Flickr: *just* hit 20 Million geotagged photos

From geoblogger.com From a fellow over at Flickr and its geotagging efforts...

April 10, 2007 at 9:11 am · Filed under geotags, flickr

Quick update:

Public geotagged photos: 14,500,174
All geotagged photos: 20,076,235

Semi-Offical geoFlickr satistics

Hoot's Dugong Adventures with Nikon D200 GeoTagging

Where are the dog-gone dogongs?

In collaboration with researchers from the Centre for Dolphin Studies, South Africa, we will be conducting aerial surveys of the Bazaruto dugong population. The work forms part of an ongoing environmental impact assessment that is being carried out to determine the potential impacts of planned offshore gas exploration activities.

The flights will cover the area between the Rio Save mouth and the southern end of Bazaruto Bay and will be conducted three times a month, from April 2007 up to and including November 2007.

Click here to find some Dugongs

A company aircraft will be stationed at Vilanculos or Inhassoro for the duration of the work there.

GeoGathering 2007

May 7th and 8th - Estes Park, Colorado

GeoGathering 2007 is a first of its kind event dedicated to providing oil and gas gathering system professionals a venue to share their experiences and best practices with geospatial information while learning about current industry regulations and GIS solutions. This conference will provide valuable insights into the process of GIS enabling your organizations and what role the technology could play in your day to day operations. Speakers will address topics ranging from integrity management and gathering system regulatory requirements to field data collection and GIS based system analysis.

2.6 Billion Images Served! And that is a bucket full!

CANON LEADS, BUT SAMSUNG CLIMBS IN CAMERA SHIPMENTS

Digital camera shipments continued to rise in 2006, climbing 14.5 percent to 106 million units -- and Samsung more than doubled its digital camera shipments in 2006, reports IDC, expanding its market share to 7.8 percent from just 3.8 percent a year earlier.

However, Canon remains firmly in the lead in overall global digital camera shipments in 2006, according to the Framington, MA-based research firm.

IDC says Canon shipped 19.7 million cameras in 2006, 18.7 percent of the market. Sony was 2nd with 15.8 percent; Kodak, 4th at 10 percent; Olympus followed with 8.6. Nikon, knocked out of the top 5 by Samsung, had a close 7.6 percent market share in 2006.

In particular, digital SLR shipments grew 39 percent to 5 million units last year. Canon had 46.7 percent share of that market niche, with Nikon taking 33 percent.

www.6Sight.com

“The Weekly Briefing from Future Image:

Leaders in Visual Communication and Imaging Technology”

Issue #432 April 6, 2007

2005 Leading GPS Manufactures Gross Sales Millions

Novatel $63.3m

Sirf 165.2

Trimble 774.9

Garmin 1,030.0

CSI 32.7

Note created June 9, 2006

The Business - April 2006 - GPS World - www.gpsworld.com/...

Here’s How We Get to the Future

By Eric Schwarz

Picture yourself as a soldier in the field, communicating with your command via a personal digital assistant (PDA) and availing yourself of NGA services. Your wireless PDA has imaging capability and it’s "secure at rest" (all the data it contains is encrypted, even when the device is turned off, so that if it falls into the wrong hands, it can’t be used). It’s equipped with a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver as well as an integrated inertial measurement unit—a micro gyroscope that lets images taken with the PDA be mapped onto the earth.

Being in the field location for the night, you upload images of local features, including nearby hills and rivers, and send them to NGA. Then you use your PDA to set up a 24-hour, 5-kilometer geo-protection cylinder around your position with a 30,000-foot ceiling. You select the option to be notified of the presence of Red Forces and Blue Forces, that is friends and foes, and over flight. NGA watches the world for you.

Or, consider one of these scenarios:

An NGA imagery analyst has the power within her work space to create her own work flow in concert with the way she works best. She sets up geospatial areas of interest that are monitored for new source from a variety of intelligence disciplines to tip her off to new actionable intelligence. Reported changes indicate the presence of meaningful activity, and she calls on the advanced technology at her fingertips to create endless chains of actions to cross correlate source, initiate data mining, cue imagery, and literally bring the universe of information to her desktop for analysis, in a presentation style she’s requested.

An NGA geospatial analyst’s command customer requires an immediate symbolic information product to identify optimal avenues of traversability (ingress/egress) from a current location to a desired endpoint. The analyst can access the unit’s equipment specifications, such as vehicle size, and analyze road networks and cross country mobility options from his work space. He adds current variables into consideration such as weather, soil and geology and current Red and Blue locations to create information that will intuitively convey the options to the command customer.

An NGA source analyst interacts via a visual interface with the world’s sensors to determine how to gather the right combination of imagery sensed from the electro-magnetic spectrum to satisfy source information requirements for NGA analysts. She tasks by interacting with sensor facsimiles that instantly show her the available options and allow source to be collected and distributed to those who need it.

Sprint gives away GPS service with low-cost data plans

By Nancy Gohring, IDG News Service
March 21, 2007

Some Sprint Nextel data-service customers will be able to use a new location service without additional charge starting in April.

Subscribers to the $25-per-month Sprint Power Vision Ultimate Pack and Sprint Vision Business Pack plans will get the service, based on GPS, free of charge. In addition, Sprint is introducing the Power Vision Navigation Pack for $20 per month, which includes the navigation service and unlimited access to data and Internet, as well as Sprint's e-mail, radio, and TV services.

Other Sprint data users will be able to pay $2.99 for a 24-hour period of usage of the navigation service.

The new service includes voice-guided driving directions and maps the route on the phone's screen. Users can also get traffic alerts and search a database of 10 million points of interest for locales such as restaurants and shops. A pedestrian mode makes it easier to use the service on foot rather than in a car.

Customers need certain phones to use the service but can choose from a variety of devices made by Motorola, Samsung, and Sanyo. Compatible phones fall under Sprint's Power Vision and Vision categories, although not all phones in those groupings will work.

Mobile operators are increasingly offering location-based services as more handsets come with GPS. Nokia has taken a particular interest in navigation capabilities, recently announcing that it will offer mapping and routing services, some of them free to users, in all of its converged phones. Just one Nokia phone is listed among Sprint's Vision and Power Vision phones.

Senators Seek Better Defense Imagery
Senators Seek Better Imagery

Committee Wants More Photos, Video and Maps Available to Troops in Field

By Walter Pincus

Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 6, 2006; Page A13

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence wants to expand the mission of the nation's imagery intelligence agency so that it can provide U.S. forces on the ground with laptop computers that display still pictures and video of what may lie over the next hill.

"New products including full-motion video and ground-based photography should be included with available positional data [such as maps] in National Geospatial-Intelligence libraries for retrieval on Defense Department and intelligence community networks," the Senate panel said in its report on the fiscal 2007 intelligence authorization bill.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence wants to expand the mission of the nation's imagery intelligence agency so that it can provide U.S. forces on the ground with laptop computers that display still pictures and video of what may lie over the next hill.

"New products including full-motion video and ground-based photography should be included with available positional data [such as maps] in National Geospatial-Intelligence libraries for retrieval on Defense Department and intelligence community networks," the Senate panel said in its report on the fiscal 2007 intelligence authorization bill.

"The committee wants troops to be able to dial up what the route ahead will look like and where potential ambush points may be," said John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org, an expert in satellite- and ground-based intelligence. He said digital still photos taken by military attachés and Special Forces teams that have slipped in and out of potential target countries such as Iran and North Korea as well as video footage taken by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been collected for years, but have not been integrated into the main data libraries maintained by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA).

"The NGA's current library of geospatial products reflects its heritage -- predominantly overhead imagery and mapping products," the committee wrote in its report. "While the NGA is beginning to incorporate more airborne and commercial imagery, its products are nearly devoid of FMV [full-motion video] and ground-based photography," it added.

The panel's solution is to give the director of national intelligence authority to direct the NGA to "analyze, disseminate and incorporate" into its national system "likenesses, videos, or presentations produced by ground-based platforms including handheld or clandestine photography taken by or on behalf of human intelligence collection organizations."

The new visual materials would be available along with traditional mapping data for retrieval by mission planners and troops in the field. "The route to and from a facility or photographs of what a facility would look like to a foot soldier -- rather than from an aircraft -- would be of immense value to our military personnel and intelligence officers," the report said.

Sensitive to the unique roles played by human collectors, including Special Forces teams and clandestine CIA operatives, the report made clear that the NGA's new mission would not give the agency authority to "manage or direct" the collection or set the technical requirements for "handheld or clandestine photography." The human collection agencies would also control the classification of their photography as well as how and to whom it is distributed.

Instead, the panel encouraged the NGA, whose database includes the exact location of where images are taken and the timing, to work with the other collection agencies so their data can easily be retrievable from the National Geospatial data libraries.

Pike said, however, that technical difficulties exist in finding ways to integrate the new collection into the NGA data libraries. "Lots of still-camera imagery does not have time and place stamped into it as do the satellites," he said. He also noted that full-motion videos, where a UAV can be traveling 100 mph, creates a problem in stamping locations so viewers know the start and finish of the target.

An NGA spokesman said the agency does not comment on pending legislation such as the Senate intelligence committee's version of the authorization bill. But the NGA has been making changes in its databases over the past few years. More commercial imagery has been purchased and some video from UAVs such at the Predator and Global Hawk have gone into the system.

Last December, Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte gave the NGA responsibility for overhead, non-imagery infrared and space-borne collectors of measurement and signature intelligence, which involves sensors that, among other things, gather signs of chemical, electronic, nuclear or other radiations emitters.

The NGA also has linked elements of its group with the National Security Agency, whose satellites and ground-based facilities collect electronic messages. Negroponte recently praised this step as "linking our nation's 'eyes and ears.' "

In a presentation last September, retired Lt. Gen. James R. Clapper Jr., the head of the NGA, described his view of "geointellingence" as seeking to answer such questions as "Where am I? Where are the friendlies? Where are the enemies? Where are the noncombatants? Where are the obstacles, natural and manmade, and how do I navigate among them? And what is the environment?"

Clapper, who became director of the NGA in 2001 when it was still the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, plans to retire this month.