Thursday, October 23. 2008

Why Location Matters: Legal Issues of GPS, Navigation Systems and Other Location-Based Services-A Webcast

This from reader Kevin Pomfret...

"The legal community has been unable to keep pace with the rapid changes in geospatial technology and location-based applications.  As a result, the American Law Institute and the American Bar Association are holding a webcast and telephone seminar on November 5, 2008 at 1:00 p.m. E.S.T on the unique legal issues associated with spatial data. The cost is $169.00 to attend.

The program, entitled “Why Location Matters: Legal Issues of GPS, Navigation Systems and Other Location-Based Services” is believed to be the first program hosted by the American Bar Association to focus exclusively on Spatial Law matters."

Kevin Pomfret of Cantor Arkema, P.C. and Dan Connors of GeoEye will be the speakers.   The program will focus on matters such as protecting intellectual property rights in spatial data, limiting liability exposure and U.S. and international laws related to privacy and national security."

deCarta Announces API for iPhone

At deCarta's devCON event, CEO Kim Fennell made an announcement that the company will release an API for the iPhone. It will be available for download by the end of October. This follows on the heals of deCarta's announcement that they released their J2ME API for mobile devices and support for connected navigation devices.

Canceling of BASIC Good News for GeoEye

Chris Fernandez at PeakStocks thinks so. Bottom line:

With the BASIC program out of the way for at least one more year, and perhaps for good, the U.S. government will rely on GeoEye more and more, especially in light of the fact that GeoEye is now in possession of the highest resolution commercial satellite available today, GeoEye-1.

Geotagged Horse Photos Concern Owners

Geograph.org.uk hosts user-generated geotagged photos. The goal: to post a picture for every grid square of the Ordnance Survey maps of the British Isles and Ireland. One visitor has called the site "a thief's shopping list." The suggestion is that people are trespassing to get photos and once they are posted, the images provide an easy way for horse thieves to find targets. I suppose it's the next logical step after StreetView and other services have been painted as dangerous to privacy, children and society.

- Horse and Hound

Daratech's Foundyller: Intergraph May be #1 in GIS

[Daratech founder Charles] Foundyller estimates privately held ESRI's revenue at about $710 million last year. Privately held Intergraph lists 2007 revenue of $725.3 million, which might make it the market leader.

This comment appeared in an article about the use of ESRI technology in medical care at Loma Linda University Medical Center, not too far from ESRI headquarters in Redlands in Investor's Business Daily.
The most recent publicly available rankings I can find (recall that Daratech sells its reports and only sometimes offers press releases on marketshare) had the rankings: ESRI, Bentley, Autodesk, Intergraph. This from coverage of BE (May 2008) in the August 2008 issue of GIM.

Daratech is a market research company specialising in the information technology market, including GIS. A 2008 Daratech study ranked Bentley a world number two, with geospatial revenue of over $200 million. The list is dominated by ESRI, with over half a billion US dollars, and numbered three and four are Autodesk and Intergraph, respectively: very close to Bentley in terms of turnover. The first European firm to appear on the list is Leica Geosystems, ranked number six.

As usual with such numbers, "your mileage may vary!"

GIS: 21st Century Innovation?

The Boston Globe highlights the city of Revere's GIS and how it enabled a "quick fix" of a water main. Revere is among the less wealthy communities in the Boston area and it now has an internal Web-based GIS from Camp, Dresser & McKee, most likely built on ESRI technology, though the article does not say. What struck me about the article was the intro:

A recent water main break in the Beachmont area was fixed in record time thanks to the combination of 20th-century metal detector technology and $480,000 worth of 21st-century Geographic Information System mapping innovation.

Was the GIS part really 21st century? My sense is that all of the GIS aspects of what went on were 20th century, though the I'm guessing wireless access and perhaps some of the communications tools may have been 21st century:

In a matter of minutes, Public Works employees were able to log on to the GIS system online, retrieve a digital map outlining the city's 128 miles of water pipes, isolate the break and the valve, use a metal detector to pinpoint the location, and finally dig the spot to fix the problem, said Revere Finance Director George M. Anzuoni.