This week Joe Francica and Adena Schutzberg explore Leica Geosystems three recent acquisitions. Why did the company, itself acquired in 2005 by Hexagon of Sweden, purchase Acquis Technology, ER Mapper and IONIC Software? What do the three have in common and what are Leica's future plans?

This week Adena Schutzberg and Joe Francica, who's on site in San Diego for the 2007 ESRI User Conference, discuss some of the themes from the opening plenary held Monday morning including "the geographic approach," a focus on modeling and planning, and updates to ArcGIS 9.3. Also: the innovation that got the crowd really going - and it's not ESRI technology!

This week's Directions on the News podcast explores the criteria for buying a desktop mapping system. Directions Magazine Editor-in-Chief Joe Francica will run through a check list of items that are important in considering a desktop solution for products in the $250 to $2,500 range. There are some extremely capable systems on the market and this podcast looks at the functionality that will be right for your purchase decision.

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.