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.

As we've been involved with or heard of GIS implementations around the world there's a recurring rejoinder: "It's not the technology preventing its implementation, but the people" which is short for politics, power and related issues. Now that geospatial technology is maturing and moving to the mainstream that same theme is popping up. And this week, we had some great examples, including the world's (and the U.S. government's) reaction to Google's changes to its Katrina area imagery.

An InformationWeek survey reveals that just 7% of businesses surveyed are using mashups. Is that true for geospatial mashups? Is it true, as Matt Brown, an analyst at Forrester Research suggests, that "Businesses have bigger priorities at the moment than worrying how to mash up logistical data or workforce information into a mapping app?" This week we look at why businesses are slow on the uptake with regard to mashups, and perhaps geospatial and what it might take to get them involved.

In this week's Directions on the News podcast we dig deeper into offer by Pitney Bowes to buy MapInfo. We will explore the background of this transaction and what it means for partners and resellers of MapInfo. We'll provide listeners with news that will help them assess the long-term impact if they are an existing customer. And we'll examine what the competitive environment might look like as Pitney Bowes encroaches on the location intelligence marketplace occupied by companies like Oracle or ESRI. Join Editors Joe Francica and Adena Schutzberg as they weed through the public statements of both companies to provide you with the news you can use. In this week's Directions on the News podcast we dig deeper into offer by Pitney Bowes to buy MapInfo. We will explore the background of this transaction and what it means for partners and resellers of MapInfo. We'll provide listeners with news that will help them assess the long-term impact if they are an existing customer. And we'll examine what the competitive environment might look like as Pitney Bowes encroaches on the location intelligence marketplace occupied by companies like Oracle or ESRI. Join Editors Joe Francica and Adena Schutzberg as they weed through the public statements of both companies to provide you with the news you can use.

In this interview Directions Magazine Editor-in-chief, Joe Francica, speaks with Bob Skinner, Group Vice President of Trimble Mobile Solutions about the @Road acquisition and cost saving related to mobile resource management with clients including Coca Cola.

GITA 2007, held last week in San Antonio, covered a wide variety of topics. Our editors take on just two they find particularly significant: the role of professional organizations in grooming the next generation of practitioners and GE Energy's new GIS solutions to be built on Oracle. In the short term the offerings will sit alongside GE's Smallworld solutions.

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.