Thursday, February 26. 2009

For the PR Folks: "Three quarters of the PR email I receive is irrelevant."

No, I didn't come to that conclusion, some one far more savvy than I did: Josh Bernoff at Forrester Research. He breaks down all the PR e-mail he received in a two week period and provides some great tips for doing PR better, whether you do it yourself or through a third party.

via For Immediate Release

Virtual Alabama May Grow into Virtual USA

FCW reports on the effort, currently being discussed by several southern states. The idea is to allow states to share their own data across jurisdictions no matter their platform. As discussion get going David Boyd, director of DHS Science and Technology’s Command, Control and Interoperability Division reports technology is not the issue, it's getting the players on the same page.

The whole article sounds like every OGC conversation I ever heard. I guess it's good to see progress, but the term standards is not part of the current reporting. That said, I suspect it's in the mix.

Virtual Alabama is built on Google Earth Enterprise; the technology for the pilot of gulf coast states was not detailed.

TomTom/Tele Atlas Pursues LBS Platform Offering

GPS Business News has the story. Here's the key quote from CEO Harold Goddijn, speaking today at the Fourth quarter conference call.

So what you will see coming out of Tele Atlas-TomTom is a set of tools and platforms to make it easy and fast to deploy location-based services in a variety of applications and contexts. That platform of development, you can see some of that if you go to our website and see our route planner. That is a branded expression of those platform tools, but you can expect further development in that space. We will make that type of development available in a white label to a wide variety of customers in the mobile space for them to develop specific applications.

So, instead of standalone solutions noted last year, the company will compete against the likes of deCarta, the recently spun off Autodesk Location Services among others. The big distinguisher? The TomTom offering will be tied to Tele Atlas data. As GPS Business notes, the company is very late to that space.

Wednesday, February 25. 2009

Update: Tenlinks: Questex Divests Cadalyst

Update 2/25/09: WorldCAD Access reports Cadalyst will live on, now as part of licensing deal to Longitude Media (very geographic!), lead by ex-CMP (they owned Cadence, a competitor) Seth Nichols. All involved will keep their jobs. Here's the official statement.

--- original post 2/13/09 ----
Tenlinks today reports that Questex Media will no longer publish the last remaining print publication focussed only on CAD, Cadalyst. The company will pay employees until the end of February. A team from the magazine is looking to buy the property and continue publishing. Questex is also the parent company of Geospatial Solutions, GPS World and Sensors.

Microsoft Sues TomTom over Navigation/File Management Patent Infringement

Microsoft has tried to engage TomTom in licensing the patents for over a year with no luck, so the time has come to go to court. This is just the third time Microsoft has gone to court to allege patent infringement (the company been on the other end of such suits, however).

There are two separate filing alleging infringement of eight patents, five related to navigation and three to file management. ITWire reports the file management patents are key parts of TomTom's implementation of the Linux kernel. The filings are before the U.S. District Court in Washington and the International Trade Commission. The former are aimed at gaining payment for damage, the latter to block future imports of infringing products.

This is not a good time for TomTom to have to go court; the company warned this week it may default on its debt incurred to acquire Tele Atlas. (MarketWatch)

Update 2/26/09: Thursday morning TomTom "rejected" the claims without elaborating. (Dow Jones)

- C|net

INRIX PR Firms Uses Location with Interesting Results!

I just received the "social media package" from Weber Shandwick (PR) on the second annual traffic scorecard put out by traffic company INRIX. (press release) The package is nice and includes some interactive maps and a video on the findings. Bottom line: " a more than 30 percent decline in traffic throughout the US."

A moment later I received another news alert from Weber Shandwick. This time highlighting that "Chicago 3rd Worst City for Traffic." The short e-mail provided the top ten list with Chicago indeed at number three and included gory details on that city's traffic along with a pointer to the study noted above.

Why did the PR firm send me info on Chicago? Because Directions Media's mailing address is in Illinois. That, the PR logic goes, means our publication covers local news (we don't) and thus would want to feature the nearby big city (we don't). So, it's great the PR industry is being spatial. It just doesn't always work.