increased interest in oil and gas exploration and production, including activity in Africa, as well as in shale gas plays in Eastern and Western Europe, Spatial Energy made the strategic decision to focus on building and strengthening relationships with key EAME energy companies. By establishing an office in Vienna with one of its key principal executives, the company is able to provide dedicated sales and support for customers and partners in key markets throughout the Western and Eastern Europe, Africa and the Middle East (EAME).

"Long term customer relations and service are a critical part of our success. As our customers expand their operations globally, a subsidiary in Europe is our logical next step," said Bud Pope, President, Spatial Energy. "We see Europe and Africa as strong growth markets where the concept of enterprise imagery hosting and management is catching on fast. We're dedicated to ensuring that our current and future clients can rely on our remote sensing expertise no matter where their business takes them."

Carlston stated, "More and more, oil and gas companies are beginning to understand the value of integrating disparate spatial data sets and making them more accessible throughout their organizations. They also place a high value on service and support, which is the hallmark of our company. I look forward to serving the EAME market with the leading enterprise imagery and data management services to the Energy sector. With our global remote sensing applications and analytical offerings, and now with the opening of the Vienna office, I'll be able to provide our global customers with the consistent, personal attention they deserve."

DOCOMO Demonstrates the Effectiveness of Mobile Spatial Statistics for Disaster-Prevention and Urban Planning

Tokyo, May 24, 2011 - (JCN Newswire) - NTT DOCOMO, INC. announced today that two recently completed research projects conducted jointly with Japanese universities have demonstrated that mobile spatial statistics, or population statistics compiled from data used to provide mobile services, can provide useful information for planning disaster-prevention measures and urban development. If specific, practical applications are developed, it is envisioned that national and local governments will be able to use DOCOMO's spatial statistics for planning in these fields.

Mobile spatial statistics are aggregate data about mobile phone locations and user attributes. In the use of such statistics, individual users are never identified.

A joint research project with Kogakuin University studied how DOCOMO's mobile spatial statistics could support disaster-prevention planning. The project was conducted across Tokyo from November 22, 2010 to March 31, 2011. The results of the study showed that spatial statistics can be used to estimate the distribution of people who would have difficulties returning home if a major earthquake centered on Tokyo were ever to occur.

The study focusing on urban planning, which was carried out with the University of Tokyo from November 1, 2010 to March 31, 2011, proved that mobile spatial statistics provided by DOCOMO can be used to evaluate suburb communities that relatively large populations of daily commuters compared to their current scale of public busing.

The University of Tokyo and Kogakuin University will release the details of their respective studies with DOCOMO at future academic conferences.

The studies were two of DOCOMO's latest initiatives to contribute proactively to society through its mobile business.

Disaster-Prevention Planning Joint Research Project: http://www.nttdocomo.com/pr/files/20110524_attachment01.pdf

Transforming Location Intelligence Into Profit

More businesses are now realizing that technology is only as good as the content and quality of the data that is being managed. Location intelligence provides the capability to organize and understand convoluted processes through the use of geographic relationships. At an enterprise level, Location Intelligence has the capacity to optimize business processes to improve profitability and competitiveness. Location intelligence helps businesses use the principles of location to organize, reason, plan, and problem solve. The degree of information is enriched by the successful integration into a process that results in better business decision making. Transforming location intelligence into profit is about transforming business processes to create more enterprise opportunities. The business use of location intelligence can be divided into the following three sub-categories that are designed to improve profitability.

Consumer Applications: These are enterprise applications that build loyalty among customers and influence purchasing behaviors. For example, retailers can execute store-specific promotions with more accuracy or use location intelligence to enhance loyalty program services.

Customer Service: Applications that facilitate customer service and self-service to improve the overall customer experience. For example, a government agency can more efficiently measure service levels or plan for the distribution of services that are in many cases dependent on variables that change over space, such as household income or number of children.

Enterprise Decision Support: Enterprise applications that help create optimal business strategies where the outcome is improved profitability. For example, identifying common customers and determining how to offer services to achieve the greatest value.

To access all possible revenue opportunities through location intelligence, a location intelligence provider should be able to provide the following:

All Validated Addresses in a Market: Creating the capability to determine the exact households in a serviceable market'

Mapping to the Property: Adding geo-targeted precision through geographic references to the property parcel or roof-top levels for contemporary location intelligence applications.

Residential, Business and Unit Information: Illuminating residential and office buildings with access to validated unit and floor information.

Address Management: Address validation, data cleansing, and data maintenance. The enterprise benefits from clean, current, and standardized address elements with geographically explicit references. verifying the existence of individual addresses by matching them against a master address database of functional addresses.

Mapping Addresses: Transforming addresses to embed explicit references of location. This allows the enterprise to map customers and to understand the opportunities among business assets, programs and competitive threats.

Standardizing Addresses: Ensures a common address structure, syntax, and nomenclature. A corporate-wide level of standardization allows for more predictable levels of data quality and system performance.

Merging customer information from a master address database provides complete viewing of all addressed dwellings. This allows for product penetration views, even into Multiple Dwelling Unit (MDU) buildings. Changes to customer product and service levels by building can now be measured to assess marketing, sales, and operational activities. Using location intelligence helps a business understand fundamental characteristics about customers, prospects, and their potential relationships to an enterprise's revenue-generating operations. Location Intelligence has the capacity to optimize business processes to improve profitability and gain a competitive edge.

DoT wins award for GIS implementation

DUBAI - The Department of Transport, or DoT, in Abu Dhabi has won the Excellence Award in Geographic Information System (GIS) Implementation for the second successive time by GISTEC. The award was announced at GISWORX ’11, the 2011 GIS Workshops and Exhibition for Esri Users.

This excellence award was given to the DoT for its work in Geographic Information Systems in the Transportation Category and also for its implementation across the Emirate. At the GISWORX ’11, DoT showcased its activities and initiatives and provided important information on its GIS Web Applications. The DoT team also answered inquiries related to different topics such as the Intranet Portal, Corporate GIS Database and the developed spatial tools.

Abu Dhabi Systems and Information Centre (ADSIC), the GISWORK’11 government partner and the organisation tasked with making the Abu Dhabi Government more effective and efficient in delivering modern, efficient and constituent-centric e-Government services, praises DoT’s efforts and initiatives through its participation as a successful and long-standing member of the spatial data community.  ADSiC and the Department of Transport cooperate on Abu Dhabi’s spatial data programme, an ADSIC administered e-government program to facilitate the sharing of geospatial data among government agencies and other stakeholders. The GISWORX ’11 provided a unique in-depth learning environment on different aspects of GIS to both beginners and advanced users through several technical workshops on focused topics. The workshop and exhibitions help organisations take full advantage of their software investment by enhancing the knowledge and skills of their GIS professionals. It also addresses key issues related to GIS implementation in specific industries. 

Location Intelligence: Why is it Useful?

Posted by kirsty  Blog, Business Intelligence

What is location intelligence?

Wikipedia:

Location Intelligence is the capacity to organize and understand complex phenomena through the use of geographic relationships inherent in all information. By combining geographic- and location-related data with other business data, organizations can gain critical insights, make better decisions and optimize important processes and applications. Location Intelligence offers organizations opportunities to streamline their business processes and customer relationships to improve performance and results.

LI enables business analysts to apply geographic contexts to business data.

It’s not surprising that organizations want to combine geographic and location data with traditional business data – employees, customers, facilities, inventory, vendors and suppliers, and other assets all have a location component. By combining geographic data with traditional business data, users are provided with the insights and context to make better business decisions.
What about online businesses? Well, Location Intelligence is still important for them too. Knowing where your customers come from allows you to tailor effective marketing campaigns. Knowing their location might also help you choose which medium or media channel to use to get your message out.

Context: how is Location Intelligence being used today?

• In Retail, location services like Foursquare provide the geospatial information that a customer is at or near a retailer’s store. Combining this with customer data such as preferences and purchase history allows retailers to make timely and relevant offers to consumers that can result in additional sales.
• Location is very important in the insurance industry, where customers and natural disasters are both tied to a location. When a natural disaster occurs, insurance companies have the ability to instantly understand their claims exposure by visually plotting their customer data and the affected area on a map. This also allows them to more accurately estimate the resources they will need to process claims in an affected area.
• Site selection, the decision about where to locate a new store or facility, is probably the most common application of Location Intelligence today. When location data is combined with available real estate data, demographic data, data on current customers, and information on prospective customers, the resulting Location Intelligence can help identify a site location with maximum revenue potential.
A recent research report – Location Intelligence: What can be Expected as BI embraces Location and Cloud – released in March this year by Saugatuck Technology defines the benefit of LI in the following way: “Integration of Location (GIS) and standard BI platforms brings LI to greater usefulness by making it available as an option to anyone who is familiar with the more readily-available BI solutions, and without the need to master new concepts or a new user interface. Spatial relationships also greatly enhance many of the details commonly reported by BI systems, providing an added level of analysis that is useful in viewing and assessing trends (and existing data types).”

Usefulness by business function

Here are some examples of how LI can be useful in different departments of a business: Planning and construction
• Site selection
• Geographic impacts and factors for current and future developments
Operational and supply chain processes
• Optimizing transit routes (e.g. the fastest transportation routes and enhancing on-the-move communications by mapping cell phone towers)
• Enabling effective forecasting (matching store locations with the size of surrounding populations can be used as a guide to determine potential profitability)
• Optimizing warehousing processes and stock flows based on the consumption rates of particular products by locality
Sales and Marketing
• Customer clustering
• Revenues / sales per country, state, region
• Postal addresses of target customers
• Marketplace gaps, opportunities, threats and level of penetration (by adding a time element, it is also possible to track and predict growth)
The bottom line is that LI can be used across a breadth of industries – retail, telecommunications, financial services, government, logistics….

U.S. Will Not Pay $25 Million Osama Bin Laden Reward, Say Officials

No one will receive the $25 million reward for the capture of Osama bin Laden, say U.S. officials, because the raid that killed the al Qaeda leader in Pakistan on May 2 was the result of electronic intelligence, not human informants.

"We do not expect a reward to be paid," said a senior U.S. official familiar with the bin Laden hunt, meaning that the $25 million bounty offered by the U.S. under the Rewards for Justice program after the 9/11 terror attacks will probably remain uncollected.

The reason is simple, say officials involved in or knowledgeable about the hunt for the world's most wanted man: the CIA and the military never had an al Qaeda operative as an informer willing to give him up. Instead, what killed bin Laden was electronic surveillance, and an operational mistake by one of his closest associates. After a slow drip of intelligence year after year, and then a final flurry of data collection and analysis brought a team of SEALs to bin Laden's Abbottabad compound on a moonless night.

In previous manhunts, such as the capture of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein or the killing of his two sons, U.S. intelligence and military commandos had the help of insiders and human sources. In each case, someone received millions of dollars in reward money for their efforts.

The long and sometimes circular path that led to bin Laden was paved by satellites, drones, phone surveillance and luck. The CIA declined to comment on specific intelligence methods, but U.S. officials have said the intelligence was a "mosaic" and "multi-streamed," meaning from every avenue in the government's arsenal, the strongest of which is still the technological wizardry of the CIA, the National Security Agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the Department of Defense.

Bin Laden's survival for nearly ten years was the result of the limits of American power and intelligence--the ability to recruit sources inside al Qaeda or support networks in Pakistan, and his death was the result in the overwhelming superiority of American electronic, signals, and technological capabilities.

By the summer of 2009, the trail for bin Laden had gone cold. The CIA simply had no tangible evidence of any place he'd been since he'd slipped away from U.S. air attacks in his redoubt in Afghanistan's Tora Bora mountains. Marty Martin, a former top CIA official who led the hunt for bin Laden from 2002 to 2004, said that for years his colleagues were baffled as to where the fugitive had hidden.

"We could see from his videos what his circumstances were," Martin said of bin Laden's video messages that were released in the years after his Tora Bora escape. "In the immediate years afterward he looked battle fatigued and on the run. He didn't look healthy. We knew he was moving. But where? We simply didn't know. Then, he gained weight and looked healthy. I told my analysts, 'He's gone urban, moved somewhere stable and safe.' "

During all the years the trail went cold, the CIA had been unable to develop a human source inside al Qaeda or inside their support network. Several former intelligence officials involved in the hunt for bin Laden said developing a spy inside bin Laden's inner circle was never very likely because of the level of commitment his followers possessed. The man who turned in Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was an Afghan informer who provided low-level support to the al Qaeda chief of operations, not a fellow operative. Beyond that, the CIA tried to monitor those who facilitated communications and operations for al Qaeda, while learning as much as they could from detainees.

But in 2009, the CIA caught a break. The Pakistani intelligence service, known as the ISI, delivered a gift: a cellphone number they gathered when they recorded a call made from Pakistan to the Middle East. The number belonged to an al Qaeda courier that the CIA had long been searching for, Abu Ahmed al Kuwaiti.
Osama Bin Laden's Courier Makes A Mistake

After the 2009 phone call that the Pakistanis tapped, however, al Kuwaiti's number went dark. But the courier had exposed himself, and the CIA suspected that if they could find where al Kuwaiti lived, they might be about to find bin Laden.

The call had located al Kuwaiti in northwest Pakistan and gave the CIA a starting point for a renewed hunt. A year later, in the summer of 2010, despite fastidious operational security by al Kuwaiti -- he normally drove 90 minutes from the compound before inserting the battery in his cellphone, preventing signals intelligence pinpointing his starting point – he made a twofold mistake. For the first time in almost a year, he used the cellphone simcard that U.S. intelligence had linked to him, and he made a call with that simcard close to bin Laden's compound.

The National Security Agency, the world's most powerful signals intelligence organization, had been waiting to pounce on any calls made from that simcard since 2009. The NSA picked up the call and located al Kuwaiti in Abbottabad, Pakistan. They were even able to pinpoint the neighborhood the call had probably come from. From there, the CIA and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) began searching aerial satellite photographs to deduce which house would likely be bin Laden's.

When they discovered a newer building with high perimeter walls, custom construction and a third floor terrace wall of seven feet--the CIA knew they had their target. The search was almost over.

By August of 2010, CIA director Leon Panetta briefed President Obama and had a new stealth drone begin flights over the compound, undetected by Pakistani air defenses. The CIA was sure a high-value target lived in the compound, and given al Kuwaiti's relationship to bin Laden--learned in bits and pieces from interrogations of captured detainees since 2002 -- was "60 to 80 percent" sure bin Laden was hiding in the compound, according to Panetta.

The CIA, the NGA and the Pentagon studied reams of signals intelligence, electronic emissions, infrared technology, almost all from drones and satellites, in order to learn the compound's construction and the number of people living inside. Intelligence analysts even studied the water tables underneath the Abbottabad valley to determine whether it was likely bin Laden had built an escape tunnel underneath the house.

"We were pretty sure it was too wet to build a tunnel," one US official familiar with the CIA's intelligence said.

Martin, the retired CIA official, said bin Laden also undoubtedly learned from his al Qaeda operatives' mistakes.

"He was not stupid. If you see your men killed by drones or captured, you learn from experience what kind of entourage to have and how to change your profile."

Bin Laden had taken away all signs of his importance that for years the CIA had searched for from the sky: armed guards, rings of protection, transportation convoys -- he left it all behind and hid behind an 18-foot wall for five years. When the Navy SEALs eventually stormed the compound, only a few rifles and handguns were seized. He had dropped virtually all his protection so that spy satellites, and drone surveillance would be unable to differentiate his compound from any other in the area. The SEALs also found, and killed, the courier whose single errant phone call, snapped up in a web of electronic surveillance, had led them to Abbottabad.