Mapping your solar potential...

Bristol City Council have now gone ‘live’ and published an online map highlighting potential untapped revenue across the region. The map, freely available on the council’s website, shows the expected solar power generation if PV panels were fitted to building rooftops throughout Bristol.

Produced in part by leading aerial survey specialist Blom, a map on this scale is the first of its kind in the UK, and was funded as part of a government grant.

 The map highlighting the solar potential of buildings on a backdrop of Blom magery

Nearly a quarter of a million buildings have been assessed, with a surprising third of these understood to be suitable to take advantage of the Government’s Feed-in Tariff scheme. It is hoped that it will encourage residents and businesses to invest into solar energy and further boost Bristol’s credentials as a leading ‘Green City’.

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Blom Launches V3.2 of Blomdesktop viewer™

Blom announces the release of version 3.2 of the BlomDESKTOP Viewer, desktop application for geospatial data, with enhanced features and a collection of new functionalities, tools and datasets.

The main features of this new version of BlomDESKTOP Viewer are based on enhancing the user experience with new datasets such as the spherical imagery of BlomSTREET™ and high resolution LiDAR models.

To enhance the capability of the BlomSTREET product, BlomDESKTOP Viewer 3.2 now provides a complete integration with the Cyclomedia API offering full measurement capabilities of points, lines, heights, areas and volumes as well as year filtering, export, print and vector reprojection capabilities. New BlomSTREET datasets are also being added to our catalogue.

BlomSTREET datasets viewed within BlomDESKTOP

BlomDESKTOP Viewer LiDAR features have been developed to allow our users to work with continuous LiDAR models online, retrieving new data from the servers as needed and minimizing the needs to manually load new areas when moving to different sections of terrain. A powerful terrain profile tool is also included. It is now possible to define terrain profiles over the maps or imagery and extract the data from the LiDAR datasets to perform on-the-fly detailed measures of objects, making BlomDESKTOP Viewer and invaluable tool for utilities and forestry companies among others.

LiDAR dataset and profile extraction

Featuring additional enhancements to the user interface (help messages, tooltips, north compass, metadata information on-screen…) and performance, there is also a new, powerful way of geocoding address points using locally stored shapefiles. This includes the ability for the user to define fields to be used in the geocoding process.

BlomDESKTOP Viewer continues providing a complete showcase of Blom online geoservers capabilities, BlomURBEX™ and BlomURBEX 3D™, in terms of functionality and available datasets, including access to third party geospatial data from Blom partners and Blom’s unique database of BlomORTHO™, BlomOBLIQUE™ and Blom3D™ datasets.

Applications for BlomDESKTOP Viewer are vast, from exporting imagery for evidence reports or presentations, to use as an asset management tool. The software can be easily used throughout an organization with minimal installation effort and a small amount of training time.

BlomDESKTOP Viewer will update itself to version 3.2 when launched. If you do not have the application installed yet, contact your local Blom representatives to provide you a license for the application.

About Blom
The Blom Group is the largest provider of geospatial services in Europe for both government agencies and private commercial organizations and companies. Blom owns exclusive spatial databases composed of maps, images and 3D models. Focused on online services, Blom provides data and solutions to its customers in many markets and allows its partners to create high added-value applications based on Blom data models and services. This strategy is backed by Blom’s major technical capacity in aircrafts, cameras, laser scanners and mapping systems. This makes it possible for all projects to be carried out within the company, assuring a high quality product is delivered both on-time and to budget. Blom has more than 1,000 employees and offices in 13 countries and its HQ is located in Oslo, Norway. Blom is listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange (ticker BLO). For more information, visit www.blomasa.com

The publication of AGI member press releases is a member service. The AGI neither approves or endorses the contents of member's press releases, nor makes any assurance of their factual accuracy.

TomTom expands partnership with Blom to improve road networks in Europe

With the help of TomTom's professional traffic analysis tools, Blom – a European provider of GIS services – can now enable governments in Europe to identify and solve the bottlenecks in their road network quickly and at reduced costs. TomTom and Blom already cooperate in creating the largest 3D city model database and are now expanding their partnership to support Blom in selling TomTom's advanced traffic products.

With TomTom's unique traffic products, Blom can support municipalities, regions, provinces and national government authorities across Europe with bottleneck analysis, evaluation studies and investment proposals in order to help their customers improve travel times for the entire European road network. TomTom's historical traffic database includes more than five trillion anonymous data points and continues to grow with over six billion data points collected per day.

"The expansion of our partnership with Blom is proof of the growing demand for advanced traffic analysis to help reduce traffic congestion and save costs," said Nuno Campos, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for TomTom Licensing. "With the addition of TomTom's accurate historical traffic analyses, Blom can help speed up policy and decision-making within governments."

"Blom are always looking to bring innovative solutions to the marketplace and we believe that TomTom's historic traffic analysis technology is one such example.

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Blom ASA and Unicom announce important contract win in Saudi Arabia

Blom CGR, the Italian subsidiary of Blom ASA, has partnered with the Saudi Arabian firm Unicom to secure a contract with the Development Commission of Medina (DCOM). The contract involves providing professional services for the production of base maps and 3D modelling of the city of Medina in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Blom's advanced capture technologies will produce accurate and high resolution data; the deliverables consist of LiDAR, aerial photo and BlomOBLIQUE™. Blom's data will form a unique geospatial base in DCOMs sophisticated database sharing service, providing an encompassing solution.

"Blom is proud to have been awarded this first contract in conjunction with Unicom. The data we will make available for the Development Commission of Medina will provide a fantastic return on investment when used for Urban Planning." said Giovanni Banchini, Country Manager of Blom CGR

Blom's share of the contract is NOK 8 million. The contract will be completed within 4th quarter 2012.

The publication of AGI member press releases is a member service. The AGI neither approves or endorses the contents of member's press releases, nor makes any assurance of their factual accuracy.

Blom ASA signs agreement to divest its Danish subsidiary Blominfo a/s

Blom ASA (Blom) has signed an agreement to divest its Danish subsidiary BlomInfo A/S to the Danish engineering and consulting company NIRAS A/S.

Blom will receive a consideration of DKK 19.4 million as compensation for the equity in BlomInfo A/S and working capital provided by Blom to BlomInfo A/S. After the completion date Blom may receive up to an additional DKK 4.5 million as further repayment of the working capital in BlomInfo A/S.

The transaction is expected to be completed within the end of next week.

The transaction comprises the activities of BlomInfo A/S in Denmark and certain projects for mapping and property registration carried out outside Denmark. The transaction does not comprise the shares hold by BlomInfo A/S in PT Blom Nusantara, Indonesia (95%), Blom Romania SRL, Romania (100%),  Blom Bulgaria EODD, Bulgaria (100%), BlomInfo Polska Sp.zo.o., Poland (100%), Blom Kosova Shpk, Kosovo (100%)  and BlomInfo Ukraine Ltd., Ukraine (51%), which ownership will remain with Blom.

BlomInfo A/S had 42 employees at 30. September 2011 and its Board and Management consisted of the following members:

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