RouteShoot Shortlisted for Alarm Risk Awards 2016 Product of the Year Award

RouteShoot Limited is thrilled to announce that our GPS Tagged Video platform has been shortlisted for the Product of the Year Award! Winners will be announced at the Alarm Risk Awards Dinner being held at the Palace Hotel, Manchester on the 27th June 2016. 

The Alarm Risk Awards celebrate those public service and community organisations who have maintained effective and innovative forward momentum in the management of risk. 

This Product of the Year Award recognises those companies who have provided an effective product or solution that has assisted public service or community organisations in managing their risks. 

Aerial Surveillance and Spatial Multimedia

Waterways, Pipelines, electrical transmission lines and railroads all require inspection of assets.

The aerial survey has emerged as a credible solution.

Now, the use of video and digital photographs as well as its audio commentary is an invaluable tool for documentation and communication. Helicopter patrol and video recording is now an industry norm. The recordings extend the time in which visual assessment can be conducted and potentially enable the cooperative review of asset conditions by a body of expert inspectors.

With many of these patrols the video remains recorded to tape. While this format is reliable and seemingly low cost it can only be forced to recall detail with some difficulty. Therefore, tape based systems are changing to digital forms. When digital multimedia is accepted, all sorts of enterprise information can be associated with that content.

Geotagging, sometimes referred to as Geocoding, is the process of adding geographical identification to various media such as images, or video. This data usually consists of latitude and longitude coordinates, though it can also include altitude, bearing, place names, and other data.

RouteShoot uniquely complements that commitment to this technical change. And it is this spatial indexing of video patrols that radically shifts the utility of the visual inventory. Once spatialised as a set of map-indexed patrol pathways, the current and past conditions of the corridor landscape and its infrastructures can be shared and intuitively accessed across the organisation.

RouteShoot provides a solid foundation for geographically disperse asset management and timely decision support without incurring the expense associated with multiple on-site visits. Because the mapped multimedia content is available over a network, everyone in an organisation has simultaneous access to the store of information.

Geo-referenced Spatial Multimedia Application

There has always been a gap between map features and representation and visualisation in GIS maps.

This gap is now being filled by spatial multimedia. Spatial Multimedia brings geo-referenced video multimedia and digital, interactive mapping capabilities to the desktop of the planning professionals.

Transportation planners and other environmental agencies face enormous challenges in monitoring and interpreting traffic situations on daily basis. The implementation of Spatial Multimedia Applications with geo-referenced video images is seen as key to meeting these challenges.

The ability to visually explore and navigate these dynamic scenarios through video imagery is an important function of Spatial Multimedia. Hence, the use of Video mapping or geo-referencing in Spatial Multimedia applications has become vital in the representation and visualisation of planning scenarios, especially in traffic situations. 

It has recently become a lucrative component of the mapping industry because of its ability to extend the cognitive abilities of planners and enhance consensus on issues amongst and across levels of decision makers.

It doesn't stop there though. Spatial Multimedia can be used across an array of sectors including:

Municipalities

Municipalities for managing its civic amenities in many cities. The application of Spatial Multimedia would be highly useful for this purpose.

• Asset inventory
• Maintenance planning
• Quality assurance

Utilities

Water, Sewer, Gas pipeline and electric utilities have started using Spatial Multimedia technologies for the operation, management, and servicing of assets.

RouteShoot provides the utility market with a highly versatile, cost-effective, and easily integrated solution that enables better decision-making. We offer a fully automated process for the geo-referencing and mapping of digital photographs, video, and audio. More importantly, we provide you with tools that dramatically enhance the use and sharing of field data - right from your desktop.

Transport and Engineering

• Rail Track Management
• Highway maintenance
• Site surveying
• Construction phase reporting and monitoring
• Asset Management

From Drone to the Field

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are becoming the go to technology in the mapping business for collecting aerial imagery.

UAVs have quickly become a truly disruptive technology in the geospatial industry. The ability to quickly send an inexpensive and flexible platform of sensors into the air to survey your surroundings, and receive near real time feedback, has opened the door to countless opportunities for data collection and analytics.

We see UAV technology as a major opportunity to enhance both the efficiency and the quality of data collected in the field. In order to keep ahead of this technology, our development team have spent some time over the past few weeks looking into how RouteShoot can support the ever growing file formats produced by UAV's.

The processes are still in development, but we’re making considerable progress in showcasing how readily UAV-based imagery can be deployed on the ground in real-world scenarios for various operations.

Local Road Financing Innovations in the Philippines

Access to global markets can move a new business from a backyard garage to a local warehouse to a global network. In fact, small businesses that export are more productive, have greater job growth and are more likely to stay financially solvent than non-exporters.

In 2014 RouteShoot were contacted by the World Bank who were seeking a collaborative tool that would assist in the monitoring of strategic investments in local roads in the Philippines. The World Bank is a United Nations international financial institution that provides loans to developing countries for capital programs, with a membership of 188 countries, 6 official languages and 12,000 plus staff and consultants who work in Washington, DC and in more than 130 countries worldwide.

The Department for Public Works and Highways (DPWH) vowed to further upgrade and fully pave the national network, and finance, implement, and monitor strategic investments in local roads in the Philippines. The current Aquino administration, governing from mid-2010 to 2016, has prioritised over $3billion for Farm to Market Roads (FMRs) and Tourism Road Infrastructure (TRIP) alone.

In August 2014 the World Bank approved the Philippines Rural Development Program (PRDP), of which the majority of the $500million financing is allocated for FMRs. The Rural Development Project for the Philippines aims to increase rural incomes and enhance farm and fishery productivity in targeted areas by supporting smallholders and fishers to increase their marketable surpluses and their access to markets.

The Philippines, and for that matter most local governments, have no comprehensive, open, and validated map to their road network and those levels of government responsible for it. Main road investment programs have historically been both opaque and highly politicised. Project budget credibility has been weak, with roads being apparently funded not getting built. Tracking public roads investments from budgeting, procurement, implementation, audit, and maintenance has more often than not been a broken chain.

In September 2014 RouteShoot partnered with web developers out in the Philippines to create an on-line interactive, Open Government, multi-media platform to digitally map the whole national and local roads network in the Philippines, and track associated priority public investment projects.

The platform called 'Open Roads' captures geo-coded digital images and videos through notably mobile devices to promote better planning, budgeting, procurement, implementation, and participatory audits. More timely and better information across the public investment delivery chain provides the basis for closing feedback and performance monitoring loops. RouteShoot has now become a government mandated tool that must be used as part of the project management process across the the Philippine archipelago comprising 7,107 islands. 

In February 2016, RouteShoot and the World Bank signed a new extension to the contract which saw a couple of our team heading out to visit the guys in the Philippines. A blog post published by the World Bank discussing 'Local road financing innovations in the Philippiness' can be found here:

http://blogs.worldbank.org/governance/no-movie-no-map-no-money-local-road-financing-innovations-philippines

Announcing Expanded Features

RouteShoot sees the release of some brand new features. The entire RouteShoot team has remained focused and operated with purpose over the past year to bring you some highly powerful features!

Route List:

In the top left hand corner of the journal map you will notice there is a 'route list'. By clicking the drop down menu this will allow you to quickly select from a list of routes that have been randomly colour coordinated for visual ease.

Rotate:

When selected, the rotate feature orientates the map so that the direction of travel is always upwards. 

Measuring Tool:
Use the measuring tool to draw a line or polygon on the map to determine the geographic length or area.



We’re blown away by how RouteShoot has grown recently and we’re excited to evolve it even further in the coming year. 

RouteShoot - Geo-referenced Video For Everyone

Video capture has historically been costly, requiring dedicated cameras and hardware. In order to conduct roadway alignment surveys, or construction site reviews using video documentation, it involved loaning out extremely expensive equipment to surveyors, then waiting to pull together the data manually in the back-office for review.

Using consumer-grade hardware (like Android devices or iPhones), teams can use the device they carry everywhere to document quick clips, or mount the device in their vehicle to drive the length of a road widening project, then sync everything they’ve captured up to the centralised cloud account for management and review. RouteShoot even has an option to record the audio track with the video, so an inspector can make voice annotations and comments as they’re walking a construction site or a facility inspection.

Within the RouteShoot iOS and Android apps, you also have total control over video quality, both resolution and frame rate. Based on your needs, being able to adjust quality gives you a way to manage file sizes and storage.

Along with the GPS location track, our video recorder also logs the heading, time, speed, distance, and even the altitude. 

Combined with high-resolution imagery, this allows you to identify buildings, road signs, poles, and lots more right from the imagery as you’re scrubbing through your collected video. 

With high definition video, pausing the clip gives you nice crisp frames for picking out features.

Check out the 'Edition Comparison' page to see which plan is right for you to get started using video capture. Also grab the latest updates to the iOS or Android app to get access from mobile, including a host of other new features.

Stay tuned to the blog and follow us on Twitter for more news on additional announcements.