EU member states agreed on how to finance the satnav system on Friday. The plan includes a €2.4bn ($3.6bn, £1.7bn) funding deal using unused farm subsidies and some monies from re-orged research and industrial spending. Oh, and taxes, too.

- MSNBC

Things are getting worse. The company announced plans to drop 23% of its employees and a few days later the CFO resigned. The stock, which had a high of $32 in 2000 has a 52 week high of 24 cents. This week it dropped to 7.5 cents on the Toronto exchange.

- The Star

--- original post 11/14 ----

Mobile Resource Managment provider AirIQ is being hit by geography. It's based in Canada where the dollar is rising and thus its once not so small debt is much bigger - $3.4M this past quarter from $1.2M a year ago.

To fix things some execs may go. Most of its clients are in the U.S. - 95%.

- The Canadian Press

If you need reassurance that open source geodata and services can work, read LinuxWorld's comprehensive interview with GeoNames "gazeteer plus" founder Marc Wick. He speaks to how the project got rolling, why he's chosen a creative commons licenses, how the number of data sources once about five now tops 100. The interviewer clearly did some homework: there's a question about implications for geonames of Autodesk taking Mentor's projection engine to open source.

Well-known New England GIS guy Niels la Cour has left his role as Senior Planner in Amherst, Mass to join the staff at the University of Massachusetts as a physical planner taking on the update of the campus master plan. Good luck with the new job.

- Amherst Bulletin

"the Vermont State Archives is using digital technology to make copies of the [18th century survey] maps accessible over the Internet so landowners, lawyers, surveyors and historians can use them to analyze colonial-era roads, boundary lines and titles." Minnesota has started the process for that state, too.

- AP

You've heard of the startup, but here's the latest tidbits, from Dr. John Corbett, CEO/Co-Founder, per Dave Taylor who attended the Angel Capital Summit.

AWhere, Inc. provides a desktop application for visualizing business data... on a map. With AWhere, anyone familiar with EXCEL and Chart can quickly visualize and interact with their business data alongside demographic and other readily available data that drives or predicts their business. Veteran Team: AWhere Inc. has assembled a veteran management team including the recent VP of World Sales from StorageTek/Sun and one of the founders of @Last which sold its Sketchup product to Google in 2006 because of its value-add to Google Maps. $954K Raised: Since January 2007, AWhere has closed $954K of angel funding towards a $1.6M goal via a convertible debt instrument. We have a robust, proven product with 700 licenses sold worldwide. The primary use of funds is execution of sales and marketing efforts. Comparable: MapInfo, our closest direct competitor in the business intelligence (BI) market was acquired by Pitney Bowes for $408M earlier this year.

From the company website: "AWhere, Inc (AWI) provides clients with complete consulting solutions using our GIS-based mapping software. AWhere is a GIS-lite tool for data visualization." The trick now for AWhere is to distinguish itself from MapInfo.


- Internet Financial News