| Read the LINK Newsletter
Airborne 1's quarterly email newsletter, the LINK, features the latest information on the LiDAR industry and happenings at Airborne 1.
You can read samples from previous issues below. To get the FULL newsletter, though, you need to subscribe! See the bottom of the page for a link to subscribe.
Survival of the Fittest
When Airborne 1 first started back in 1998, our main market was photogrammetry and surveying firms. In the boom years of the late 90s and early 2000s, these businesses did well. You would have to live under a rock to not have noticed, however, that we're now facing tough times for commercial and residential real estate development. Photogrammetrists and surveyors are struggling as a result.
In a tough economy like this one, only the strong survive and adapt. Airborne 1 is no exception.
While we still enjoy providing services for our traditional photogrammetry, surveying and engineering clients, we've seen a change due to shifting economic forces. We're seeing a surprising amount of new business from some very un-traditional industries, such as the entertaining and gaming worlds, due to the demand for data used to create graphically rich visualisation / simulation environments. Airborne 1 has prior experience in this realm; for example, the producers of the wildly successful film "Transformers" used our Hoover Dam data, and we provided LiDAR imagery of the Indianapolis 500 racetrack for Sony's Formula One video game series.
We believe that Airborne 1 is positioned to take advantage of the growing demand for spatial information from nontraditional industries. Our photogrammetrist/surveying clients may not realize, though, that they too can capitalize on this potentially multi-billion dollar industry. To that end, in the August issue of Professional Surveyor, we gave some advice to surveyors about marketing and reselling their data.
The Professional Surveyor article mentions iracing.com, a web-based simulation racing environment, as a typical example of this new data-hungry market. iRacing Motorsports Simulation, while not technically a video game, uses real-world data to make its simulated environment more accurate. iRacing.com provides a high-tech simulation tracks for "drivers" to train on and compete online. That latter task requires a degree of accuracy in the modeling of both car and track—but most particularly of the track—that doesn't exist in a video game. Iracing is just one example of the burgeoning business for real-world data by virtual world architects.
According to the cover story of the July/August issue of Earth Imaging Journal, organizations have invested approximately $1.5 billion in virtual world technologies in the last two years. We think this investment is likely to pay off for Airborne 1 and other companies in our industry, provided we successfully adapt to this evolutionary step.
Hurricane Katrina: LiDAR to the Rescue
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Satellite image of Hurricane Katrina
hitting New Orleans
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Hurricane Katrina was one of the largest natural disasters in U.S. history. The storm left an estimated 12,000 people homeless and cost billions of dollars in damage.
Fortunately, Louisiana was covered in a state-wide LiDAR survey conducted well before the hurricane hit in 2005. The LIDAR survey helped save lives, as a tool to help the flow of food and other aid, and allowed FEMA to issue millions of dollars in emergency checks right away, saving untold hours and costs in post-storm surveying and assessment.
We recently interviewed David Gisclair of the Louisiana Oil Spill Coordinator's office to hear more about the extraordinary story of how LiDAR came to the rescue during what may have been the storm of the century.
Read more
Other topics covered in the LINK:
- LiDAR News: the latest in the world of LiDAR
- How to make money/save money in the world of mapping
- Job listings
- Educational articles
- Fun puzzles and contests--win valuable prizes
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