Directions on the News this week welcomes Intergraph's Chief Executive Officer Halsey Wise and Chief Operating Officer, Reid French. Intergraph wrapped up its user conference late last month and editors Joe Francica and Adena Schutzberg explore the company's prospects for growth as it enters a new phase as a private company.

On our LBS360.NET podcast today, Ted Morgan, CEO and founder of Skyhook Wireless reviews some of the capabilities of the new Loki 2.0 as well as its applications. Morgan also discusses the use of the technology for social networking and the licensing of Skyhook technology to SiRF Technologies that combine Skyhook's Wi-Fi Positioning System with SiRF's GPS technology.

In this podcast Adena Schutzberg will try to convince you to spend some time with a few new online tools and applications. Some are geo-focused, others more broadly focused but she thinks all of them indicate where we as an industry are going. They include: Yahoo! Pipes, Microsoft Popfly, Google Experimental and OpenLayers.

More and more electronic geodata is available for consumer use on the Internet, on phones, on navigation systems and elsewhere. Much of it is free and even datasets that are for fee are easy to access and update. Can the same be said for geodata for GIS professionals? This week we explore if the increased demand in the conusmer space has changed how geographic data is delivered and sold to professionals.

This week we examine Microsoft's announcement that the next release of SQL Server, SQL Server 2008, expected next year, will include support for spatial data. We consider that the announcement was made at Microsoft's first Business Intelligence Conference and how that may impact the product's development. We also look at how the new technology will play in a market crowded with databases, both commercial and open source that support spatial data.

We take a look at some of the latest earning reports from geospatial companies and try to tease out what's going on. Among the companies discussed: Trimble, Garmin, NAVTEQ, Pitney Bowes and Bentley, which as a private company, issued an annual report.

In this week's podcast, we discuss what you should know about how the growth of the commercial land satellite business, a basic primer on satellite image processing and what you need to consider as more high resolution satellites are launched in the next five years. We also consider some of the implications of online image processing systems and the possibilities of real-time image downloads.

We focus in on two of the presentations at last week's Location Intelligence Conference. One, by Yahoo's Frazier Miller, director of product management for Yahoo! Local, gave a surprising set of numbers about the potential size of the local search marketplace. The second, from SiRF's Kanwar Chadha, founder and vice president of marketing, highlighted how we've barely begun to realize the scope of location in mobile devices.

Dead can be a number of things; on the Web sometimes it simply means users/developers have moved on to the next thing. How is Web mapping 2.0 doing? Is it mature? Is it time to move on to the next thing, as a recent guest, Mark Wallace speaking at A Very Spatial Podcast offered? He's ready to move to 3D on the Web. We explore these questions and try to nail down what hallmarks might indicate maturity for Web mapping 2.0.

A recent Wall Street Journal article got Joe Francica thinking: could IBM be the next big GIS player? What about that company could make it possible? The editors explore that idea and ponder what the addition of My Maps, a tool for end users to annotate maps in Google Maps, might mean for Google and its mashup partners.