Change is inevitable when you work in a technology sector like ours. 2006 saw many changes and you can read and "listen to" what we felt shaped our industry during the past year in Adena Schutzberg's "Top Ten" article and our Year End Editor's Roundtable, respectively. We felt the need for some "tweaking" with our Web presence, and you'll see some refinements and additions to the Directions Magazine home page as well as the home pages of LocationIntelligence.net and LBS360.net. LocationIntelligence.net will focus entirely on our LI conference, and the newsletter by that name will no longer be published. What will not change is our dedication to providing you a well written, quality publication that includes information you will find useful, as well as entertaining. We also strive to bring you information found in no other geospatial publication, in a timely manner.

During November we conducted our annual reader's survey which has led to some of the changes you'll see, such as listing feeds from All Points Blog and press releases in close proximity to our Top Story, and a new stock chart of publicly traded geospatial companies. It's important for you to know that we value your readership. In our survey, over 70% of you told us we were better than our competitors and so we feel a significant responsibility to keep delivering information that you can use in your everyday work. (On a scale of 1-5, 70% gave us a rating of either 4 or 5.)

Directions Media continues to expand: our Web traffic grew 44% during 2006, to more than 4.8 million visitors for the year. Independent media ranking services now show that Directions Magazine is reaching more geospatial professionals than any other publication in our industry (see Alexa.com). And today, we are also announcing a new conference, the Rocket City Geospatial Conference, to be held this coming October in Huntsville, Alabama. We are working to create the premier GIS conference in the southeast in 2007. This spring we host our fourth annual Location Intelligence Conference on April 16-18 in San Francisco, where we anticipate growth in both attendance and number of exhibitors as we examine how location technology is integrating with enterprise computing.

In the coming weeks, you will see some changes to our newsletters as we offer more options for you to receive the news of our industry. We appreciate reader support, in particular the weekly flurry of comments on our articles and the candid e-mails with opinions and topics you'd like covered in the future. We also thank our advertisers, for without them we would not be able to serve you with cost-free subscriptions. We hope you find the changes to our news services and publications useful, that you'll attend our conferences, and that you'll tell a friend about Directions. Best wishes for a prosperous New Year.