Location-based Services

Most everyone has used GPS in some fashion. But how many people know how it works? Or know about its many siblings online or coming online in the coming years? Or how good it is at determining elevation? Executive Editor Adena Schutzberg rounds up what she thinks you should know about this important positioning system.

Long Island University has just opened the virtual doors on its Advanced Certificate in Mobile GIS Applications Development, a four-course program taught entirely online. The first courses begin in the fall. Directions Magazine interviewed the team to learn more about the motivations and expectations of the instructors and potential students.

Did you miss Directions Magazine's coverage of Hexagon 2012 from Las Vegas? Here's a list of articles and blog posts from the conference.

New York City’s Department of Transportation added a new layer to its maps at the end of May. This layer posts the details of parking signs for the city on a web-based map. It’s a huge step forward from having to actually read the signs from your car, or have a friend read them for you from a far away neighborhood. But is it what drivers want?

From a report by

You are journalist. There’s breaking news across town. How do you tap in to citizen journalists already on the ground in the area? Geofeedia. The feed offers location-based content from Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Flickr and Picasa based on an address or a polygon drawn on a Bing map. The for-fee service was launched last week after quite a bit of testing. 

Bike Score is the biking equivalent to Walk Score; it’s a measure of the bikeability of cities. 

Mapping of potential retail outlets is one of the first steps in putting a distribution channel in place while launching a telecommunications brand. This is the second article in a two-part series on utilizing location intelligence to organize and understand information through a geographical perspective, enabling informed decisions about retail marketing. Author Abhishek Bhardwaj, associate consultant for Infosys, uses Bangalore, India as the setting for his analysis.

Unlike the board game, the Map of Life lives online and as its name suggests, maps out life on earth. To be more specific, it provides location information for a selection of living things on earth.

What should the satellite companies DigitalGlobe and GeoEye do now that ongoing talks of mergers and acquisitions are a well-publicized fact? It’s a pretty fair bet that something has to happen soon since it looks increasingly like the government will cut spending for commercial remote sensing satellites. Editor in Chief Joe Francica writes an open letter to the CEOs of both companies with some "free" advice.