March/April 2026 Archives
Worlds Colliding: Sensor Fusion, Platform Modularity, and the New Architecture of Geospatial Data Collection
At Geo Week 2026 in Denver, one of the industry’s most experienced voices in multi-sensor positioning argues that the real transformation isn’t in any single instrument — it’s in how the instruments learn to work together. Mohamed Mostafa has been thinking about sensor fusion longer than most people in the geospatial industry have been using […]
The Duct Tape Principle
The geospatial industry has never been short on capability. That said, industry leaders have learned to look beyond the technology, to lead with problems instead of solutions. The most successful seek to find the places where people are improvising, stitching together workarounds, doing something difficult and expensive because no better option exists, and to start […]
Seeing Through the Water: Inside Leica’s CoastalMapper
The new four-channel bathymetric sensor redefines what airborne hydrographic surveying can cover — and how fast Airborne bathymetric lidar has always been a physics argument. The physics are largely fixed: green laser light at 532 nanometers penetrates water in ways that infrared does not, but the water column itself attenuates the signal, and the degree […]
Pix4D’s Platform Moment: From Photogrammetry Engine to Enterprise Reality
Fifteen years into the UAV software revolution, Pix4D’s CTO sees Gaussian splatting, AI-assisted editing, and the smartphone-as-surveying-instrument converging into something bigger than any single tool. When Pix4D was founded in 2011 as a spin-off from EPFL’s Computer Vision Lab in Lausanne, the pitch was essentially this: drones are coming, and someone has to turn the […]
Since Precision Exists: How Topcon Is Reframing Construction Through Geospatial Intelligence
At ConExpo, some booths display products. Others project momentum. Topcon did both. From the aisle, the scene was hard to miss. The booth was busy almost constantly, each kiosk crowded with a rotating mix of current customers, future customers, partners, dealers, and industry observers and media. Demonstrations ran continuously. Conversations layered over one another. Specialists […]
Between the Scanner and the Deliverable: How Mach9 is Building the Missing Layer in Geospatial Production
A Carnegie Mellon-trained roboticist who learned surveying in a coal mine and mapped uranium deposits inside decommissioning pipes is now building what he calls a new category of software — one that sits at the intersection of CAD, GIS, and the physical world. Alex Baikovitz did not set out to build CAD software. He set […]