I mentioned that WeoGeo is among the finalists in the Amazon Start-Up Challenge. Amazon has posted the videos for each of the seven companies in the finals and is asking for visitors to view them and vote for their favorite. Is this a popularity contest? Only sort of. Per the site: "The votes will be used by the judges when choosing the grand prize winner. "

I encourage you to check out the videos (perhaps at lunch) to see what folks are doing with Amazon's services. First off, your company may be able to take advantage of the Amazon services as an enabling technology for your organization. (We expect to have the WeoGeo folks speak to that at our Location Intelligence Conference next year.) Second, some fo the services may be of interest to you personally (by the mile car insurance) or your company (online website usability testing). The variety of offerings in the finals is impressive and the videos range from goofy to serious.

Don't forget to register your vote! Voting closes on Thursday, Dec 6.

That's the theory of Eduardo Mercado, a neuroscientist at the University of Buffalo that he presented at the Acoustical Society of America meeting last week.

“Simply knowing that thee are three whales swimming in the ocean is not very useful if you do not know where the whales are,” Mercado said. “Singers have to figure out where other whales are by listening.”

But this can be challenging as sounds get distorted as they propagate through water. Mercado speculates that whales sing in an attempt to recreate the vocalisations of their kin as they originally sounded.

“By imitating the sounds of other singers, a whale can create a copy of what the sounds he hears are like at the source,” he said. “The singer can then potentially compare incoming sounds to memories of undistorted copies of those sounds, and use the differences to judge the distance the sound has travelled.”

...

Mercado thinks his hypothesis could be tested by playing novel songs to whales and seeing which parts they learn. He predicts that only certain song segments containing spatial information will get repeated.

- Cosmos Magazine

This time it was UPS that settled with Acacia Research Corp.'s Telematics Corp. No details other that the lawsuit in question related to "tracking vehicles on a map."

- AP
- press release

Francois Ajenstat, director of SQL Server project management, offered some interesting tidbits in an interiew with Redmond Developer News:

- next CTP will include an SDK with integration to its Visual Earth app
- geospatial functionality will be "at no extra charge" in all versions (including Express) which is contrasted with Oracle which includes Locator free but charges for the advanced features of Oracle Spatial (Oracle XE includes Locator)

Two database experts say the release is evolutionary and not revolutionary and one suggest many will move from SQL Server 2000 directly to SQL Server 2008.

The Times reports that LaSalle County, IL will drop per parcel costs from a sliding scale of 30-70 cents to a starting point of 10 cents, after a still-the-same $50 setup fee. Hard copy product, a new offering, runs from $1 to $10. And local governments can have data at a discount, or even free if they can provide data to the county that the county wants. The County Board approved the changes, but doesn't say why the prices came down. I for one am curious.

The CEO in question is AND's Chief Executive Officer Maarten Oldenhof. AND, based in The Netherlands competes with Tele Atlas (TomTom is in process to buy it) and NAVTEQ (Nokia's in process to buy it).

AND started pondering its sale in the last few months. On Oct. 10 it hired ThinkEquity Partners LLC for advice on among other things selling now or waiting with the hopes of a better price. AND's market value has doubled to 54.1 million euros since word of the the Nokia/NAVTEQ deal. Unlike Tele Atlas and NAVTEQ which use field surveys AND uses land registry as the basis for its mainly European maps.

In the first half of 2007 AND reported a profit of 710,000 euros and net sales of 2.43 million euros Tele Atlas's sales totalled 136.8 million euros and NAVTEQ revenue $362.3 million. Another tidbit from the CEO: The company would need one year and about 15 million euros to build a detailed North American map.

-
Bloomberg