"Convergence does not always turn out to be as good as expected."

- MapIT (TomTom reseller in South Africa, I believe, though its hard to say from the article) communications manager Lorraine Deane on why personal navigation devices won't yield to all the pressure of nav-enabled cell phones quoted in IT Web.

The Singapore Land Authority (SLA), the country's mapping agency, has already won a lawsuit against Virtual Map (VM), the company behind an online directory regarding the latter's misuse of geographic data. Virtual Map appealed and the details are slowly coming out.

VM stated via its lawyer that it used the SLA data to plan routes through the country with a GPS to collect its own data. In response, the SLA lawyer noted that means VM could not have created its data without the SLA data. Further, he asked why were "phantom features" that SLA placed on the maps from VM. The reply? Human error.

The appeal is in recess but it's not sounding good for Virtual Map.

- Channel News Asia

The "Daichi" satellite went up about two years ago. Japan launched it to collect data to create maps of remote parts of the country. Today, the Geographical Survey Institute said that the images were blurry and could not be used for the detailed mapping planned. But the images won't go to waste - they'll be used as background data for land use determination and the like.

- AFP