Thursday, March 27. 2008

Oracle Stock Drops 7.2% on Poor App Sales

We know Wall Street is fickle but this time the numbers add up just fine. Oracle reported Q3 results which disappointed investors because sales of new Oracle application licenses grew just 7% compared to 63% in Q2. While total software revenue grew 21%, Wall Street focused on new applications. It is important to recognize that this is the sweet spot of potential geospatial revenue as well. While we tend to think of only Oracle Spatial/Locator as a feature set, the growth in geospatially-enabled applications, specifically Oracle applications in vertical markets, is where the growth will be. If we see this part of the business slowing, then its likely the adoption of spatially-enable applications will be affected. Caution: this is just a forecast only because in speaking with Oracle at the Oracle Spatial Users Group meeting, interest in vertical applications for spatial are humming along.

Data Discounts from Autodesk

Geoff Zeiss notes on his blog Autodesk has deals with data providers to offer up discounts on data. Whose data? DigitalGlobe (via its acquisition GlobExplorer), NAVTEQ (via ADCI), Intermap and Weatherbug (that link was broken when I tried it). Offers vary - DigitalGlobe offers a limited 14 day trial and Intermap a percentage discount. Worth a look if you are in the market.

The title of offer's Web page: High Resolution Earth Images for AutoCAD Map 3D. (Might want to update that since there's more than imagery and the data are for other products, too.)

Free Autodesk DWG Reader Available for Download

The good news? DWG Trueview 2009, as the viewer is called, is free (registration form required) and from Autodesk so it's got the same engine used in AutoCAD. It converts to older formats DWG formats to other old and the new 2009 format and includes tools to print, measure, visualize.

The bad news? It's an 193 Mb download.

via Tenlinks Daily

OS Could Make MasterMap Free by Charging Fee on Land Registrations

That's the word from Cambridge, where academics ran the numbers. Land registrations occur any time real estate changes hands.

[It seems its possible for] a simple surcharge on Land Registry transactions to make up any loss in direct revenues from making the Ordnance Survey's MasterMap, its most detailed map, available for free. The calculated benefits according to the study by Cambridge academics for the Treasury are dramatic: for a cost of between £12m and £30m in "lost" revenues from sales of its MasterMap and Large Scale Topo products, the wider economy would benefit by £168m.

- The Guardian

The World is NOT Flat When it Comes to Talent, Innovation and Creativity

Richard Florida's new book is called Who’s Your City and argues essentially that. As Tracy Certo puts it at Metromedia: "the creative economy is making where you live the most important decision of your life." Or, in other words, geography does matter, though it's hard for me at least to tease cause from effect. The article offers an interview with the author and a YouTube clip of him on the Colbert Report.

Clark University's Turner Heads to Arizona State

Arizona State University at Tempe's new School of Geographic Sciences has recruited Billie Lee Turner, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and most recently director of the Graduate School of Geography at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. He specializes in sustainability science.
Turner will join Arizona's faculty in July as the school's first Gilbert F. White chair in environment and society. Arizona State's School of Geographic Sciences launched in 2006 focuses on interdisciplinary study.

The university has hired four additional faculty members with expertise in urbanism, landscape ecology, spatial analysis, and geocomputation. "It's very unusual that a university makes a major investment in geographic sciences the way ASU has done," says Mr. Anselin [Luc Anselin, founding director of the geography school and director of its GeoDa Center for Geospatial Analysis and Computation]. "I've never seen a geography department hire five full professors in one year."

About 20 years ago Mr. Turner sat next to me on a plane to an AAG meeting. Before he told me who he was, he extracted that I was a geographer and proceeded to test me on my ability to explain our discipline. I recall thinking that this was a very mean thing to do. I've gotten over it and might perhaps do the same to a newly minted graduate.

- Chronicle of Higher Education