The Week in Geospatial, 3D, and AEC News: GNSS Acquisition, Location Intelligence, Industrial Metaverse – Geo Week News

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Every day at Geo Week News, we publish the most important press releases from the industry to keep those within the industry up-to-date with all of the news they need to know. Of course, we know it can be difficult to keep up with everything coming in, so we’re going to look back at the week that was in the news every Friday to recap the biggest happenings of the last five days. Today, we have a significant acquisition for the positioning industry, a partnership between two location analytics leaders, and more.
Coming out of the new year, things are still a bit slow in terms of news, but there was a significant acquisition announced this week with Hexagon buying GNSS technologies provider Septentrio. The official completion of the transaction is subject to regulatory approvals but is expected to be finalized in the first half of the year. Once completed, Hexagon interim CEO Norbert Hanke believes that the combination of the two companies will “transform the positioning industry across existing and new markets, setting new standards for the accuracy, resilience and scalability of positioning technologies, necessary to support and accelerate the journey towards full autonomy.”
Geo Week News will have more coverage of the acquisition next week, but for now, follow the link above for more preliminary information about the transaction.
TomTom and Esri are two of the biggest names in location analytics today, with the former serving as the leader in GIS technology and the latter being among the leaders in location technology. This week, the two companies announced a new partnership that will integrate TomTom’s global map and traffic data into ArcGIS’s geospatial platform. In their release of the news, TomTom says that the data will provide organizations with insights into needs ranging from the maintenance of infrastructure to studying traffic flows to optimizing retail site selection, among other uses.
This is not the first experience these two organizations have working together, with Esri serving as a general member of Overture Maps Foundation, a group for which TomTom was one of the founding members. OMF’s ethos is entirely about collaboration around map and location data, and this partnership embodies that idea.
Sticking with TomTom, the company also announced a new feature with this Orbis Maps platform, announcing a new 3D lane geometry with what they term “unprecedented” coverage.
HERE Technologies, another location data organization, made a couple of its own announcements this week at CES. In one, they announced a new AI-powered guidance assistance for vehicles and transportation companies. Additionally, they announced a new collaboration with Amazon Web Services.
It was a busy week for the location and map services sector, with Mapbox making an announcement of its own. In this one, the company will integrate its navigation services with Cerence AI’s solutions.
Finally, bringing things back to CES, we already talked about some of the announcements around the industrial metaverse and robotics made at this year’s events. In addition to what’s mentioned in that article, we also saw Siemens and Sony bringing together their products for the industrial metaverse. Additionally, Siemens also announced Teamcenter Digital Reality Viewer, a new software solution to bring NVIDIA’s Omniverse platform and accelerated computing to Teamcenter.
Matt Collins is a Content Specialist at Geo Week. Prior to joining Diversified Communications, Matt covered the world of baseball and other sports for over a decade. When not writing he enjoys learning about new developments in the world of technology, spending time outdoors, and reading.