I just checked and it's been nearly five and months since I posted on this blog other than one recent post which I removed as it's not relevant to this blog. So starting today I'm going to try and make an effort to post more often and share my ideas and comment on some of my favourite topics. And as you can see I've updated the look of the blog, giving it a cleaner look.
So what's kept me so busy that I've no time to blog?
As some of you know I spend most of time working on projects for the two companies and one organization I founded. So here's a rundown of what I've been doing for each.
SpaceRef - Last October we celebrated our 7th anniversary and with time SpaceRef has grown to encompass 18 web properties and has over 600,000 monthly unique visitors now. Not bad for a project that started as a little hobby and non-commercial. Right now the push is on for a major upgrade to SpaceRef which will take many months and will see new services phased in over that time. You should expect to see some of the changes by Yuri's Night on April 12th.
Mars Institute - It's hard to believe but the Mars Institute is now just over 4 years old. And I'm very happy to say that we've met our initial goals and have started to expand the way we envisioned. Our major project is the Haughton-Mars Project (HMP) which is an ongoing effort with participants from around the world. This past year the HMP celebrated it's 10th anniversary. Our largest participant organization at this moment is the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) which we signed a multi-year contract with in 2005 valued at over $2,000,000 to provide them logistic support. At this time we're preparing for this summers field season on Devon Island.
Also keeping us busy is the PRIME: Phobos Reconnaissance and International Mars Exploration concept study we're doing in collaboration with Optech and MDA for the Canadian Space Agency. In mid-January we held the PRIME science team meeting in Vancouver and discussed all the scientific aspects of the concept study. Some innovative ideas came from that meeting which will be in the final report we'll provide the CSA when the study is completed.
aTerra - My oldest company and the one I do the least with up until now. Most people have never heard of aTerra, and no wonder, I don't promote it much. But in the past I've done some good work building niche web directories, web crawlers and search engine applications. Last year I started a new project, I'll call it Project Phoenix, as it's the rebirth of aTerra, and basically it's an enterprise class search engine with several new web crawlers for different tasks. It's been slow going, trying to work on it in spurts when there's time but I'm happy to stay that progress is being made by my small team of engineers and sometime later this year we'll unveil our first public beta of a new vertical search engine.
Well I think that's good update on what I've been doing.