got geoint?

Welcome to the Monday Morning News Kick Off post from got geoint? It goes without saying that we hope that everyone had a restful weekend, recharged the batteries and are ready to take on the work week. While many are conflicted about Mondays, we like to dive right in and get the week started on the right foot. For this week’s MMNKO post, we offer a very mixed bag of news about location-based data, the DNI’s official press statement about the new Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, a 70,000 foot view of the Discovery launch and much more. So, as we always say, fire up that second cup of coffee and read on. Happy Monday!

Statement By Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper on the Senate Confirmation of Ms. Stephanie O’Sullivan As Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence
I am pleased to announce that the Senate confirmed Stephanie O’Sullivan yesterday to be the Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence. In addition to her more than three decades of intelligence experience, Ms. O’Sullivan brings a passion and appreciation for the men and women of the Intelligence Community who serve our nation selflessly each and every day. Ms. O’Sullivan’s experience and abilities will be invaluable to us at the ODNI as we continue to lead intelligence integration, be good stewards of the resources we’re allocated, and work to keep our nation secure. Check out more from the ODNI news room here.

Discovery Launch Imaged From 70,000 Feet
Last week, a camera-carrying balloon was poised at 70,000 feet to image Space Shuttle Discovery as it launched for the final time on Thursday 24th at 21:53 GMT. As you can see in the image above, there is a large arc in the left hand side of the image; which is Space Shuttle Discovery’s exhaust fumes as it launches from Florida and blasting into low earth orbit. The images were taken by the Robonaut-1 balloon, which at the time was traveling through the troposphere at the time Discovery launched, which is the cause of the fog on the lens. Robonaut-1 was a joint effort between the Challenger Center for Space Science Education and Quest for Stars, two non-profit organisations. As well as the purpose of this mission to image discovery, the idea is also to engage children with space exploration, to be the next generation of explorers, in fact, the mission partially designed and made by high school children in America. Read the full Spaceosaur post here.

MDA to Provide Information to the U.S. Government to Support Safe Maritime Navigation
MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates Ltd. (TSX: MDA), a provider of essential information solutions, announced today that the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has exercised an option under an existing Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity delivery order with MDA. The multi-million dollar option is for the provision of additional information derived from RADARSAT-2 that will be used to create ice charts to improve the safety of maritime navigation. Read the full press release here.

Fusion Centers Continue to Experience Growing Pains
Budgetary uncertainty, turf wars, and competing priorities plague the country’s expanding network of state and regional intelligence fusion centers, federal and state stakeholders revealed yesterday. “Typically for me, a fusion center success story may be, I go home happy that Bill and Steve didn’t punch each other in that meeting,” FBI Supervisory Special Agent Matthew Drake, deputy director of the Northern Virginia Regional Intelligence Center, told a conference at the Center for Strategic & International Studies, a national security think tank. A key intelligence asset in the United States’ homeland security architecture, fusion centers bring together law enforcement and intelligence personnel from state, local, and federal agencies to collect, analyze, vet, and disseminate intelligence to partners at all levels of government, including the U.S. intelligence community. Read the full Security Management article here.

IBM Makes Cities Smarter with Location-based Analytics
At its Pulse 2011 conference here, IBM is slated to announce that it is working with cities around the world to help them gain new efficiencies by visualizing and analyzing their physical and digital assets in real time. Indeed, as part of its Smarter Cities initiative, IBM is announcing smarter cities projects in Cape Fear, N.C; Henderson, Nevada; Waterloo, Ontario, Canada; the Emirate of Abu Dhabi and new results from an IBM First-of-a-Kind Research project in Washington, D.C. Increasingly, cities are leveraging the power of location to bring efficiency to their operations and improve the customer experience, IBM officials said. They are using IBM software to get both a bird’s eye view of their city infrastructure — roads, buildings and waterways — as well as insight into their operations underground or on the street — the pipes, wires, street lights, electrical meters, storm drains and other assets that make up a city’s infrastructure. Some cities are using embedded sensors to detect faulty pipes or broken streetlights to automatically generate a work order for maintenance staff. Read the full eWeek article here.

AT&T ShopAlerts: First Location-Based Ads from a US Carrier Kick Off in Four Markets
A few third-party apps have been going after this market for a while now, but AT&T has just become the first American carrier to throw its weight behind location-based ads in teaming up with Placecast to launch the so-called AT&T ShopAlerts service in four markets. Residents of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco will be the first to experience the mind-bending future of advertising — presumably because they’re densely-populated enough to make a location-based trial worthwhile — with seven inaugural partners: HP, Kmart, JetBlue, SC Johnson, Kibbles ‘n Bits (‘n Bits ‘n Bits), Nature’s Recipe, and the “got milk?” people. Fortunately, the system is opt-in, not out. Follow the break for AT&T’s full press release. Read the full Pulse story here.

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