Portable Google Earth - When wires and radios fail

Written by Kevin P. Corble

 GIF 2009 Volume: 7 Issue: 5 (October)

 

Industry Seeks New Ways To Deliver Imagery
And Derived Products More Efficiently To
Commanders In The Field Or Wherever
Geospatial Information Is Most Needed.

The U.S. defense/intelligence community has a seemingly insatiable appetite for commercial satellite imagery. The unclassified nature of images from private-sector remote sensing operators makes these products appealing to the military because they can be quickly transmitted between commands and freely shared among allied forces without the time-consuming clearances required for distribution of classified images.

While purchases by the Pentagon have been a boon to commercial satellite operators, these firms face the added challenge of staying ahead of the evolving needs of military end-users. In recent years, this has meant supporting the Department of Defense in finding new ways to deliver imagery and derived products more efficiently to commanders in the field or wherever the geospatial information is needed the most.

PORTABLE GOOGLE EARTH

The defense/intelligence community has embraced the Google Earth environment as one in which geospatial users with little or no formal training are comfortable viewing and accessing geographic information. The Google Earth Enterprise product enables customers such as NGA to build Web-accessible Google Earth Globes populated with their own data sets. In the military setting, this allows commanders to drill down through multiple levels of satellite and aerial imagery, as well as vector and video data, to gain 2-D or 3-D insights into nearly any area of interest on Earth.

Google and Spot Image teamed in 2008 to develop a portable and deployable version of Google Earth Globe for warfighters to take imagery with them on laptop computers or external drives where no Internet is available. Google Earth Enterprise Portable offers all of the same viewing and processing features as the larger product, but it is designed for use with smaller slices of the Globe, such as a single country or geographic region.

“The main advantage is that you now have imagery in the field in a completely disconnected version of the same, easy-touse, Google Earth,” said Sean Wohltman, a Google geospatial engineer.

With hard-drive space always an issue in mobile computing, Google looked for a medium- to high-resolution image product to serve as the base map for the portable Globe, recommending to customers the SPOTMaps line of products. These are fully orthorectified and color-balanced mosaics of recent 2.5-meter, natural color Spot imagery prepared as COTS products for specific countries and regions around the world. The mosaics are produced by Spot Image and delivered in the fusion-ready format compatible with the Google Earth environment.

Wohltman said the SPOTMaps products are the perfect base maps for the mobile application because the file sizes are relatively small for the amount of detail they contain, and Spot Image has already produced mosaics for many parts of the world. Availability of these mosaics in Google Earth formats eliminates weeks of processing and color-balancing for end-users who might otherwise try to create their own mosaics from individual scenes from other satellites, Wohltman added.

Google Mapped Earth Engine - NGA and others

Spy Agency Amends No-Bid Contract Notice, But Google Still Favored

By James Rosen

Personal Tech

Published August 24, 2010

FoxNews.com

That was 2010  and a Current Search?

One of America’s most secretive spy agencies, responding in part to inquiries made by Fox News about a no-bid contract set to be awarded to Google, announced Tuesday it will revise the terms of its notice for the contract – but Fox News has learned that Google will still have the inside track for the deal.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, headquartered in Bethesda, Md., first posted online on Aug. 19 a formal notice of its plans to award the “sole source,” or no-bid, contract to the Internet and software giant. The contract synopsis – posted on fedbizopps.gov, a sort of bulletin board for federal contractors – stated that the agency was seeking “a secured, hosted environment that provides web-based access to geospatial visualization services.” No dollar figure was attached.

One of 16 spy agencies reporting to the president, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency provides aerial satellite imagery and mapping, as well as analyses of those products, to civilian and military officials at the other spy agencies and the Pentagon. Experts told Fox News the agency's contract was designed to provide the agency with an integrated system that would allow analysts from different disciplines to use the Google Earth mapping program in a way that allows for a freer exchange of data between them.

“They want to be able to acquire servers where they can host their data, the NGA's data,” said Kevin Pomfret, executive director of the Center for Spatial Policy and Law in Richmond, Va. “They want it to be secure, but they want it to be web-based, so that it can be easily accessed.”

Others suggested the agency's contract notice reflected the inadequacy of the intelligence community’s current computer systems. “This NGA no-bid contract is a cry for help,” said Tim Brown, an imagery analyst for globalsecurity.org, in an interview from Los Angeles. “They're basically saying that their classified customers from all over the intelligence agencies, and from (the Department of Defense), are not able to use the clunky, older systems that are all designed very, very top-secret.”

The agency's online synopsis indicated that the agency wants to steer the contract to Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., on a no-bid basis because “Google is the only source that can meet the government's requirement for worldwide access, unlimited processing, and Open Geospatial Consortium complaint web service interfaces.”

But Microsoft, the computer behemoth headquartered in Redmond, Wash., has indicated that it believes its Bing Maps program can also meet the agency's needs. In response to several calls, the agency told Fox News that a number of “interested parties” had met a Tuesday evening deadline for formally challenging the agency’s no-bid plan.

Karen Finn, an agency spokeswoman, said Tuesday afternoon that the agency planned to post a revised version of the contract synopsis no later than Wednesday. Concerns over the appearance of the no-bid contract plan were partly behind the agency’s decision to revise the synopsis. “The (agency's) acquisition folks thought about how that might be perceived,” Finn said. “Yours was not the only media call we received.”

Finn said the revised synopsis would provide more data about the kind of work the agency requires under the contract. “We realized we did not put out enough technical information for (companies) to be able to discern whether they could (perform the work) or not,” Finn said. But she also made clear the revised synopsis will still reflect agency's intention to award the contract to Google without entertaining competitive bids.

Brown told Fox News he believes the agency's claim that only Google can perform the necessary work. He noted, for example, that a user of Microsoft’s Bing Maps service can obtain detailed, panoramic, street-level views of Los Angeles and other relatively open cities, but that Bing stops at an aerial view when it is trained on an authoritarian stronghold like Tehran. Google Earth, by contrast, can deliver more detailed views of Tehran’s streets, or of Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea.

“So we can map every single street with a (geographical) coordinate,” Brown said. “We can monitor it to see if there's any cell phones or wi-fis there. This allows the NGA to have a classified version of what we've been using all along here in the United States, which is Google Street Maps.”

The satellite mapping galaxy is not vast. Google Earth came into being only after Google’s 2004 acquisition of Keyhole, a company that was in part funded by In-Q-Tel, the venture capital firm run by the CIA. And those firms, along with Microsoft, tend to purchase their aerial imagery principally from two other companies: DigitalGlobe and GeoEye. Those firms on Aug, 6 received federal contracts worth close to $4 billion each, in order to collaborate on a next-generation satellite that can deliver even more detailed imagery -- money that was awarded by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

Because this nexus of private firms and government is so heavily dominated by a few titans – Google, Microsoft, GeoEye, and DigitalGlobe chief among them – many corporate and industry trade executives were unwilling to discuss the agency's contract notice on the record. They told Fox News that Google and Microsoft, in particular, were either customers, sponsors, or members, respectively, of their own firms or trade associations.

But Pomfret noted that similar firms, sometimes backed by their own countries’ governments, are cropping up in Italy and Germany, South Korea and Japan. And times are flush for the satellite industry as a whole. In 2009, according to statistics published by the Satellite Industry Association, the industry grew 11 percent, for total billings of $161 billion, during a year when the U.S. economy as a whole shrank by nearly 3 percent.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/08/24/spy-agency-amends-bid-contract-notice-google-favored/#ixzz20FNqUWAR

LIDAR for Les

This can not be ignored by the LIDAR groups much longer..

Android Stats

http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/07/02/android-platform-distribution-updated-10-9-on-android-4-0-22-7-still-on-2-2-and-below/

Flash dies needing AIR - The whole story

Adobe Sticks A Fork In Flash For Android

 

from Phone Scoop - Latest News by Rich Brome

Adobe is effectively killing off its Flash Player browser plug-in for Android. The current version of Flash will be removed from the Google Play store on August 15th. As previously announced, Adobe won't develop a version for Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean), and the current version of Flash - if it works at all - won't be supported by Adobe on Android 4.1. Users can only maintain a certified installation of Flash - including future security updates - if they have a device that came with Flash pre-installed and do not update to Android 4.1. Users who download the Flash Player themselves from Google Play before August 15 technically have an "non-certified" installation, but may continue to receive security updates as long as they don't upgrade to Android 4.1. The news is no surprise, as Adobe announced over seven months ago that it was halting development of Flash Player for mobile devices. The company promised to continue releasing security fixes, however, and one such update was just released earlier this month. Adobe has refocused its mobile efforts on Adobe AIR and HTML5.

Here is the full statement:

Beginning August 15th we will use the configuration settings in the Google Play Store to limit continued access to Flash Player updates to only those devices that have Flash Player already installed. Devices that do not have Flash Player already installed are increasingly likely to be incompatible with Flash Player and will no longer be able to install it from the Google Play Store after August 15th.The easiest way to ensure ongoing access to Flash Player on Android 4.0 or earlier devices is to use certified devices and ensure that the Flash Player is either pre-installed by the manufacturer or installed from Google Play Store before August 15th. If a device is upgraded from Android 4.0 to Android 4.1, the current version of Flash Player may exhibit unpredictable behavior, as it is not certified for use with Android 4.1. Future updates to Flash Player will not work. We recommend uninstalling Flash Player on devices which have been upgraded to Android 4.1.

Adobe not supporting Flash on Android Jelly Bean

updated 09:27 am EDT, Fri June 29, 2012


New Flash installs also being disabled on Google Play
Read more:
Adobe will stop supporting Flash Player in Android from Android 4.1 onwards, with new installs of Flash on the mobile OS ceasing altogether in the near future. A company blog post has announced that there will not be a certified implementation of Flash Player on Jelly Bean; development and testing of Flash for the new version of Android has already ceased.

As of August 15th, moreover, Flash Player will be withdrawn from the Google Play Store. Downloads after that date will mostly be limited to updates for devices with Flash Player already installed. Some files should be be available in the Adobe archives for download, but without Google Play-based updates.

Late last year, Adobe confirmed that it was stopping work on mobile Flash, finishing at version 11.1 for Android and the BlackBerry PlayBook. Future developments were redirected to bugfixes and closing security holes, with the company focusing on AIR.

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET Staff on October 04, 2011

As Adobe has focused on Flash Player development in the aftermath of the rise of HTML5, it hasn't ignored its other content-delivery system: Adobe AIR. AIR 3 brings some hefty speed improvements to the system, thanks to a little something new called Stage3D.

In case you're new to AIR, which stands for Adobe Integrated Runtime, it's a platform that runs applications across multiple systems without coding in more than one language. It's powerful and respected for giving people the same end-user experience, whether on Windows, Mac, or Linux. One very well-known AIR app is TweetDeck. If you try to install an AIR app without having previously installed AIR, you'll be automatically prompted to download it.

Stage3D brings combined hardware-accelerated 2D and 3D graphics rendering that's up to 1,000 times faster than previous versions of AIR. Although it's only for desktops at the time of writing, Adobe promises that it will soon take Stage3D to its mobile apps. The advancements offered by Stage3D should bring far more complex graphics development for the player, and allow some developers to use it as a viable alternative for their projects, especially for cross-platform efforts. It includes more support for Android devices including software licensing and hardware, captive runtime support for developers to bundle AIR along with their programs (removing the requirement to separately install AIR), and native extensions for enhancing AIR's capabilities.

AIR has allowed developers to make hybrid applications, or desktop tools that can integrate with various Web services, while still allowing some offline functionality that Web browsers don't yet have. This includes things like taskbar and dock notifications. With these latest updates, Adobe is really improving AIR as an alternative development environment and maintaining its relevance on the Web.

Read more: Adobe AIR - CNET Download.com http://download.cnet.com/Adobe-AIR/3000-2383_4-10652806.html#ixzz1zOLEKoBG

Steve Would Be Proud: How Apple Won The War Against Flash

from TechCrunch by Ryan Lawler

Late Thursday, an extraordinary thing happened: Adobe announced in a blog post that it would not provide Flash Player support for devices running Android 4.1, and that it would pull the plugin from the Google Play store on August 15. The retreat comes five years after the introduction of the iPhone, the device which thwarted Flash’s mobile ambitions, almost even before they began.

That Adobe would make such an announcement nearly five years to the day that the first iPhone was sold is kind of funny. I’d like to think that the Flash team has a sense of humor and was well aware of the timing when it posted the blog entry, but I could also see the entry as unintentionally ironic. Either way, it caps off a five-year battle to win the mobile landscape — a war which for Adobe ended in defeat.

At the time the iPhone was announced, lack of support for Adobe Flash seemed like a glaring omission, for a platform that was so hell-bent on being a portable computing device. But it wasn’t until the iPad came out, two-and-a-half years later, that the battle between Apple and Adobe, Flash vs. HTML5, and “open” vs. “proprietary” reached a fever pitch.
The iPad Effect

The iPad was announced in January at WWDC, but wasn’t available until March. And when it did finally become available, people began to notice that the lack of Flash, which then was the de facto standard for video playback and interactivity on the web, was missing. For the iPhone, not having Flash was a minor annoyance — after all, few other smartphones had very good Flash support at the time… But for the iPad, which in many cases was being used as a laptop replacement, at least for consumption of media, that was a big deal.

It wasn’t long before Google latched onto this and began promising an alternative to the “broken” Apple devices which wouldn’t give users access to the full web, as publishers intended them to view it. It’s tough to believe now, but at one point, Flash on mobile devices was actually considered a feature. There was Google’s Andy Rubin in April 2010, announcing that Android would have full Flash support in Froyo, the next version of the operating system to be released.
The Impact Of “Thoughts On Flash”

Battle lines were drawn, and just a few days later, Steve Jobs issued his epic missive “Thoughts on Flash,” which sought to explain, once and for all, why Apple didn’t — and wouldn’t ever — integrate Flash into its mobile and tablet devices. There were numerous reasons, and Jobs debunked the trope of Flash being “open,” as well as its ability to access the full web. He also brought up security, reliability, performance, and battery life issues that plagued devices using the plugin.

Most importantly, though, Apple didn’t want Adobe developers to create cross-platform apps which didn’t take advantage of the most latest features, development libraries and tools. Jobs wrote:


“Our motivation is simple – we want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers, and we want them to stand directly on the shoulders of this platform and create the best apps the world has ever seen. We want to continually enhance the platform so developers can create even more amazing, powerful, fun and useful applications. Everyone wins – we sell more devices because we have the best apps, developers reach a wider and wider audience and customer base, and users are continually delighted by the best and broadest selection of apps on any platform.”

It turns out Jobs was right. When Flash finally did ship on Android devices, it didn’t provide users with the full web, as was promised. Android users who wished to watch videos on Hulu through the Flash browser, for instance, were met with a message saying that the content wasn’t available on the mobile web. Same thing for users who tried to access most premium video sites on Google TV, which also supported Flash. More importantly, even when those videos or interactive Flash elements did appear on Android devices, they were often wonky or didn’t perform well, even on high-powered phones.

The end result was that users stopped seeing Flash on mobile devices as a good thing, and developers quit trying to support the framework on those devices.
The Flash Issue Isn’t Just About Mobile

But the impact of that battle goes beyond just how people view content on mobile phones. While pretty much all developers have settled on building native apps or coding for the mobile web when trying to reach those users, the battle has also had an impact on the way that developers think about multi platform web development. Even when not building for 4-inch screen, they’re increasingly turning to HTML5 to build new user experiences or render interactive applications, rather than writing to be seen in the Flash player.

Video might be the last industry where the Adobe Flash Player continues to have a hold on how content is displayed, but even then, a growing number of sites are moving to HTML5-based video players for delivery. YouTube and Vimeo are leading that charge, displaying their videos in a HTML5 player first, when available, and only falling back to Flash when the player isn’t supported. And many others are following that lead.

Frankly, Flash had never been a huge business for Adobe, even when development for interactive websites using the plugin were in high demand. As time goes on, it will become an even less important part, as its development tools — where Adobe makes the bulk of its revenue — focus on catering to a developer base that is increasingly interested in building HTML5-based web applications. As more can be accomplished in-browser without a plugin, that’s good news for users and developers alike.

Point-and-Shootists rally to Smartphones

Digital camera sales slump as people use smartphones to take snaps

Hi-tech smartphones have driven down the sales of digital cameras by 29 per cent in five years, research shows.

Althought the digital camera market was still worth £598 million in 2011, this is down by nearly a third from 2006, when it was worth £843 million.

Eight per cent of UK adults, or three million consumers, now say they are unlikely to replace their camera when it breaks, instead relying on their phones.

By 2016 the market is expected to be worth £523 million, reports Mintel.

Camcorders have shown a similar drop, falling by 21 per cent in the same time frame, from £354 million to £279 million.

Mintel Technology Analyst Samuel Gee said: "Although smartphone cameras do not typically match the quality of output of dedicated devices, the technology is consistently improving, as the quality of camera image output becomes too high for consumers to reliably distinguish between competitors.

"Dedicated device manufacturers investing in digital services and including social connectivity and image-editing features in upcoming devices will remain a more enticing proposition in the face of gently growing opposition."

Figures show that 80 per cent of us use a digital camera or camcorder, with 40 per cent relying on them exclusively.

This compares to the 45 per cent who use their smartphone.

The traditional film camera is used by jut eight per cent of Brits.

Four in ten (39%) camera owners purchased a camera to replace their old one.

Around a third (34%) of consumers purchased a camera for their holiday (34%) while almost one in five (18%) purchased a camera to record a specific event.

Althoug 21% of all camera and camcorder owners agree that smartphones are a better long term investment, seven in ten (71%) strongly agree that the quality of photos is better on a digital camera or camcorder than a smartphone.

One in five (19%) Brits have bought a compact digital in the past 12 months, with around the same number (22%) claiming they do not own one.

Mr Gee said: "As newer technology continues to improve the specifications of top-end equipment, measurements like megapixel density or the top level of optical zoom possible will become meaningless to consumers best served by less expensive, middle-of-the-field devices.

"Camera manufacturers must choose to either invest in a web service that complements captured photos or video, or to focus on including new, innovative hardware capabilities and modifications, to retain consumer interest."

As they say in Kansas - It will rain some day...

Navigating Through the Nebulous Arena of “The Cloud”

Monday, June 25th 2012

By Dr. Ignacio Guerrero

Summary:

After some years of hype about cloud computing in general, the geospatial technology sector is seeing the emergence of a variety of interesting cloud-based geospatial products and services. Andes Consulting principal, Ignacio Guerrero, reviews the landscape of “the geospatial cloud” to provide a sense of the current state of the art.

The title of this article was borrowed from a recent posting in Directions Magazine on Key Resources on Geospatial Cloud Computing. This phrase seems an appropriate title because, after some years of hype about cloud computing in general, we are seeing the emergence of a variety of very interesting cloud-based geospatial products and services. I will review the landscape of “the geospatial cloud” to provide you with a sense of the current state of the art.

Let us begin by quickly reviewing the elements of cloud computing. A very useful reference is The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing by the U.S. Department of Commerce

National Institute of Standards and Technology. NIST established five essential characteristics of the cloud model:
On-demand self service. A consumer can request resources to be allocated automatically as needed.
Broad network access. Clearly “the Internet is the computer.”
Resource pooling. The provider resources are pooled to serve multiple customers.
Rapid elasticity. The ability to rapidly scale by requesting additional resources
Measured Service. Resource usage is monitored and customers often “pay-per-use.”

As we look at the various offerings in the geospatial technology sector, it will be useful to keep in mind these essential characteristics.

In the past several years we have seen the growth of a large ecosystem of IT providers in the cloud computing arena, as defined by the NIST essential characteristics. Where do geospatial companies stand in this space? In the traditional computing model, we have: (1) hardware resources such as storage, processor or memory; (2) platform, i.e., operating system, tools, databases, etc.; (3) application software. In the cloud computing paradigm, these translate into infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS). Geospatial software companies (or other application software companies) that wish to embrace cloud computing can offer their products on a cloud computing platform (IaaS/PaaS) or they can create new offerings in the cloud (SaaS).

The option of running a geospatial product in a cloud computing platform (IaaS/PaaS) such as Amazon EC2 orWindows Azure is relatively straightforward. Such cloud platforms provide a virtual machine with an operating system to install the application software. Depending on the application, there might be some issues - for example, firewall configuration, ports usage, licensing, etc. An end user might not be able to solve these problems on his or her own, however, they should be relatively minor complications for the software vendor. 

Thus from a vendor perspective, supporting a cloud platform is a matter of testing, making changes as needed, and certifying the software in such an environment. Software vendors might elect to go a step further and integrate with the cloud platform. In that case, the application software is packaged and configured to integrate with the cloud vendor management interface. As part of this integration, the geospatial software may adopt the cloud vendor payment system. ArcGIS for Server on Amazon EC2 is packaged for rapid deployment in Amazon EC2. The Open Geo Suite integrates with Skygone (theGISmarketplace) and Amazon EC2. Skygone hosts cloud versions of a variety of geospatial products, including MapServer and ERDAS Apollo, among others. 

In summary, supporting a cloud platform is not a radical move since it basically implies running the same traditional applications on a “rented” system outside the premises rather than on an in-house, company-owned system. The application software itself may be licensed on a pay-per-use basis rather than on permanent licenses. This may have significant financial implications that have been discussed in detail by Editor in Chief Joe Francica in an earlier Directions Magazine article: The Cloud’s Disruptive Value Play.

Even more interesting is an examination of the new SaaS geospatial offerings. For this purpose, we will categorize offerings into three groups:

• Basic mapping services
• Value added geoprocessing services
• Specialty applications

Basic mapping services are largely commoditized and many such services are available at low cost. For a discussion about the commoditization aspect, see the Directions Magazine article: Is Geospatial Cloud Computing a Commodity? Basic mapping services generally offer online content that can be used as a backdrop for users to add their own data. Users can upload data from a variety of formats to be mapped and symbolized against a selected base. Offerings include Esri’s ArcGIS Online and Google Earth Fusion Tables, which use their own image and vector content, and other services which are generally based on the widely used OpenStreetMap data. Examples of the latter include MapBox, GeoCommoms, CartoDB and Cloudmade. 

Basic mapping services commonly offer a free entry level option and fee options based on resource utilization or value added services. ArcGIS Online entry level users can upgrade to subscription-based services which include a rich set of added capabilities. Google Earth Fusion Tables users can migrate to other geoservices offered by Google (more on this later on). MapBox fees are based on the number of “map views,” storage utilization, support options, ability to remove the logo from maps, and analytics support. CartoDB fees are based on the number of tables, storage utilization, support options and the ability to remove the brand. GeoCommons can upgrade to the parent company, GeoIQ, for enterprise level services. Cloudmade users can upgrade by purchasing subscriptions to a large variety of point-of-interest databases.

Value added geoprocessing services are available in various forms from the geospatial cloud vendors. The full version of ArcGIS Online essentially exposes the full set of Esri ArcGIS capabilities to a cloud-hosted environment. ArcGIS for desktop acts as an authoring tool which provides the ability to create and publish geoprocessing services into ArcGIS Online. Google announced Google Earth Builder in April 2011. Recently, the name of Google Earth Builder was changed to Google Maps Engine. Google Maps Engine is a cloud-based platform for geospatial data management and collaborations. Data visualization is done seamlessly in Google Maps. Earlier, in December 2010, Goggle Labs announced Google Maps Engine ( formerly Google Earth Engine), a platform for distributed processing of satellite images. 

In addition to offerings from the giants, Esri and Google, the companies mentioned in the previous paragraph offer a variety of value added services:

MapBox complements superior styling capabilities, offering advanced map analytics.

GeoIQ, the parent company of GeoCommons, offers connectivity to enterprise databases and sophisticated geospatial analysis.

CartoDB offers data join capability and spatial queries. Cloudmade focuses on consumer applications, offering geocoding, driving directions and a data market place with extensive point-of-interest datasets.
eSpatial supplies a robust geoprocessing functionality via its product, OnDemand GIS. This is a full-featured SaaS GIS covering the entire gamut of capabilities for data capture and editing, data management, view, analysis and reporting.

In the specialty application category, there are a variety of SaaS applications designed to perform specific tasks. I will mention just a few examples. In this category is Socium, a wholly owned subsidiary of 1Spatial that provides online data validation services based on 1Spatial Radius Studio technology. Esri Business Analyst Online is an SaaS solution for custom site evaluation and market analysis. Digital Map Products offers SaaS products for spatial development, government and real estate markets.


Cloud computing is not a fad -- it is a real trend with a compelling value proposition. Google CIO Ben Fried said, 

“The economics of cloud computing are driving down the cost structure of business so far and so fast that it’s scary” (CIO Journal). 

In the geospatial industry, cloud computing is a growing segment in which we are seeing the emergence of a myriad of innovative solutions. Many of these solutions are helping to bridge the gap between traditional GIS and business solutions as well as consumer applications. However, the impact encompasses the entire industry. In this article I have made an attempt to describe the geospatial cloud with a variety of examples. The references mentioned are not intended to be comprehensive but rather representative of key areas. As this is a rapidly changing field, I invite readers to comment on any noteworthy omissions that may have escaped my attention.