Local Municipality gets it.

Great meeting with another local municipality this week. Can't get into details yet cause we do have competition these days. Regardless, more an more folks are realizing the value of mobile LiDAR data...and that's good for all of us!

Tulsa's very own Drillerman

During our city wide collect we caught a giant.

Motorcyclist caught in scan

While scanning a project in Kansas earlier we passed guy on a motorcycle. When tweaking the point cloud data we came up with this pic. Pretty cool!

This was one of my favorite twisty roads in JoCo to ride when i lived there. Now here I am participating in it's destruction...progress is going to make it a nice easy graded straight road so that soccer moms and football dads can cart their kinds safely while sipping a Starbucks Coffee and texting on their iPhones.

Mobile Mapping Panel at the MAPPS Winter Meeting

MAPPS has announced it's preliminary program for this winters meeting in Hawaii, and mobile mapping is one of the hot topics. We will have representatives from the three manufacturers (Optech, TerraPoint, and Riegl), from the owners (David Evans Associates, Michael Baker, and SAM), and end users (HNTB, BHI, and AutoDesk). The format will be a panel discussion moderated by Myself and Lewis Graham of GeoCue.

More info can be found here.

http://www.mapps.org/events/MAPPS_2010Winter_SessionsSynopsis_101909.pdf

If you are interested in finding out more about MAPPS, go here.

http://www.mapps.org/about/index.cfm

If you are interested in joining the MAPPS organization and reaping the benefits of membership go here.

http://www.mapps.org/join/index.cfm

Welcome to more new LYNX owners

If I had not mentioned it yet, welcome to McKim & Creed out of Florida the fourth LYNX V200 owners to join the revolution.

And even more recently a big welcome to Sanborn out of Colorado as the fifth LYNX V200 owner.

Rumor has it there's a sixth as well, but they have not announced just yet.

ADS LYNX update

Been offline for a while. So I thought i'd update everyone. The LYNX has been busy scanning in OK and TX lately. Currently we are in the process of collecting the majority of the streets in the Tulsa area. This is an exciting project...having seen the accuracies we've been able to achieve and the interest we've been getting from our local engineering firms.

This image is from a collect in Indiana. the bridge is going to be demo'd and replaced.

Entering New Markets an article from Lewis Graham with GeoCue

Entering New Markets

For this article, I am stealing directly from a recent article by Guido Jouret, Chief Technology Officer of Cisco Systems. In this article, Mr. Jouret discussed the criteria for evaluating entries from contestants in the Cisco I-Prize competition. This competition invited anyone to submit ideas for new markets suitable for entry by Cisco. I was struck by the simplicity and applicability to any business of the primary judging criteria:

1. Does it address a real pain point?

2. Will it appeal to a big enough market?

3. Is the timing right?

4. If we pursue the idea, will we be good at it?

5. Can we exploit the opportunity for the long term or would this market commoditize so quickly that we wouldn’t be able to stay profitable?

I would add a sixth rule: “Is it in alignment with our strategic plan and, if not, can our plan be reasonably expanded to include this new business?”

I would strongly advise than any new business endeavor or serious expansion of an existing operation be subjected to similar criteria. The last (my added rule) should be considered first. Far too often I see companies who react to market opportunities without giving adequate consideration to the impact on the current plan. The result is often a dilution of resources that had initially been dedicated to a well conceived forward march. Of course, as I have often pointed out in the past, strategic plans are not cast in stone; they must accommodate changing market conditions and sometimes even be totally revamped.

We could look at Mobile Mapping in terms of these criteria. The question of strategy can only be answered by the company contemplating entering this market. You must ensure that entering the business will be reasonably rational within a modified strategic plan. If you cannot make this work, full stop!

Mobile Mapping definitely addresses several pain points when applied to the appropriate market. For example, it clearly solves the low data resolution and overhead obstruction problems of performing highway and rail surveys from airborne platforms. The appeal and market size questions are often very tough to answer. Most folks entering a new market attempt to address these via “market surveys.” Unfortunately, this often requires more knowledge by your would-be customers than is frequently available (who knew they needed an iPhone?). In these circumstances it might be better to do a replacement cost analysis—are data obtained from mobile mappers less expensive than current sources or do they provide measurable better products than existing methods?

The fourth point is critically important. It is easy to say “we can do anything we set our minds on” but the real point here is can you do it better than your competitors both from the execution and profitability points of view?

The final point is the bane of our industry. We tend to race to the bottom on pricing before we even figure out how to do the job! There is no doubt in my mind that certain aspects of mobile mapping will rapidly become commoditized. Thus the question here is do you offer a product (easily commoditized) or a service (a bit more difficult to commoditize)?

Mobile mapping is just a useful example, The checklist criteria can be very helpful when considering any new endeavor.

Best Regards,

Lewis

Another collection video

New ADS LYNX Mobile Mapper video

AREMA

At the AREMA Conference in Chicago.

All the LYNX owners are here: SAM, McKim & Creed and ADS. Michael Baker could not make it, but I hear they just completed a rail collect making them the second company to prove mobile LiDAR for rail projects.

Everyone at the conference is excited about the mobile data being shown in Optech's booth. SAM has done a great job putting together an animation from the point cloud data we collected at the port of Muskogee, last year.

SAM has their system here and are giving demo's outside of the hotel. It's a very nice setup. I hear they have a Hy-Rail ready to go as well. I should go upstairs and see if the system is installed on the Hy-Rail.

McKim & Creed are taking delivery of theirs in a week or so I think.