Google's opened up "Point of Interest" editing to all. ESRI gives its third party developers new application development environments. China and Wal-Mart push the envelope on RFID. Our editors look at these developments and what they may mean to the geospatial community and beyond.

This past week two of the many tech players with a toe in the geospatial waters, Apple and Yahoo, announced new developer offerings that will add to the twists and turns location based services have taken on the road to maturity. One of the services of the iPhone SDK is Core Location, meaning developers can develop native applications that take advantage of the pseudo-location abilities. We'll have a look at the iPhone SDK and Fire Eagle from a geospatial perspective plus explore what the real reason is for wanting navigation on your mobile device.

The U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) commission the report titled, "Independent Study of the Roles of Commercial Remote Sensing in the future National System for Geospatial-Intelligence" early last year. It explores four possible business cases for how the government and private companies might work together to provide needed imagery for those agencies and their government clients. The suggested path is not the status quo and may have implications for the two current U.S. commercial satellite providers DigtialGlobe and GeoEye. Our editors try to tease out what the report means and its implications.