As every year ends it is almost inevitable to reminisce. We have had a rather interesting year with quite some success stories and let us think of only those... Early in the year, WorldView-1 imagery became available soon followed by GeoEye -1 data at 0.41cm resolution. The Indian Cartosat-2A was successfully deployed along with nine other satellites. Heralding a new era, the RapidEye Constellation was launched - five imaging satellites in a single launch...The Chandrayaan-1 is imaging the moon. BOEING and ImSAR have developed the first NanoSAR as a UAV payload. On the applications front the World Wide Telescope from Microsoft, WOEID 2.0 and FireEagle from Yahoo and The One Geology initiative were some of the interesting offerings. The under-sea-3D is an application which Google is working on and we should soon be virtually diving into the deep blue.

On the Policy front, Ministers from thirty nine countries and the European Community agreed in principle to 'promote the Internet economy and stimulate sustainable economic growth' at OECD Ministerial Meeting in Seoul. The 'Guidelines for Access to Research Data from Public Funding' and the 'Recommendations for Enhanced Access and More Effective Use of Public Sector Information' should satisfy the 'Free Our Data' campaign launched in the UK as well as the 'unshackle the maps...' mission started by GIS Development in India in 1999... Cheers to USGS for its 'free LandSat Data' program and to DMCii for its free data initiative, Akshay Rajagopal a sixth grader made “Cochabamba” and “conurbation” famous. He took top honours at the 2008 National Geographic Bee in the United States. He won the $25,000 prize money and a lifetime membership of the National Geographic Society.

A lot more has happened in the last 52 weeks and the choice of success stories was huge. To windup - just for a few laughs, this news takes the cake as the best April Fool's idea 'Tracking Service for Public Pay Phones also to monitor Graffiti Change detection...'

wish you all a happy and peaceful 2009.