Now is an exciting time for GEOINT, with the market projected to reach a staggering $134.48 billion by 2025. The adoption of GEOINT technology is increasing rapidly, and we can expect to see significant changes and disruptions to the space within the next few years.
Personally, I think we can...
As the SPAC frenzy among satellite companies continues, Rocket Lab has become the latest geospatial startup to announce its plans to go public by merging with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), Vector Acquisition Corporation.
The deal, which would give Rocket Lab an enterprise value of $4.1 billion, is expected...
Recently, the Berlin-based space company LiveEO published the results of an amazing study: They analysed the entire U.S. electrical transmission grid based on satellite data to detect vegetation encroachment from space. The results reveal exciting insights about the vegetation condition alongside nearly 574,000 miles of overhead lines.
Besides the sole...
A report published by the World Economic Forum (WEF) in collaboration with Digital Earth (DE) Africa explores the potential economic impact of Earth Observation (EO) data in Africa.
Published on January 15th, the report predicts that the impact of DE Africa could surpass $2 billion per year by 2024. It...
If you’re curious about the existence of life on Mars, you only have to look as far as Turkey to find answers. Well, almost.
Lake Salda, a stunning turquoise basin in Turkey’s Bardur province is believed to have similar mineralogy and geology to that of a Mars crater. Now, this...
After analyzing almost 6 million public bee occurrence records, researchers are now ready to tell us where all the bees are! For the first time ever, a global map of bee diversity has been created to help in the conservation of these invertebrates as ecologically and economically invaluable universal...
Satellite imagery specialist BlackSky will soon become a publicly-traded company through a SPAC merger deal with Osprey Technology Acquisition Corp. The geospatial company expects to raise $450 million in cash proceeds through the deal, including $180 million from already-committed PIPE (private investment in public equity) investors.
When the transaction closes...
Much research has suggested that night-time lights can, to a certain degree, represent several variables, including urbanisation, density, and economic growth.
To speed up research efforts and applications, the World Bank released open access, analysis-ready, nightlight data set under Amazon Web Services (AWS) open public data set program.
The Light Every...
On 15th February 2021, The Department of Science and Technology (DST) announced India’s geospatial mapping guidelines for Indian geospatial technology sector. Let me take a step back and try to attempt to outline how these new policy guidelines are envisioned to help and whom.
Survey of India (SOI), under the...
Geocoding is a subject most geospatial users have to deal with on a regular basis. It is often one of the first steps in analyzing a dataset. But rarely do we really think about the reasons why we choose one geocoder over another other than I know what I...
Today, if you want to leverage geospatial data for an application, there is no dearth of online marketplaces offering affordable, pay-as-you-go analysis of open-source spatial data and commercial satellite imagery alike.
However, there is one dataset that plays a crucial role in global defense programs, wildlife protection, maritime applications, and...
Ghana launched its National Map of Forests and Land Use on 28th January 2021.
Resource Management Support Centre (the technical wing of Ghana Forestry Commission) produced the map, with the support of among others, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ecometrica Limited and the University of Leicester.
The map differentiates...
Africa. The World’s second-largest continent comprising 55 countries, covering 6% of Earth’s total surface area and 20% of its land area, more than the USA, India, China and most of Europe combined.
From Egypt in Northern Africa to South Africa in the South, and from Kenya in Eastern Africa to...
This time last year, geographer and explorer Dan Raven-Ellison called out for 100 volunteers to join him for a hack day at the Geovation Hub in London and create a network of 1,000 walking routes that connect Great Britain’s towns and cities. The ‘Slow Ways’ hack day was such...
Google Street View – millions of panoramic images on Google Maps that have served as a delightful time-guzzler for us over the years – announced a fundamental change in its data collection process late last year. The updated Street View app on Android now allows anybody to collect contribute...
Esri has launched a new Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) product to make it easier for developers to integrate location capabilities into their apps and other business offerings. The newly-released ArcGIS Platform will give developers direct access to Esri’s powerful location services through myriad APIs and web frameworks. As such, developers will...
The wait is over! We are delighted to announce the list of the Top 100 Geospatial Companies and Startups for 2021.
The team has been working on updating the list for the past few months now. We are delighted that together with our list of the top 100 geospatial companies,...
We are back with our first Geoawesomeness Digital Meetup for 2021! We are delighted to partner with our friends over at TravelTime platform to talk about how we can use transport and travel time data to choose the right home, office, or retail location.
Choosing where to live, work or...
With in-person events canceled, Zoom fatigue making online events less appealing, and social media full of bad vibes, podcasts have become one of the best ways to stay abreast of geo industry trends.
Whether it’s to get up to speed on the latest geospatial technology, discuss industry developments, or just...
It looks like Snapchat’s parent company Snap quietly acquired crowdsourced mapping startup StreetCred sometime around Q4 last year. Since October 2020, StreetCred’s Founder and CEO Randy Meech, and Co-Founder and CTO Diana Shkolnikov have been working with the Maps team at Snap. While Randy has joined Snap as Director...
The featured image is neither a black and white photo nor a radar image – in latter case the bright areas would have been produced by strong/ absolute reflectors such as metal objects or sharp edges, which I have never seen extending over such a large surface. Indeed, the...
After a series of satellite launches related to Earth Observation (EO) in the previous couple of years (Sentinels, IceEye, PAZ, GOES, Landsat, RADARSAT Constellation, CSG-1, etc.) plus the pandemic during last year, the number of EO satellites entering the orbit in 2020 was scarce. This article gives a short...
Among all human inequalities, unequal energy consumption is unique in being easily visible from space. Satellite images captured at night are proving to be a promising source of data for measuring access to electricity.
Access to electricity is not the only thing that can we can measure from above. A...
Amazon’s cloud platform Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched a new service that would give developers access to maps and location-based services from multiple geospatial data providers on an economical, pay-as-you-go basis. Currently available as a public preview, Amazon Location Service is priced at a fraction of common alternatives...
There are many ways to draw driving-time polygons on a map: desktop, web or cloud-based platforms all enable the creation of isochrone maps using APIs. For this article, we only focus on GIS-based tools that use different APIs to create isochrone maps and compare them with each other.
Today, many...
“What do we know about the universe, and how do we know it? Where did the universe come from, and where is it going? Did the universe have a beginning, and if so, what happened before then? What is the nature of time? Will it ever come to an...
With COVID-19 making contactless technology solutions a top priority for enterprises across the globe, the use of drones for mapping, surveillance, inspection, asset management, medical deliveries, et al, has grown exponentially. And policymakers are struggling to keep up with the rapid advances in drone technologies.
Today, at least 143 nations...
The recent release of LuciadRIA has been really something that caught my attention. It features new ways to integrate 360° panoramas and image data with other geospatial datasets. I’ve spent 3 years in TomTom working on the practical uses of Mobile Mapping data and I’m closely following all the...
US-based environmental scientist and cartographer Dan Ford spends most of his free time (after his toddler daughter goes to sleep) designing maps and studying new software. Last year, as his daughter’s first holiday season rolled around, Dan embarked on a very special handmade gift project – writing and illustrating...
Whether it’s moving people, foods, or goods, time is of the essence. As consumers of mapping apps, we have all used the travel time feature to communicate our Estimated Time of Arrival (ETA) to our friends and family but how does it really work? How does the ETA calculation...
Powerful supercomputers and machine learning algorithms have led to the discovery of an unexpectedly large count of trees in the West African Sahara and Sahel regions – typically dry areas that do not receive much attention for their contribution to the global biome in climate models and other prediction...
Robotics and geology aren't two topics that are mentioned in the same sentence very often, let alone being someone's area of expertise. Geology looks at the past and Robotics, well, is the stuff of future (and scary science-fiction) so when I came across an interview where the guest (Dr....
With extreme temperatures becoming common in urban jungles, policymakers are increasingly looking to increase shade on warming city streets. However, a well-planned (hence more effective) tree-planting effort requires budget and resources and not many cities can afford to spare those, especially during an unprecedented pandemic. Google, through its Environmental...
Earlier this year, satellite imagery market leader Maxar laid bare the intentions to make its highest-quality imagery products even better. Introducing a proprietary technique, called High-Definition (HD) technology, Maxar detailed that it would refine satellite images to ensure precise edges and well-reconstructed details which would reduce clutter and pixilation,...
In 2007, Velodyne used to charge almost $80,000 for each LiDAR unit it developed to advance safety in self-driving vehicles. Today, the company is prepping to offer one for less than $500.
With mass manufacturing expected to be underway by the second half of 2021, Velodyne’s solid-state Velarray H800 LiDAR...
The wait is over! One of my favourite organisations in the geospatial realm has a new head - Carly Morris. Ordnance Survey announced the appointment of Carly as the head of Geovation earlier today. Carly who was previously heading Hangar 51 Accelerator Programme at IAG Cargo inherits a geo-awesome success...
The UN Biodiversity Lab – a partnership between the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the UN Environment – is an initiative that provides high-quality geospatial data to government representatives of more than 140 countries. The platform offers more than 100 global spatial datasets on biodiversity, protected areas, sustainable...
Technology giant Intel has quietly launched Intel Geospatial, a cloud platform that would support multi-source data types, geovisual data management, immersive 3D visualization, analytic applications, and enterprise integration for multifaceted industries such as utilities, smart cities, and oil and gas.
The scalable geospatial data management platform is designed to transform...
I've been in the drone industry for the past 4 years. I work in a company focused on drone data analytics, software development and advisory. I talk to a lot of drone manufacturers, fly drones myself (I'm a licenced BVLOS pilot) and subcontract a lot of work around the...
Geoawesomeness Digital meetup is all about bringing the spatial community together and enabling interactions within the community whether its for fun and/or profit. And along the way, we hope that the meetup will help us all better understand how location data and technology are transforming the world for better.
We...
While Google Maps’ popular times and live busyness insights have been saving us from unnecessary stress and helping us make better plans since 2016, this information has transformed into an essential tool for many during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Google says between March and May this year, users’ engagement with...
For our regular readers and the geospatial community in general, Light Detection and Ranging or LiDAR is part of common parlance. For everyone else, it’s a cool new tech that Apple first incorporated in iPad Pro and has now adapted for its iPhone 12 Pro models.
You will find the...
TomTom and Uber are joining forces to ensure our digital maps mirror real-road conditions. Uber has joined TomTom’s Map Editing Partnership (MEP) – a program wherein TomTom opens up its map-making process to trusted partners, allowing them to provide fresh, accurate location information that would help keep the maps...
Construction designs, mine designs, power line documentation—so much can be and is done in the Computer-Aided Design (CAD) environment. As a geospatial professional working in the drone data analytics industry for the past few years, it was easy for me to see the enormous potential of working at the...
Around seventy percent of the world’s property is unregistered, causing land insecurity and poverty. Creating a system to document and formalize land ownership is the only way to ensure that the land is developed sustainably into the future. Medici Land Governance works in partnership with governments at the national, state and...
San Francisco-based geospatial startup Capella Space has unveiled the first commercial SAR images captured by its recently-launched Sequoia satellite. Giving customers immediate access to sub-0.5-meter rapid coverage of regions such as the Middle East, Korea, Japan, Europe, South East Asia, Africa, and the US, Capella Space has become the...
Unmanned aerial vehicles or drones have quickly become vital components in the rapidly advancing technology for wildfire spotting and management. In California, Air Force drones have been mapping wildfires since 2017, helping frontline responders to fight fires more aggressively and with heightened situational awareness.
But wildfire is a disaster where...
Norway’s reputation as a climate champion is no secret. Under a mix of United Nations and bilateral schemes, the country has set aside up to $350 million a year for a decade to help save rainforests and improve the livelihoods of those who live there.
In June 2019, Norway announced...
With the coronavirus pandemic continuing to spread in many countries as economic activity revives, Google has ramped up its efforts to help people stay safe when they’re out and about. The next time you fire up the latest version of Google Maps on your smartphone, you will receive an...
Being a cartographer has never been as easy and at the same time as difficult as today. On one hand, we have all the great GIS tools from Esri and QGIS, that are great for data analytics but typically making great-looking maps using these tools still requires using Adobe...
In 2016, we generated more than 2.01 billion tonnes of waste. That's roughly 270 kilograms of waste per person for all the 7+ billion people and thanks to rapid urbanization and growing population, the global annual waste generation could increase to 3.4 billion tonnes by 2050 (Reference: WorldBank report)....
I'm delighted to invite you to another Geoawesomeness Digital Meetup on October 22, 2020. This time will have a pleasure to discuss on the topic of How Deep Learning is changing the Earth Observation industry and beyond.
This topic is particularly close to my heart and interests as I've been...
Big news arrived at the turn of the last week when Esri acquired nFrames, a Stuttgart based photogrammetry software company. I believe that this news is one of the most relevant in the geospatial industry we had a while.
But the news itself does not comes as a surprise, as...
This is a reunion that was three years in the making. When the Google Maps app suddenly disappeared from the Apple Watch in 2017, the only explanation Google gave was that it expected to “support it again in the future.” Well, it seems the future is now because the...
The science of photogrammetry has been developing for more than a century. Initially being fully analogue, it is gradually being digitalized for the past 30-40 years. Back then, it was a field understood and practised by a fairly small and closed group of engineers. The data was used mainly...
Predicting traffic conditions on the roads and determining the best routes for a journey is an incredibly complex task. And yet, Google Maps does it in a matter of seconds – every single time. So, how does the navigation app figure out whether the traffic along your route is...
I assume that most of you already seen the real-time Esri COVID map, which is without doubts a very useful tool followed by millions. Earlier this week Esri published a new map called Covid Pulse that is one of the greatest examples of data visualization that I've seen for...
Watch this as a video story:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJCUs__9L-s
When you think about viral content, maps are not the first thing that comes to mind. And yet, it is not uncommon to see maps of all shapes and sizes dominating social conversations about various issues – as well as non-issues.
In January, when the...
Measuring Covid19 Impact on Urban Retail
Covid19 lockdown forced retail stores to close in order to avoid contagion. As a direct consequence, many of them did not reopen. Many of them reopened, but will close soon as an effect of the social distancing rules. EIXOS Economic Observatory has developed a...
I have been working in the geospatial industry for quite some time now. During these years, I have hired (and unfortunately also fired) a lot of people. I know exactly what the industry demands and what skills are required to get into a job of such kind. Also, I...
I have spent over a decade in the geospatial industry and thus know a lot about how things work here but I was shocked when recently buying satellite imagery for a project. I wanted to share with you my experiences and confirm whether it was a rule or an...
There are dozens of large wildfires burning across the United States right now – almost a third of them in California. As more than 45 million residents grapple with excessive heat warnings or fire weather advisories, Google has ramped up its efforts to provide deeper insights for areas impacted...
Millions of people around the world live in earthquake-prone regions. And while earthquakes cannot be predicted, a few seconds of warning can make all the difference in giving people time to drop, cover, and hold on before the shaking arrives. Japan, Mexico, and California have built a costly network...
The First Fleet of 1,485 settlers first arrived in New South Wales on January 26, 1788 – a date which is now celebrated annually as Australia Day. Since then, Sydney has developed into one of the world’s largest, most cosmopolitan cities, with a population of over 5 million and...
If you are interested in Copernicus and Entrepreneurship, join us on the 1st of September to learn more about the Copernicus programme, current applications of the data & information, and the Copernicus Accelerator. Register here.
Applications to the Copernicus Accelerator 2021 are now open
Do you have an early-stage business idea...
As countries across the world halted economic activity to combat the spread of the novel coronavirus, the relative quietness was noticed by the sensors listening for earthquake signals as well.
Seismometers typically register the high-frequency vibrations caused by several types of human activities, such as road traffic, football games, parades,...
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has launched a new geospatial portal that would help to build more resilient food systems post COVID-19. Called Hand-in-Hand, the geospatial platform contains over 1 million geospatial layers and thousands of statistics with 4,000 metadata records for more than...
Google owns the largest submarine cable network in the world. Undersea cables make it possible for us to use the Internet to share, search, send, and receive information at the speed of light. And now, these fiber optic assets may just prove useful to improve earthquake and tsunami warning...
Don't Miss: Google Maps adds new COVID-19 travel alerts as cities reopen
The global tally of coronavirus (COVID-19) infection has crossed the 14 million mark. When this article was last updated, there were more than 14,107,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus around the world. The death toll from the potentially deadly...
It’s no secret that female startup founders face negative attitudes during investment pitches. Men constitute the bulk of early-stage investors (90%), and research shows that investors question women entrepreneurs more about the risk and losses associated with their ventures. This, when men are queried about their ambitions and achievements.
Interestingly,...
The geospatial industry is going through a period of rapid transformation—as is our world. From climate change and COVID-19 to biodiversity loss and business uncertainty. At the same time, new companies are entering the geospatial arena. With them, they bring unique technologies and solutions capable of solving complex problems...
From keeping an eye on large forest fires to tracking clouds and watching dust storms to predict the weather, or even mapping the growth of cities to plan for sustainable living, remotely sensed data helps to improve our lives in countless ways.
See: How earth observation data and analytics is...
The economic disruption induced by the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting raw materials and product flows worldwide. Freezes and disruptions at borders and ports are creating a strain on the way goods are produced, assembled, and delivered. The brunt is especially hard on non-digital native industries, such as shipping, retail,...
In our previous blog post, Geodata for Financial Institutions Part 1, we discussed the difficulty of developing geodata based products and services for new markets that are not necessarily familiar with geodata. We found Financial Institutions (FI) to be an interesting new market for geodata. This blog shows how Satelligence...
If you are a US citizen, you may want to recheck your home’s flood risk. A new national-level study has found that a total of 14.6 million properties across the United States are at risk of severe flooding. Of this, 5.9 million property owners are either not aware of...
With both the movement of people and COVID-19 cases increasing rapidly in several countries around the world, it has become more crucial than ever to follow rules and regulations (and wear a mask). Social distancing continues to remain one of the most effective ways to stop the spread of...
Google Maps is probably one of your most frequently used apps, with over 100 million downloads in Google Play alone. But you can do a whole lot more with it than just get directions to places. This post will teach you 7 awesome Google Maps hacks, to make your...
If you are a foodie like me, you would agree that there’s a certain mystique attached to the oldest restaurants in the world. These places have a serious staying power, quite simply because delicious food never goes out of fashion. And then there is the allure of the famous...
Esri has released a new ArcGIS solution that leverages an organization’s existing data (LiDAR, building footprints, underground utilities, etc.) to streamline the creation and maintenance of a 3D basemap for the community. The output of the 3D Basemaps solution is a collection of 3D layers that GIS analysts can...
Great Britain’s national mapping agency Ordnance Survey (OS) has launched a new geospatial data platform to allow users to download open data products easily and get quick access to OS premium data via APIs.
Replacing the current OS online ordering systems (OS OpenData Portal, OS Orders, and API shop), the...
As the world limps back to normalcy, geospatial technologies are at the forefront in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. But for the geospatial industry itself, knowledge-sharing and networking through in-person events do not seem likely for the foreseeable future. Naturally, virtual events have come up as the next...
New applications of GNSS
Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) technology is an enabler for numerous applications which make our lives more convenient and efficient. With the worldwide spread of the COVID19 virus, GNSS even further proves to be an invaluable technology. The struggle to tame the pandemic motivated the development...
First and foremost, wherever you are reading this from, I hope that you, your family and friends are doing well and keeping safe.
COVID-19 has disrupted even the best-made plans and our pet project - the Top 100 Geospatial companies of 2020 is no different. The nominations for the list...
The running joke in Washington is that think-tanks produce 200-page paperweights that sit on a congressperson’s desk, never to be read.
But the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) is different. Ranked #1 think-tank in the United States by the University of Pennsylvania’s ‘Global Go To Think Tank Index’, CSIS’s...
Many are making strong arguments in the appeal for more comprehensive coronavirus infection testing. For instance, Paul Romer, former World Bank Chief Economist, contributes greatly to the debate with his modeling and provocative spending comparisons, to encourage testing everyone in the nation once every two weeks. (His comparison with...
There is a lot of geodata publicly available. The Copernicus programme, for example, hosts 6 families of satellites (Sentinel 1 - 6) consisting of 30 operational earth observation satellites daily collecting images of the Earth. The current archive is already at several Petabytes and growing. One of the biggest...
How to predict covid19 impact on urban retail. A geospatial risk evaluation model.
As soon as the covid19 crisis broke out, lockdown forced retail stores to close in order to avoid contagion. EIXOS started developing a geospatial model to predict the economic impact on urban retail. In parallel, an MIT...
As global economies reel from the impact of the novel coronavirus, there has been a lot of uncertainty in the job market. Naturally, many GIS professionals are currently searching for ways to boost their chances of getting hired. If you are also one of them, it may be a...
June 21 is World Music Day. Which means there’s no better time than now to go on a melodious journey around the world.
With more than 286 million users and 130 subscribers worldwide, Swedish streaming service Spotify enjoys explosive popularity amongst music lovers. For World Music Day, Budget Direct decided...
Geospatial startup Mapillary has been scooped up by Facebook. Sweden-based Mapillary, which has been featured by Geoawesomeness in the Top 100 Geospatial Companies and Startups List, has created a crowdsourced database of street-level imagery. By using computer vision and deep learning technologies, the company has been able to detect...
The environmental risks posed by climate change become clearer with each extreme weather event, but we are only starting to study the impact of these changes with an economic lens.
When researchers from the International Monetary Fund, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Southern California projected the long-term...
For the past few years, I heard a lot about the potential of Deep Learning in the geospatial industry to automate analytics and interpretation of raster data. There is a lot of research and some promising startups in that space, but there are not too many large scale success...
A former archaeologist and ex-GISP, Kurt Menke is a geospatial generalist based out of Albuquerque, New Mexico, US. He is also the founder of Bird’s Eye View, a GIS consulting business providing services in cartography, training, web development, spatial analysis, and data creation.
Having written several books on QGIS, the...
Google Maps API, launched only a few months after the Google Maps website in 2005, has completed 15 summers around the sun. And to commemorate this occasion, the Google Maps Platform team is expanding the capabilities of its products intending to deliver more contextualized experiences. Here’s what’s new:
Local Context...
“The remote sensing community has spent several decades asking for more data. To say now we have too much data would be really churlish,” Alastair Graham quips on a recent episode of The MapScaping Podcast. “I firmly believe we need more open data, not just from government agencies but...
Locale is building a location analytics product for city and business teams who want to analyze and optimize their ground operations. Think of it like Google Analytics using location data for any company with moving things. The product converts raw location data into actionable insights to help companies make...
In times of crisis, the importance of space assets for the safeguarding of the economy becomes more apparent. The Galileo navigation system, in particular, is a key enabler of EU responsiveness to crisis situations and has demonstrated its flexibility and utility during the COVID-19 pandemic. Galileo Green Lane is...
COVID is changing the global flow of goods. Some of it is temporary; some of it permanent. Listen to Hossam Bahlool from Mapbox as he talks about tools for on-demand and last-mile delivery services that make customers happy and helps scale operations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvU5HOZ9Z00
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Life amidst the COVID-19 pandemic has been somewhat surreal. Though I have been fortunate enough to be able to work from home during these unusual times, certain aspects of sheltering-in-place have felt palpably more bizarre – such as listening to birds instead of the car traffic during the morning...
In a nod to how geography plays a central role in building an interconnected social networking platform, Snap has announced a series of location-centric updates for Snapchat. Let’s dive right in…
Snap Map comes front and center
Snap CEO Evan Spiegel openly recognizes in an interview with The Verge that there...