Slashgeo

The Google Earth Blog and APB links to a Newsweek article on the recent boom in aerial imagery business. From the article: "The Internet firms believe these overhead photos will become the building blocks for a new wave of virtual services that will let users navigate 3-D simulations of cities and shop in exact replicas of stores. As a result, scores of decades-old mom-and-pop aerial-mapping firms are suddenly thriving, along with the nation's two major commercial satellite imagery companies. "The geospatial-imaging industry seems to be at the epicenter of a war between Google, Microsoft and Yahoo," says Edward Jurkevics of Chesapeake Analytics Group. "It's a good place to be.""

The Google Earth Blog links to an interesting new small unmanned remote control aerial vehicle with a digital camera used to capture images and then show the images in Google Earth. The short video clearly explains the power and simplicity of this new device. From the blog: "This technology could be a much less expensive way to acquire very-high-res data for certain situations - particularly for special events." Related, All Points Blog links to a story on GeoCam: "High altitude balloons can be deployed in a matter of hours and provide emergency remote sensing thereby enabling first responder's situational awareness and give adequate trajectories to rescuers."

GeoCarta links to a paying report which has a positive summary on the future of remote sensing. From the summary: "The total global market expenditures for remote sensing products were more than $7 billion in 2006 and should reach almost $7.3 billion in 2007. At a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.3%, the market will reach more than $9.9 billion by 2012"

Open Aerial Map is a non-profit, open access, meeting place for the aerial imaging community. It exists to provide a freely available image map of the world created solely by community contribution, and to facilitate the free exchange of imagery, technology, and ideas. In order to provide an unrestricted, free, an unbiased view of the world, OpenAerialMap encourages the free exchange of aerial imagery, without restriction on its use. More info on thier website at http://openaerialmap.org.

It seems Google's Ed Parsons does not read Slashgeo, otherwise he would have discovered about OpenAerialMap last August, here's his thoughts on the project. There's also an interesting recent entry on the O'Reilly Radar about OpenAerialMap: "Anyone can register as a datasource. You can then upload and geoposition your imagery using the site's tools. Though the project idea has been around for a while it was only recently put together by Chris Schmidt, an OpenLayers (Radar post) contributor and MetaCarta (Radar post) employee. Chris has made the site's code available."