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.

Directions Editor-in-Chief Joe Francica and the editorial staff discuss themes from the past year in the geospatial industry and look ahead to 2007. The 25 minute discussion was recorded on December 20, 2006.

Don Murray and Dale Lutz are the two founders of Safe Software, the company behind FME, the well-known tool for massaging data sets and moving them from one format to another. In this interview they speak about the company's first international user conference, FME Idol and the future of FME.

Directions editor-in-chief, Joe Francica, spoke with Rob Shanks, president of GlobeXplorer, on the business model of Web services, the availability of specific products and the interest level that exists for purchasing Web services.