Sunday, December 09, 2012

Former Space Agency President Joins Canadian Space Start-up


Mac Evans knows the way this "WIND" is blowing.
William MacDonald ("Mac") Evans, a 34-year veteran of Canadian public service, the key architect of the 1985, 1994 and 1999 Federal government space plans, Canadian Space Agency (CSA) president from 1994 - 2001 and recent contributor to the David Emerson led Aerospace Review has joined the board of directors of Canadian space start-up UrtheCast.

The formal announcement was made by UrtheCast in the December 7th, 2012 press release "UrtheCast Appoints Former Canadian Space Agency President To Its Board." According to the press release, Evans "will help guide the international tech startup in providing the video stream from the International Space Station (ISS)."

As outlined in the December 2nd, 2012 Commercial Space blog post "Space Start-up UrtheCast Named One of Canada's Most Innovative Companies,". the company intends to install two digital cameras (one medium and one high resolution) on the Russian segment of the International Space Station (ISS) over the next year in order to stream near-live video and static imagery to Earth and offer those images for sale.

It's worth noting that UrtheCast Chairman Tony Lacavera, is also the Chairman and CEO of of Globalive Communications Corporation and Chairman of WIND Mobile.

According to UrtheCast Chairman of the Board Tony Lacavera, the next battleground in the telecommunications world is content and specifically “over-the-top content.” According to Lacavera, “I’ve been looking where I can get involved in companies that will be manufacturing content that is both unique and also hard to replicate. And that’s specifically why UrtheCast got my attention.

According to Evans, UrtheCast is "going to bring Earth observation information directly to the consumer with their web-based portals and all that sort of stuff. And quite an intriguing approach to do that because (previously) we would always scratch our heads over how to commercialize Earth observation data and moving it into the consumer realm seemed to be a very difficult task. And I think the UrtheCast approach is quite promising.

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