How many people attended Jon Stewart's rally last month, or Glenn Beck's rally last summer? It depends on who you ask. Two crowd-counting experts explain the "gold standard" for measuring crowd size, and discuss why some rally organizers might disagree with the counts. From NPR's Science Friday.

Directions Magazine's editor in chief, Joe Francica, speaks to Kanwar Chadha, a pioneer in location-based services who founded SiRF Technologies, a GPS chipset manufacturer which merged with CSR plc in February 2009. Mr. Chadha, now the chief marketing officer of CSR, has appeared as a keynoter at Directions Media's Location Intelligence conference. Francica spoke with him to get his take on how the LBS landscape has changed for social networking as well as anticipated new developments in electronics going into smaller and smaller form factors. They also discuss the Location and Beyond Executive Summit upcoming October 6th at the St. Regis Hotel in San Francisco, as well as a new endeavor that Directions will be supporting called PointThinkTank, a place for discussing new ideas and concepts in the LBS ecosystem.

In this interview, Editor in Chief Joe Francica speaks with Dr. Richard Lathrop, director for the Center for Remote Sensing and Spatial Analysis at Rutgers University. Dr. Lathrop recently published a study on land use and land cover classification of the entire state of New Jersey entitled "Changing Landscapes in the Garden State: Urban Growth and Open Space Loss in NJ 1986 thru 2007." Francica discusses some of the GIS and remote sensing technology applications used to produce this study. In this podcast, Dr. Lathrop highlights the specifics about the GIS technology and techniques he used and the implications for New Jersey’s communities and legislature to act upon his findings for smart growth initiatives within the state.

Did you ever wonder how hardware makers ensure their devices can locate you effectively via GPS, cell towers and Wi-Fi? How do they answer the question "Can you locate me now?" One way is to use in-lab simulations for testing. I spoke with Nigel Wright, Spirent's vice president of marketing for wireless about how the company's testing services work and are used.

In this interview with Editor in Chief Joe Francica, Pitney Bowes Business Insight President Mike Hickey provides a frank assessment of how his company has evaluated the opportunity for cloud computing. He explains why he has reoriented his company's business model to adapt to this new environment, what software he will offer as a service and how he must find a way to do it quickly.

You might think a non-profit organization called PromoteGIS was about promoting GIS. You'd be half right; the organization starts with mapping and GIS but has a long-term goal of promoting communities in developing countries. Executive Editor Adena Schutzberg spoke with Mehdi Bokhari, president of PromoteGIS, to learn about the vision of community development and how it's taking shape.

In this podcast, GE Energy's Paul Wilson discusses some of the challenges of implementing a nationwide smart grid system. "With Smart Grid, utilities are facing this massive amount of data, orders of magnitude worth of data, that they have not had to deal with before," says Wilson. But if any company is up to the challenge, GE certainly should be. As the company likes to say, it offers equipment from "turbines to toasters." Wilson also discusses where geospatial technology can truly impact data management and process improvements for power companies.

In this interview with Gary Gale, director of engineering for Yahoo!'s Geo Technologies, Editor in Chief Joe Francica discusses the future of Yahoo! Fire Eagle, the company's location broker that allows users to update their location as well as to control how and when to share their location information. In addition, Gale discusses the support he receives from his upper management and what we can expect from the Geo Technologies team in terms of future advancements for Yahoo!'s mapping platform.

Andre Parris is the global manager for energy and commodity trading at Bloomberg, the financial news publishing conglomerate. Parris is responsible for developing the BMAP application, a business and location intelligence dashboard that displays a plethora of location-based information related to energy commodities. In this interview with Directions Media's editor in chief, Joe Francica, Parris explains how the application was developed and the types of analyses that can be performed by commodity traders to get the latest, real-time information about various factors that might impact commodity prices from around the world.

The decennial census of the United States is a massive undertaking and maintaining the mapping products that support the effort requires managing a large Oracle Spatial database. In this interview, Nick Padfield and Stephanie Spahlinger of the Geography Division of the U.S. Census Bureau describe the process for managing the spatial data that helps them churn out maps for a variety of constituents from census enumerators to Congress.