LBS Still Failing to Catch On

Quote of the Week: “It [location-based services] is not a leisure market and I don’t know when it will be,” Chris Wade, CEO of Cambridge Positioning Systems (CPS). You can read on about the company’s plans for Europe, which from the sound of it, may not succeed!

New GIS for Uzbekistan

President Roh Moo-hyun of Korea and President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan met in Tashkent on Tuesday. Among their discussions was a plan to build a GIS for Uzbekistan. As one of my friends says, “How cool is that?”
“They reached an agreement to create a National Geographic Information System (GIS) in Uzbekistan under the technical assistance of Korea to promote the development of information technology in Uzbekistan.”

GIO on Tap for California

You may have read elsewhere about efforts to put a Geographic Information Officer (GIO) in place. That work in still in progress, according to an article in Government Technology. The article suggests that the pieces are coming together. The state State Information Technology Strategic Plan requires the governor to appoint a GIO, and an active state council is already in place (CalGIS). Further, John Ellison, acting state coordinator and representative to NSGIC has taken that group’s “success factors” to heart and is already thinking about statewide 1’ imagery acquisition by next year.

Oracle and Bentley Tie the Knot through ProjectWise

In what is becoming a recurring theme as late, Oracle has convinced yet another one of its partners to integrate more tightly with 10g. This time it was Bentley Systems. In an announcement at the BE Conference, Bentley’s user meeting, Bentley will offer the ProjectWise Connector for Oracle. ProjectWise Geospatial is a management tool for organizing map content and files during the lifecycle of a project. The press statement doesn’t say much else but this is another case of a CAD company leveraging the Oracle Spatial capabilities often missing in flat file managment systems. Autodesk also promotes its strong ties to Oracle; Intergraph does as well.

Bentley surely does not want to be left out of the party, but it made me wonder whatever happened to the ESRI/Bentley integration story so highly touted in 2003. We don’t hear much about that anymore and I assume the partnership is stagnant given the closer ties now to Oracle.



 

Location API in Windows Mobile 5.0

Bill Gates noted a key new feature in Window Mobile 5.0, a product announced yesterday. According to Gates, in a CNET interview: “One of the new things in the platform is what we call the location API (application programming interface). It gives the GPS location up to the software and then, if you have chosen to reveal your location, say, to your buddies…and if they decide to reveal to you, than we can use map-type displays and you can see where those people are. That scenario, in particular, is one that we think is really explosive. It will become just common sense. It’s obvious you ought to be able to push and see a map and there’s the information.”

A demo showed an “integrated a GPS-enabled exercise log with a multimedia application so that a runner could listen to music while jogging and continue to keep track of miles run.”