Do the appearance of CRM for Google and Oracle's acquisition of Hyperion have implications for geospatial? In this week's podcast our editors introduce CRM and BI basics and explore how these announcements could catapult geo integration forward. Also, what does it take for real time traffic and weather to become part of everyone's daily lives? Does Google's addition of traffic to Google Maps and The Weather Channel's new mashup with Virtual Earth help?

In today's podcast, we explore the possible ramifications of Google's recently announced KML Search capability. Is it a big deal? Will it alter the way we decide how and what tool we use to publish geospatial data? Will making KML an OGC/international standard help the geospatial community feel more comfortble with Google's reach into our arena? We discuss these issues and answer some questions you might have about publishing KML files to make them findable by "the Web of places." The podcast is 12 minutes (~ 4 Mb) and was recorded February 26, 2007.

This week's podcast explores Trimble's latest acquistion, new offerings from Autodesk's Geospatial Division, World Wind 1.4, voice enabled navigation and spend some time on the implications on the new Google KML Search, news from 3GSM and the end of the search for Jim Gray.

Joe Astroth, Vice President and General Manager, Autodesk Location Services, talked to David Williams about what Autodesk is offering to the LBS developer community. The podcast was recorded on January 19 and is 20 minutes long.

Joe Francica conducted an interview with Mr. Kapil Sibal, the Honerable Minister of Science, Technology and Earlth Sciences for the Government of India at the Map World Forum. Mr. Sibal's position would be equivalent to a cabinent secretary of the U.S. Government. He is the visionary driving GIS technology adoption within India and his remarks are quite candid with respect to the lack of trained GIS professionals in his country as well as to the issue of the democratization of data, especially remotely sensed data. Included is a discusion of the situation that developed about one year ago with some sensitive data on Google Earth.

In our weekly podcast covering the week's news Adena Schutzberg and Nora Parker look at news about a small bank using GIS, new offerings from EPA and Acxiom, and explore updates from the National Weather Service in how it shares weather alerts, ligitation related to the Brooks Act and new sponsors for OSGEO. Tune in!

In our new weekly podcast covering the week's news Joe Francica and Adena Schutzberg look at new products from ESRI and Ricoh, a significant GPS acquistion, an upcoming court date and explore the iPhone's lack of location awareness and new 3D modeling options with implication for GIS users. Tune in!

Editor-in-chief, Joe Francica, and senior editor, Hal Reid, interviewed Brian Bullock, CEO of Intermap Technologies, regarding the NEXTMap project which his company has recently been engaged in completing. The project goal is to capture accurate 3D geometry of road network data and sell the data to the automotive and insurance sectors to drive fuel efficiencies. In addition, the project has some environmental benefits. Bullock talks about how the automotive companies are using the data to anticipate road curvatures and changes in elevation to point headlamps in the proper direction to assist the driver's visual experience and prevent accidents. Listen for these and other topics in this 15 minute interview recorded on December 20th, 2006.

In our new weekly podcast covering the week's news Joe Francica and Adena Schutzberg summarize some press releases of note and explore DigitalGlobe's latest acquisition, Leica's contact with bloggers about a new product and the latest LBS subscription offerings announced at this week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Tune in!

Directions Editor in Chief Joe Francica and Executive Editor Adena Schutzberg speak with DigitalGlobe's CEO, Jill Smith, about the acquisition of GlobeXplorer in this exclusive interview. The 16 minute discussion was recorded on January 5, 2007.