Every day at Geo Week News, we publish the most important press releases from the industry to keep those within the industry up-to-date with all of the news they need to know. Of course, we know it can be difficult to keep up with everything coming in, so we’re going to look back at the week that was in the news every Friday to recap the biggest happenings of the last five days. Today, we have a new partnership between geospatial leaders, new CEOs at leading organizations, and more.
Teledyne Geospatial Announces Partnership with Pointerra3D
Today’s geospatial professionals have so many incredible tools at their disposal, but one of the biggest problems you’ll hear from those in the industry is that these tools don’t always play nicely together. In other words, it can be a challenge to connect great hardware with great software, which is why we’re seeing more partnerships between providers today. Along those lines, we saw an example of just that this week with Teledyne Geospatial and Pointerra3D announcing a new partnership that they say will “revolutionize” grid management in the electric utility industry.
The partnership revolves around a new “Network Surveyor” bundle, which combines the hardware from Teledyne Geospatial to collect data for utilities with Pointerra3D’s software, significantly streamlining the process of collecting, processing, and analyzing data for the utility sector. You can read more about this particular partnership in the press release linked above, but this is a sign of the current times and a trend that only figures to continue. Keep on the lookout for more partnerships between companies – particularly hardware and software partnerships – and specifically, partnerships that hone in on specific sectors like this one does with electric utilities.
Industry Leaders Announce New CEOs
Late last year, Hexagon announced a change at the top of their company, with then-CEO Paolo Gugliemini stepping down from the CEO position and Norbert Hanke stepping in on an interim basis in that top position. Now, a little over two months later, they have found their new CEO, announcing this week that Anders Svensson will be taking the position. Svensson is an outside hire, having previously served as the President and CEO of Konecranes. With a new CEO at the helm, it will be interesting to see what comes next for one of the leading digital reality companies in the world.
Meanwhile, we also saw one of the biggest AEG (Architecture, Engineering, and Geospatial) organizations in the United States name a new leader to their company this week. Woolpert, whose former CEO Scott Cattran is moving to a new role as executive chairman, announced this week that Neil Churman is being promoted to CEO. Churman, according to the company’s announcement, was initially recruited by Cattran in 2022 and most recently has served as the company’s president and led their business operations and M&A program.
Other News
The U.S. Institute of Building Documentation (USIBD) announced Version 3.1 of its Level of Accuracy Specification this week, a crucial tool for ensuring consistency in building documentation. The new version includes improved graphics, refined content, and more. Additionally, USIBD announced a newly designed website and a new education center, the latter being a crucial addition for an industry that is desperate for new and re-skilled workers.
While we generally cover laser scanners for larger spaces, smaller handheld scanners are also crucial for engineering workflows that require accurate models of individual assets. To that end, FARO Technologies has entered this smaller scanner market with the release of their Leap ST scanner, which in the company’s words makes them “one of the few companies offering customers a complete range of portable 3D metrology devices.”
In the aerial imagery space, EagleView has announced a new property data ecosystem this week. They say that the ecosystem has over 60 petabytes of asset data derived from high-definition aerial imagery. For the real estate and insurance industries, we know that geospatial technology can be a boon for their businesses, and this aims to put some of that crucial data into a single place.
Topcon Positioning Systems offers a reference station network known as Topnet Live to its user base of surveyors, and this week they announced a “significant” expansion of the service. This expansion includes 200 new geodetic stations around the U.S., and they say “expands the availability of advanced centimeter-level accuracy for precision-critical industries, including engineering, surveying, construction, and agricultural sectors.”
Artificial Intelligence is significantly changing the way a lot of geospatial work is done, and we know that it can streamline classification workflows with point cloud data. Flai is a company built around those capabilities, and they announced this week a new self-hosted solution which will be shown off at this year’s Geo Week conference, being held February 10-12 in Denver, Colorado.
