With ike™, you can gather incredibly rich, georeferenced spatial data sets with point-and-click precision and ease. Packed inside its relatively tiny but rugged casing reside a mobile GIS with a GPS, a digital camera, a compass, an inclinometer which eliminates the need for a tripod, and a laser distance meter. The laser, in fact, also eliminates the need to be on site, allowing for data collection to be conducted from as far away as 1km. The perfect accessory for The Bleex.



In a disaster scenario, for instance, you can photograph and map out the location of breached levees, downed electricity pylons, impassable points on roads and bridges, pockets of survivors, etc., all at a safe distance, then quickly disseminated at headquarters or analyzed on the field by yourself. And the photos, hopefully, should prevent, or at least reduce, the lies and obfuscations at future congressional hearings.

All it needs then is a blog editor and a wireless internet connection. Bloggers embedded as citizen soldier-engineers in post-apocalyptic disaster zones. Reading the terrain, directing aid relief traffic.

Once, for a school project, I was tasked to delineate the border of a large waterbody in a wetland using an ancient GPS device, getting as close as possible to the water's “edge,” whether accessible or not, and shouting at frequent intervals the coordinates to my partner. This had to be done a second time, in fact, after originally misreading the “edge” entirely — only to end up with mildly accurate, incomplete data sets, which someone then painstakingly entered into ArcGIS. Suffice it to say, with ike™, the entire process would have quickly produced far more extensive and far more accurate information. And also been a lot less wet.