The first weeks of January brought three big changes in the geospatial world. A well-known on-line mapping app, "indiemapper" went free; Pakistan announced plans for managing map makers; and Esri began repositioning ArcGIS Online as a content management system. Are these changes for the best?

U.S. commercial remote sensing has boomed but has it hit a wall because of budget concerns or is this merely a pause before the true explosion of commercially available imagery goes mainstream?

Several geospatial announcements and events made our editors respond, "Huh?" This week, to wrap up the year they share the surprises of the past twelve months.

Our editors step up to the plate to evaluate last year's predictions and offer new ones for the geospatial marketplace in 2012.

We’ve all been in a situation where our expertise in or familiarity with GIS turns us into a mini-lecturer on the topic. You might be chatting with a fellow passenger on a plane or be giving a lightning talk, a quick five minute presentation on the topic. What three ideas should you share?

From satellite photos to hand-drawn store maps, location-based marketing improves...but only incrementally this year. This week we look at the ways in which marketers are using location to drive potential customers into stores and whether customers are taking the bait.

Last week Google responded to past controversial data collections and Dutch legal efforts by adding a new "opt out" option. A tweak to the name of any wireless access point will tell Google not to collect the location data for the device. The response by the media and our readers included terms like "laughter," "blunder" and "joke." What can we learn from Google’s opt out offer and the tech community’s response?

HTML5, the latest version of the markup language for the World Wide Web, has been on the horizon for Web GIS clients for several years. Is it time for it to come on strong? What does it offer to encourage developers to move from Flash, Silverlight or other current solutions?

The last two weeks included at least four different announcements related to new offerings for indoor locating. Navizon, CSR, Ericsson and a startup called Euclid Elements think they hold key parts of the indoor location boom. But is anything really new and compelling?

Steve Jobs, quoted in his recent biography, suggested that salesmen don't make the best CEOs. His finger was pointed firmly at Microsoft's Steve Ballmer, one of his more recent tech rivals. How does that thesis fare within the geospatial marketplace?