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Apollo News Snipets – December 2011
- Is the dawn of a new generation in imaging upon us? AeroVironment, Inc. released its Qube Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) this month which features 40 minute hover time, dual color-thermal video cameras and the ability to transmit a live feed to a remote operator. All this comes in a package small enough to fit in a trunk and is ready for flight within 5 minutes of unpacking. Meant for public safety and disaster management folks, I suspect this technology will find a much wider commercial foothold in the not so distance
 future.
- In the domestic oil and gas market, there continues to be strong interest in the Utica Shale, especially in Eastern Ohio were estimates say there could be as much as 5.5 billion barrels of recoverable oil. Wet shales such as the Utica are attractive plays when natural gas prices are depressed as they currently are. In the last several months, there have been several major Utica deals involving Chesapeake Energy, Consol Energy and Hess Oil with a net value of approximately $4.1 billion.
- It looks like the free imagery program here in the United States, the National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP), is set to continue in 2012. At a September 2011 meeting of the Homeland Infrastructure Foundation-Level Data (HIFLD) Working Group, plans to collect 1-meter imagery over 13 states were discussed: Alabama, California, Illinois, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oregon, Texas, Virginia and Wyoming. Each of these states has been offered a buy-in to increase the resolution of this 4-band imagery to 50-centimeters. All this said, one has to wonder how long nationally funded imagery programs will continue to exist with the current budget woes and the creation of commercial ventures such as the DigitalGlobe-Microsoft partnership to fly 30-cm imagery over the lower 48 states?
- In the past few years, I have heard more and more about the emergence of location based services for advertising and marketing. In fact, a recent survey shows that 90% of industry professionals currently use or plan to use location based strategies in their marketing efforts. But as a small business owner, the proof is in 'the numbers' when it comes to marketing: nearly 50% of the survey respondents reported increased web traffic and/or sales from location based strategies!
- Are you interested in a sneak peak of Esri's upcoming release of ArcGIS 10.1? If so, you can join the Beta community here and test out the second beta version released in mid-November for yourself.
Brock Adam McCarty
Map Wizard
(720) 470-7988
brock@apollomapping.com
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