Cloud Computing

Editor in chief Joe Francica interviews Jill Smith, CEO of DigitalGlobe, to understand her view of the challenges to growth of the commercial satellite industry. The interview was conducted at the Geospatial World Forum in Hyderabad, India.

Back in the mid 1990's many will remember that Microsoft Excel included a thematic mapping option as one of the choices for creating graphic illustrations from data stored in a spreadsheet. MapInfo was the embedded engine in Excel that provided that functionality but that option has not been included in Excel for the last several releases. Well, now, hidden deep in the bowels of Google Labs comes Google Fusion Tables by will geocode and thematically map data stored in a Google Docs spreadsheet. This from Google: Fusion Tables is a service to manage large collections of cloud-based table data. You can import spreadsheets up to 100 MB and upload them for colleagues to share or publish. You can apply filters to your data and aggregate functions, visualize the data in maps and other diagrams.

Google I/O 2010 - Unleash your map data: Cloud computing for geospatial applications with the Google Maps API.

Autodesk describes Project Butterfly as

In this episode of DMTV, geospatial cloud computing is explained in a simple example of geocoding and pin mapping. Three steps are presented: storing, processing and visualizing geospatial information without the need for executible programs that are resident on your local computer. The objective is to show a workflow using as many cloud-based solutions as are available today to process georeferenced data.

This video from IDV Solutions shows how Visual Fusion Suite® supplies enterprises with the tools for better and faster decision making. Scott Caulk, Product Manager at IDV, demonstrates how Visual Fusion capitalizes on the location and time aspects of information, geospatially enables enterprise data, serves as a geospatial CMS, complements in-house GIS, and ultimately brings greater levels of insight to the enterprise.