Business news for the week of 17 October 2008

Past news briefs

September 2008 was a pivotal time for new seismic acquisition technology
6 October 2008—The Piceance Basin near Parachute and Rifle Colorado was the location for testing a new technology for the acquisition of seismic data.

One hundred ninety-nine stations of Fairfield Industries ZLand Autonomous Recording Units were deployed alongside an equal number of an industry-standard, conventionally cabled station units. Both systems simultaneously acquired the same seismic energy from precisely the same receiver locations from the same sources for a two-week period.

The ZLand ARU’s recorded seismic data nonstop for the entire period with zero down time. The ZLand ARU is a completely cable-free recording unit with all required acquisition circuitry, clock, power, memory, and sensor safely contained inside a single sealed unit. There are no cables extending from the ARU.

ERDAS launches ERDAS APOLLO 2009 and IMAGINE Objective
9 October 2008—ERDAS announced the release of ERDAS APOLLO 2009, a geospatial business system that eliminates the walls between GIS, photogrammetry, and remote sensing, extending geospatial data to business applications throughout an organization.

ERDAS APOLLO is a suite of enterprise products that includes ERDAS APOLLO Server, ERDAS APOLLO Image Manager and ERDAS APOLLO solution toolkit.

ERDAS also has released IMAGINE Objective, a new tool providing object-based multi-scale image classification and feature extraction capabilities for building and maintaining accurate geospatial content.

IMAGINE Objective includes a set of tools for feature extraction, update and change detection, enabling geospatial data layers to be created and maintained using remotely sensed imagery. With IMAGINE Objective, imagery and geospatial data of all kinds can be analyzed to produce GIS-ready maps.

Kongsberg purchases GeoAcoustics
9 October 2008—Kongsberg Maritime has signed an agreement to purchase GeoAcoustics. The acquisition will enhance Kongsberg Maritime's market position as GeoAcoustics' products will complement Kongsberg’s product portfolio.

GeoAcoustics has 30 years of experience in underwater acoustics. Its main product within side-scan sonars is the GeoSwath that includes bathymetric dataprocessing.

Petris has partnered with
15 October 2008—Petris announced the strategic partnership formed between Petris and Warrior Technology Services. In this agreement, Petris will be an OEM reseller of Warrior's risk management software solution, UnRiskIT. The reselling agreement allows for the embedding of UnRiskIT into Petris' own solutions as well as for Petris to sell UnRiskIT on a standalone basis.

Petris plans to integrate UnRiskIT with its offerings for the drilling market that include advanced data management (PetrisWINDS Enterprise with RECALL) and integration, project engineering tools (DrillNET), and its planned release of a complete AFE Management solution in PetrisWINDS Operations Center.

KMS Technologies and Mannvit sign contract
17 October 2008—KMS Technologies-KJT Enterprises of the USA, an EMSG/RXT company, and Mannvit of Iceland have signed a master services agreement to jointly develop the geothermal energy resources around the world. KMS Technologies will provide consulting services concerning geophysical exploration technology for geothermal exploration and appraisal to Mannvit. Mannvit has priority access to the preferred geophysical exploration services provided by KMS Technologies.