Australia: ipernica reported that its subsidiary, NearMap, the online PhotoMap media company, has been awarded a prize for Innovation in the 2009 Western Australian Information Technology and Telecommunications Awards (WAITTA). Michael Coles, WAITTA Chairman, said, “NearMap’s ability to update maps more frequently provides new opportunities for government and business to analyse the changing landscape in detail. This home-grown innovation gives governments and business an unprecedented perspective on changes to our environment and will change the way communities see their world.”
Dr Rob Newman, NearMap’s Chairman, paid tribute to the achievements of NearMap’s Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Stuart Nixon. “Stuart and his team have developed a capability unmatched by any other technology anywhere else in the world. The NearMap solution enables PhotoMaps and terrain data to be quickly captured and automatically processed, giving our users views of the landscape that are current, clear and show change over time.”
The NearMap solution has been designed to fully automate the process of creating very high definition PhotoMaps of entire countries or continents. The Company’s advance technology enables PhotoMaps to be updated much more frequently than other providers. WAITTA recognises the innovative nature of NearMap’s technology chain, which includes:
– NearMap’s HyperPod aerial camera system is designed to capture PhotoMap data at a small fraction of the operating and capital costs for alternative camera systems and captures overhead and four oblique photos while doing so (US patent pending).
– NearMap’s HyperVision PhotoMap processing solution processes individual photos into seamless PhotoMaps and runs on super-computer clusters of hardware. It can produce a complete city-wide PhotoMap within a few days, compared to six months or more with alternative solutions.
– The final technology innovation is the HyperWeb content distribution solution, which simultaneously serves many terabytes of PhotoMaps to NearMap’s online community.
In addition to flying capital cities every month, NearMap has recently demonstrated their ability to fly very large areas in rural Australia. Over a 40 day period, NearMap captured PhotoMaps and terrain data for a 50,000 square kilometres, covering around 20% of Victoria and is progressively adding these to the Company’s online portal.
Source: ipernica
