That'd be Qatar which took home six honors at the ESRI User Conference. Oddly the local paper noted they were for "Satellite Mapping." One was the Enterprise Application Award; several others were from the Map Gallery.

- The Peninsula

What brands are Twittering? What are they saying? The answer is on quick look is that few GIS brands are (I know NAVTEQ does). Here's a brand index where you can examine those using Twitter. And you can add your organization, as well. It's an informal list; Twitter does not offer an official one

via For Immediate Release

ChannelWeb reviews a presentation by MarketStar at XChange '08 aimed at helping VARs pick vendors with good channel management. #3 was:

3. Investigate whether the vendor uses Geographic information systems (GIS) to assist in analyzing sales data. When that information is plotted, special patterns become apparent. Relationships, patterns and trends are revealed in the form of maps, globes, reports and charts. That way, vendors can keep tabs on sales cannibalization of a region. Further, by eliminating channel partners who do not contribute to a regions growth, vendors can maximize the productive VARs' sales potential and increase their revenue.

Good suggestion. Perhap vendors would acknowledge that they do use GIS; I don't expect they'd share that info with their channel however.

The Cass County commissioners said "no" to the Indiana Geological Survey in response to a request for access to its parcel data. The article confuses me since at one point it says it'll cost $7000/year for the county to pay for the Web software: "for setting up and maintaining the Web-based technology." A grant would cover two years.

At another point the article says the state wants a copy. "It is always the citizens of your county who own that information," [State GIO Jim] Sparks said. "We're asking for a copy of it." The former implies (to me) the county serving up its own data (that would have a cost). The latter implies (to me) the state would take a copy (which would have a limited, if small, cost).

From what I read at the IndianaMap site actual copies of the vector data are hosted at the The Indiana Geological Survey, so it is a copy. The "Web-based technology" is elsewhere described as "data transfer technology."

The unfortunate part of this story (and many parallel ones) is that it's still tough to convince the data providers of the benefit of sharing.

- Pharos-Tribune via TMCNet

This from an interview at MocoNews:

- "Location is the defining element in mobile..."

- Advertisers pay an average of 10 times more for ads that have a location-relevant component too, he said.

- The iPhone’s “not where most of our users are coming from”

Slashdot highlights an LA Times front page story about professors dumping traditional text in favor of open source and non-free online texts.

We are doing that at Penn State Online Masters in GIS. So far, two texts are open source: Open Web Mapping (updated URL per course author comment below) and The Nature of Geographic Information. I'm working to open source my course (Comparative GIS) for Winter quarter.