Tina Cary of Cary and Associates is on location at the annual American society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing conference in Washington D.C. She sends us some updates on the latest happenings from the event.

The Annual Meeting of ASPRS, The Imaging and Spatial Information Society, has convened at the Omni Shoreham in Washington, D.C. with over 2100 people registered so far. Monday, 22 May, the business of the day included committee meetings, user group meetings, and six workshops. On Tuesday, in addition to more committee meetings, user group meetings, and eight workshops, there was also a classified technical session and three fora: FGDC, USGS, and NDEP. Tuesday evening, the Potomac Region of ASPRS hosted a “Welcome to Washington” reception, which was scheduled to end at 6:30. When your reporter left at 7:00 p.m., about a hundred people were still talking. The exchange of ideas that is the essence of a professional meeting was well underway!

Wednesday, Lieutenant General James C. King, the Director of NIMA, gave the keynote address. If met the full range of criteria for a good keynote speech: humor, range and vision, and it provided material for conversations at the evening reception.

A nice news note making the rounds is that Jack Dangermond has been selected to be this year’s recipient of the Brock Award, which will be presented at ISPRS in July. The Brock Award is sponsored by ASPRS and is the most prestigious of ISPRS awards.

So far, only one rumor about another company being purchased has reached your reporter. If rumors are based in fact, we will hear an announcement in a couple of weeks about a big acquisition.

The educational sessions got underway after the keynote address. The program also included tours of NIMA and USGS. At 1:00 p.m. the Exhibition opened,with 78 organizations exhibiting this year. The Opening Reception was scheduled from 5:00 to 6:30 p.m. People were still watching demos and talking till seven.

Cary and Associates was founded in early 1998 by Dr. Tina Cary to provide marketing services in the geospatial technologies -- remote sensing, photogrammetry, geographic information systems (GIS), surveying, and global positioning systems (GPS). Available services include market research, training, planning and implementation.