Chrysler's Mopar will offer "Unconnect web" as of August as a dealer-installed accessory. Where there is cell service it will create a mobile hot spot with a 100-foot range. The suggested price for the router is $449, with the monthly access fee being $29. The service is provided by Autonet Mobile, founded in 2005 and provider of the Avis Connect service, a Wi-Fi connection that plugs into a vehicle's cigarette lighter or wall outlet.

I have to believe there are cheaper ways to do this, thought they are not installed in the car. Further, with new handsets becoming computers, is the "conversion" to Wi-Fi needed? Will cars be tailgating one another to gain access to Wi-Fi?

- WSJ

The map is Flash-based, but effective. No big surprises: clusters are along the East Coast (lots of medical), Chicago and California.

In short, key players are supportive of plans to stretch the boundaries of the Australian Spatial Information Business Association (ASIBA) to New Zealand. "ASIBA is an industry organisation, formed to condense around 35 former industry groups into one, with four pillars. They are: academics, individual professionals, business and government." Major players are a recent conference and The New Zealand Geospatial Office applauded the formal request.

One reason for the move:

The country police put out an RFP for a national address register. Per Steve Critchlow, executive director of GIS specialist Critchlow:

“They wanted everything and they wanted to impose unlimited liability,” Critchlow says. “Three consortia were formed, we probably all spent around $200,000 working through the Christmas period, then the steering committee pulled the plug on the grounds it was too costly.

There's one other tidbits of note in the article:

...a study that found between A$6 billion and A$12 billion (NZ$7.6 billion and NZ$15.2 billion) was added to Australia’s gross domestic product by spatially enabling Australian government.

- Computerworld

An article in the Times-Standard (Eureka and California's North Coast paper) highlights the challenge of the region to introduce broadband demand aggregration, make access available in the most rural areas and encourage business. One paragraph is relevant to geospatial:

Mapping of the four-county region has taken a large portion of the project time. The original plan had been to use the California Broadband Task Force maps for Redwood Coast Connect, which were released midway into the project. But we determined the maps to be inaccurate, so we decided to gather our own mapping data. This turned out to be a larger challenge than expected since very little data was already in Geographic Information System format. I had to call every provider and ask for data, which came in every format imaginable, from GIS to a AAA map marked with highlighter.

Note to providers: You probably already use GIS, why not make electronic data available either publicly or by request? Perhaps customer service is not aware of the availability of this data? I think we are at or near a point where those researching your offerings will simply pass you by without access to such data.