The term “geofencing” is popping up all over discussions of location-based services, with a special focus on its use in retailing. Why are geofences “hot” and how can retailers interested in leveraging geospatial technology and data best use the invisible boundaries?Directions Magazine posed those questions to Rip Gerber, CEO of Locaid, a location-as-a-service company.

In March, American Sentinel University announced new learning tools for students in its Master of Geospatial Information degree program, including a learning lab and competency-based badges. Directions Magazine interviewed Dr. Stephen McElroy, GIS program chair at American Sentinel University, about these innovations.

NASA Earth science researchers traveled to Turrialba Volcano, near San Jose, Costa Rica, to fly a Dragon Eye unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) -- a small electric aircraft equipped with cameras and sensors -- into the volcano’s sulfur dioxide plume and over its summit crater, to study Turrialba’s chemical environment. This article explains how researchers want to improve the remote-sensing capability of satellites and computer models of volcanic activity.

In September 2012, Jim Tobias, a Senior GIS Developer with Northrop Grumman in Atlanta GA, was deployed to an onsite mission in Sierra Leone. The request for volunteer came from World Vision and was for a GIS/GPS Specialist to undertake mapping of health and education facilities in Area Development Programs (ADP)s within 4 districts (Kono, Pujehun, Bo, and Bonthe). Jim stayed in Sierra Leone for three weeks (9/15 - 10/6, 2012) and supported the project in a variety of ways.

Who will offer the first massive open online course (MOOC) aimed at teaching the basics of GIS? It may well be Peggy Minnis of Pace University. She’s counting on her years of face-to-face and online teaching, her library of videos and her energy to build a GIS 101 open online course. Executive Editor Adena Schutzberg reports it is expected to debut in the next six to nine months.

UNIGIS offers online master’s degrees and diplomas in Geographical Information Science and Systems in a variety of languages to students all over the world. Professor Josef Strobl, the current chair of UNIGIS International, details the key ways this program differs from other online learning options.

Recently, sensewhere Ltd., an indoor positioning technology company, announced a new solution with fully integrated sensors giving greater positioning accuracy. sensewhere uses Wi-Fi technology for applications such as location-based advertising. Editor in Chief Joe Francica discussed the specifics with sensewhere founder and CTO, Tughrul Arslan.

Pitney Bowes, Autodesk and TomTom have teamed up to offer a solution that helps analyze and manage capital assets. Pitney Bowes' global director of product management, Ahmed Abukhater, answered our questions about the partnership and their integrated technology solutions.

Systems to provide static spatially continuous maps of infectious disease risk and continually updated reports of infectious disease occurrence exist but to-date the two have never been combined. This article addresses this issue as well as novel online data sources, such as social media, combined with epidemiologically relevant environmental information that provide valuable new data sources that can assist the “real-time” updating of spatial maps.

UK retailer, Sainsbury, with over 30 analysts, synthesizes data for demographic analyses, location planning and other applications. In this sponsored article, Annette Dellevoet, a senior analyst with Sainsbury’s Network Planning team with responsibility for assessing the viability of new sites and store investments as well as overall estate strategy, provides this review of the GeoLytix data solutions.