ASM
Ipernica Acquires NearMap
Ipernica Ltd has agreed to pay $16 million for NearMap, a company founded by Stuart Nixon in Australia after he sold ERMapper to Leica Geosystems.
Ipernica was formerly known as QPSX. It was founded in 1987 to commercialise Distributed Queue Dual Bus technology invented at the University of Western Australia. The company was a joint venture between the university and the telecommunications company, Telstra.
DQDB later became the basis of the IEEE802.6 standard used in metropolitan area networks. The family of IEEE802 standards forms the basis of local, metropolitan and wide area computer networks.
Over the years Ipernica has transformed itself into an intellectual property company with investments in diverse advanced technologies.
Ipernica says NearMap is attractive because it has developed technologies for mosaicing large amounts of very high definition imagery.
Imagery is sourced from the HyperPod aerial camera system, which consists of four oblique cameras and one nadir camera. It generates about a Gigabyte of data per second.
This bit stream is processed by HyperVision software into a seamless image of the area. It runs on supercomputer clusters.
The Hyperweb then distributes this data online.
Neither Ipernica or NearMap have released any information on the new products, except the minimum necessary to satisfy their obligations to the stock exchange.
Apparently, the system can produce a complete city-wide image at 5-cm resolution within a few days, although the company has not released any other metrics of its performance.
The company has not released any information on demonstration sites or early adopters, although in a note to the ASX, Ipernica says NearMap traded profitably in 2007/08. Ipernica will invest $1 million in NearMap this year.
Ipernica's managing director, Graham Griffiths, says the company will begin sales and marketing around the end of the year. It is not clear whether it will sell the technology, either in components or as a compete system, or whether it intends to compete directly with Microsoft and Google in the production of high resolution city views.
