SiRF is collaborating with Intel and the Travel Channel is partnering with Tele Atlas. What do these two seemingly unrelated announcements have to do with each other? "Infotainment." The marriage of location-based services, travel and entertainment is heating up and both the chip and entertainment industries are in overdrive vying for new and different in-vehicle experiences.

Three announcements this week point to the next steps beyond local search. We look at a new mobile shopping service, a patent for pay-per-location-based ads, and a "who's buying what" mapping soloution. Are these warrented? Will they make money? What do they say about the future?

"Security created the mobile industry," says Tasso Roumeliotis, CEO of WaveMarket. "This is the reason you get your kid a phone." In this interview by Editor-in-chief Joe Francica, Roumeliotis describes how his company is looking to connect parents with kids and help create the next big wave in mobile location services by offering products that support social networking. Roumeliotis draws clear distinctions between the applications for "friend finder" and "family finder" which pose certain barriers with respect to personal security.

Last week URISA published the latest version of its salary survey. The document reveals not just that salaries are up, but that GIS departments are growing, and which technologies are in demand. This week our editors look at the some of the trends, which suggest a bright employment future for those in geospatial and related fields.

Joe Francica and Adena Schutzberg explore where innovation is occurring in the geospatial marketplace in both geospatially focused professional tools and in the consumer marketplace. There's interaction between the two markets as well as innovation moving up and down the geospatial user pyramid.

Darren Koenig, Wireless Market Director for Tele Atlas, provided insights on how the market for personal navigation devices is set to exponentially explode and why we are perhaps at a tipping point. He explained how both the in-vehicle and personal navigation devices markets will benefit from wireless network infrastructure development and why certain market segments, of varying demographic composition, are likely to buy both types of devices, and why generational differences are not a hindrance to widespread market indulgence.

This week Joe Francica and Adena Schutzberg explore Monday's announcement of the planned acquisition. Will regulators let it through? Will the combination of TomTom's Mapshare and Tele Atlas' prowess at maintaining spatial databases mean better data delivered in more timely fashion? What will investors receive? And, how are geospatial professionals impacted?

This week editors Joe Francica and Adena Schutzberg look at ESRI long-awaited ArcGIS Explorer, which left beta in June, and its positioning in the marketplace.

This week Adena Schutzberg and Joe Francica take a spin on the major and not-so-major web mapping portals to see how the new features from Google, Microsoft and others take the user experience to the next level. The editors look at how technology is allowing more interaction with users than ever before. The podcast is 14 minutes long (~ 5 Mb) and was recorded on July 9, 2007.

This week Joe Francica and Adena Schutzberg explore some geospatial companies we'd like to see. In particular we share our ideas for two data company concepts that might be succesful in today's marketplace.