Energy, Utilities and Telecommunications

The Supreme Court ruled that police must have warrants to attach GPS trackers to suspects' cars. Nokia closed its NAVTEQ developer program. What do these actions say about the state of location-based services in 2012?

Leslie P. Norton, writing in Barron's reports,

In this interview, Editor in Chief Joe Francica speaks with Al Leidner of Booz Allen Hamilton. Back in 2001, Leidner, was the director of New York City's GIS project at the city's Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications or DoITT and the person most responsible for coordinating geospatial technology support during the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11.

Two reports last week suggest new backends and datasets may power Microsoft's and Yahoo's mapping products. What is the state of technology and basemaps that power mapping portals? What are the implications of this kind of consolidation on the businesses' bottom lines and will these changes impact users and third party developers?

John Graham, President of Intergraph's Security, Government and Infrastructure division is interviewed by Editor in Chief Joe Francica about the company's integration strategy of Intergraph and ERDAS technology now that the two companies are joined under the Hexagon banner.

The President’s legislative plan to thwart cybercrime is putting critical infrastructure protection front and center. Where is the intersection of location, critical infrastructure protection and cybersecurity?

On April 27, 2011, one of the worst outbreaks of tornadic activity struck North and Central Alabama. Today's weather forecasting systems employ geospatial information and technology. In this podcast, you'll hear an interview with one of the top weather forecasting technologists in the U.S., Bob Baron of Baron Services.

We tackle two topics this week. First Joe Francica shares his experience with apps and websites he used during the recent tornadoes that hit his state of Alabama causing at least 250 deaths and destruction that is still being measured. Then we look at MapQuest as it celebrates its 15th birthday.

Last week among the requisite location privacy scares, announcementw of new features available in mapping apps, and newly opened datasets at Where 2.0, came geo announcements from tech giants Google and Microsoft. Google announced Google Earth Builder, a hosted platform that allows government and industry players to use some of the same tools Google does to publish data for use in Google Earth and Google Maps. Microsoft announced the Read/Write World project, “a flexible fabric for exposing, connecting, and consuming geo-media and geo-data.” Our goal this week: to explain what problems these offerings solve and the role they may play for current users of GIS and mapping solutions.

This is the podcast version of the Directions OnPoint webcast of the interview with Mark Reichardt, the president and CEO of the Open Geospatial Consortium. The OGC is involved with a number of standards bodies that impact the geospatial technology sector. It is because the industry has grown over the past few years to become integrated with so many other technology sectors that the consortium's importance and impact has also grown.