The McDonnell Group

Leading LiDAR and data acquisition firm purchases U.S. assets of Powel AS to fortify market leading position in utility vegetation management

HAMILTON, ONTARIO / ST. PAUL, Minn. – Dec. 1, 2011 -- Norway’s Powel AS today sold the assets of its U.S. subsidiary Powel, Inc., to digital mapping, imaging and data acquisition services firm GeoDigital International Inc. The deal strengthens GeoDigital’s position as a leading provider of distributed infrastructure management solutions and expands its leading position in the fast growing utility vegetation management and Transmission Line Re-rating marketplace.

GeoDigital, with offices across the U.S. and Canada, has acquired the mobile work management product line of Powel, Inc., including the WorkStudio® application suite for managing utility field design, vegetation maintenance, outage recovery and mapping.  All current Powel, Inc., employees, software assets, customers and facilities will form a new software and analytics division GeoDigital Solutions, Inc.  The division will be responsible for software development and the integration of complementary technologies into turnkey enterprise solutions for utilities and other asset intensive industries including rail, oil and gas, transportation, and telecommunications.

“WorkStudio, with its market leading stakeout field design and vegetation management capabilities, represents the unifying system technology that our customers have been asking for,” said GeoDigital president and CEO Alastair N. Jenkins, in explaining the rationale for the acquisition.  “This acquisition brings us an unrivalled capability and portfolio to cost-effectively transform data collected from our leading edge services into actionable, money saving solutions for our customers.  WorkStudio has been designed from the ground up for distributed linear asset environments and utility design and vegetation management functions, but we also see immense opportunity in other industries with heavy asset management and right-of-way maintenance needs.”

( &feature=youtu.be" target="_blank">See GeoDigital video presentation here)

GeoDigital integrates the world’s most advanced imaging and data acquisition technologies to perform airborne and ground mapping services with LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) for applications that include vegetation management and line rating & clearance analysis.  Powel’s applications, such as its leading StakeOut® field design and VegWorks® vegetation maintenance tools, are able to quickly format spatial data collected by the GeoDigital systems into highly detailed asset inventories for field maintenance planning, execution and regulatory compliance reporting.

SGCC’s Consumer Pulse and Market Segmentation Study finds five distinct segments based on nationally representative survey of beliefs, behaviors, demographics

ATLANTA – November 13, 2011 – Residential U.S. electric consumers fall into five distinct segments that influence their willingness to participate in energy management programs, according to the SGCC’s Consumer Pulse and Market Segmentation Study, a national research project conducted for the Smart Grid Consumer Collaborative (SGCC) by Market Strategies International.

Unlike other segmentation studies to date, SGCC’s Consumer Pulse and Market Segmentation Study is a nationally representative telephone survey that has been used to create a richer, more actionable segmentation framework. The study spent more than twenty minutes per phone call, delving deeply into beliefs, attitudes, behaviors and demographics. The results were then combined with specific energy data to create meaningful insight into consumer lifestyles, attitudes, values, motivations and communication preferences.