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Posted today at Directions Magazine:
- Pitney Bowes / MapInfo / Group 1: The Art of the Deal
- What’s New in Autodesk 2008 Geospatial Products: My Take on the Experience the Possibilities Tour
- Safe Software’s FME 2007 - Quick Take Product Overview
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Isaac @ MSDN is a new blog from “Isaac Kunen is a Program Manager on the SQL Server team working on Spatial support in SQL Server 2008.” In a first post he introduces the basics of the implementation including the difference between the round earth and flat earth options.
EU Transport Commissioner Jacques Barrot offered up three alternatives the muddled partnership that has put the project far behind schedule: “a complete EU takeover, partial public financing, or total elimination.” The choice: full EU funding.
Of interest to me are some comments made by an industry spokesperson to GPSWorld.
“The market is just not there. We were too optimistic. GPS is fine for most purposes. Besides, who gets the money from satellite navigation services? Usually the maker of the device, not the satellite operator.”
Things have been changing at Daratech, the company who puts out the marketshare numbers for our industry, over the last few years. A few years back the “GIS guy,” Bruce Jenkins left with a fellow employee to launch Spar Point Research, a firm keeping tabs on the laser scanning industry. Just yesterday I read that Daratech had sold off its datatechPLANT conference. Why sell it? “To concentrate on its consulting business in this sector, but will remain involved in the event as a consultant.” GIS players had stopped going to the AEC event which I think fizzled some years back.
Also yesterday Daratech put out a press release asking for GIS product vendors to request a questionnaire so the company could put together its next “GIS/Geospatial Markets & Opportunities” report. I believe this is the first firm press release I’ve seen requesting participation. These reports typically costs several thousand dollars, but there’s no fee to be included.
Daratech rankings can be worth quite a lot. Bentley bumped up to #2 in geospatial last year and continues to tout that fact. An analyst recently corrected me in discussing this accolade. I noted the Daratech numbers “were the best we had.” He pointed out they were the only numbers we had, which did not, ergo, make them the best.
Now, in 2007, the task of making sense of our market is even more difficult. MapInfo is part of a larger public company. Intergraph is private. Little corners of Google, Microsoft, IAC, Yahoo! and others do GIS/geospatial work. What about all those venture funded start ups?
