When I was in elementary school, Christopher Columbus was a hero. Today people don’t even complain about going to work on a holiday named after him. That tells you just how ugly the true story is. Still, you have to give Columbus credit for sailing across the Atlantic with no idea where he was going (and making it back, and then doing it again three more times). Today we have technology that enables us to always know where we are. Rand McNally is a Skokie, IL based company that played a big part in getting us to this point. They were founded in 1856, and since then they’ve been specializing “in maps, navigation, road travel, and trip planning.”
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Columbus Day isn’t much of a holiday anymore–it’s become yet another regular work and school day for many. It makes sense considering Christopher Columbus wasn’t really the guy that my 1st grade teacher taught me that he was. Still, I’m amazed by the feats of guys like Columbus (which is why I’ve written about Garmin and Facet Technology on past Columbus Days). Getting in a boat with an uncertain route to a far away destination still seems crazy to me, and these guys did it in a time when navigation equipment was quite basic. Their minds would be blown if they knew what kind of information the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (formerly the National Imagery and Mapping Agency) has. The agency is headquartered in Springfield, VA and has major facilities in St. Louis, MO (I learned about them from one of my awesome interns whose boyfriend works for the NGA). They are part of the Department of Defense, and they are tasked with providing “timely, relevant, and accurate geospatial intelligence in support of national security.”
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I’m sure that you’ve all heard of sonar, but how many of you have actually used it? My first real experience with sonar was in college when I was part of a research team trying to find the Finger Lakes equivalent of the Loch Ness Monster. Ok, that’s an exaggeration. I was actually fishing on a friend’s boat, and he taught me how to use a sonar unit to catch Lake Trout. It’s pretty cool—you can actually watch your jig drop down to the bottom of the lake, and you can watch on the screen as little blobs of pixels occasionally chase it—these are fish. It’s half video game, half real life fishing. Obviously, there are far more serious and important uses of sonar, and that’s what Farsounder is all about. They’re a company based in Warwick, RI that “is one of the world leaders in the design, manufacture and marketing of 3D sonar systems for a variety of applications in the commercial, recreational, defense and homeland security markets, internationally as well as domestically.” Two-dimensions is great when you’re fishing, but if you’re navigating a large, expensive ship around underwater obstacles, three-dimensions is the way to go.
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In my day… Columbus Day was a real holiday. Now there’s a huge portion of the population that doesn’t even get the day off. Yes, I understand that Christopher Columbus was a bit overrated as a historical hero (and a lot of the things that we learned about him in grade school were inaccurate), but I’m still amazed that he had the guts and the persistence to make a voyage across the Atlantic happen. Now we’ll barely take a walk down the street without a GPS enabled device in our pocket. Navigation and exploration have a long history, but I’m not sure how much more advancement is possible. Facet Technology would disagree. They’re an Eden Prairie, MN based software and services company that is changing what state of the art means when it comes to the Transportation, Mapping and Food Processing Industries. They’re another Inc. 5000 company with 110.4% three-year growth, and I think they’re going to shoot up the rankings over the next few years.
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Before my fishing trip to Canada last week, I ordered a couple of books from Amazon for some pleasure reading. One of those books was Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)
. I bought it on the recommendation of Ben Casnocha, and I have thoroughly enjoyed the first 200 or so pages (I’ll finish it soon). The book has taught me more about driving than I’ll ever want to know, and it also put me on to NAVTEQ. They are headquartered a half mile away from me here in Chicago (with lots of international offices too) and “a world leader in premium-quality digital map data and content.” One of those premium map features is traffic tracking, which is why they were mentioned in the book. By informing drivers with up to date traffic maps in their vehicles, they not only make driving easier for their users, but they’re also mitigating traffic jams in real time by diverting drivers.
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Ok, it might be politically incorrect to celebrate Columbus Day, but it was just about the only holiday that I had off when I was in college. Maybe it just happened to be a convenient weekend for Fall Break, but I still can’t believe that I didn’t have class on Columbus Day, but did have class on Labor Day (when I went to a School of Industrial and Labor Relations). Anyway, Christopher Columbus wasn’t much of a navigator. He had no idea where he was going, and he tried to take the long way around the world. Still, his ineptitude was the reason that he “discovered” the Americas. Had Garmin been around in the 1490s, Columbus never would have ended up where he did. Then again, the existence of a company built on GPS technology would have changed a lot of things for famous explorers five centuries ago. (Much like the existence of iPods – like the one we’re giving away – would have changed the world for musicians back then.)
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