In an interesting take on the use of UAVs, a clothing company has flown examples of their wares above Sao Paulo, so that the hard-working executives located in its skyscrapers could peruse their sale items without leaving their desks. Crazy stuff.

Also speaking of novel uses of UAVs, IEEE Spectrum talks of drones being used for taking inventory of warehouses.

Further on the topic of drones, O’Reilly Radar asks the question: ‘Drone Delivery: Real or fantasy?’ where they examine the running costs of drones compared to the (surprisingly cheap) existing courier networks.

GIS Lounge have revisited the on-going debate between land surveyors and GIS professionals, concluding that it’s more than possible for them both to get along – it’s a match made in heaven.

LiDAR News has info on the world’s first head-of-state portrait conducted in 3D – President Obama’s head has been 3D scanned and 3D printed for posterity. The post even includes a video that’s interesting to watch.

GeoAwesomeness has posted a link to an amazing interactive map that charts the locations of 6.3 billion geotagged tweets created over the last 3.5 years. What’s especially impressive is that the Twitter API only allows access to a few days’ worth of data, so the creator of the map has been compiling the data in JSON format to create the immense dataset himself. How immense? It’s currently at 3 terabytes, and is growing by 4 GB per day. Truly big data.

They also have some news regarding ancient lakes on Mars, which is pretty darn cool.

Finally Maps Mania has a really pretty visualisation/map of US Rivers, coloured based on their direction of flow.