Monday, March 30. 2009

Prioleau Takes CEO Position at Cloudmade

Marc Prioleau, former VP of marketing for deCarta, has been appointed CEO of Cloudmade, a company started by the founders of OpenStreetMap. Cloudmade offers APIs for mobile and Internet applications.

TomTom and Microsoft Settle Patent Suits (for five years anyway)

Recall Microsoft sued TomTom, then TomTom countersued Microsoft.

Now, C|net reports they've settled into a five year agreement. TomTom will pay Microsoft some money to use the eight patents cited in that suit, but Microsoft will pay nothing to use TomTom's. TomTom will removes some code (file management) over the next two years.

More at Reuters.

Podcast: ArcGIS Online Now Provides Access to Microsoft Virtual Earth-An Interview with Rob Shanks, ArcGIS Online Manager

Editor in chief Joe Francica speaks with ESRI’s Rob Shanks, the senior product manager of ArcGIS Online. Rob came to ESRI in July 2007 after many years as the president and CEO of GlobeXplorer. The interview discusses the new agreement with Microsoft Corporation that gives ArcGIS users access to Microsoft Virtual as part of ArcGIS Online at the ArcGIS 9.3.1 product release. Shanks provides more details on how ArcGIS Desktop and ArcGIS Server users will be able to connect directly to Virtual Earth and quickly start their GIS projects with ready-to-use content.
Subscribe to Podcast RSS

Listen Now (to download, right click on the link at left and choose "save target as")

Missed any podcasts? Want to subscribe via iTunes, Yahoo, etc? Here's the index with all the info.

Plan Ahead: Autodesk to Triple Upgrade Fees

Ralph Grabowski at World CAD Access reports that Autodesk has made public its planned pricing for upgrades for those not on subscription after March 16 2010. In short, upgrades and cross grades (moving to another Autodesk product) will cost 1/2 the cost of a new license.

Grabowksi notes that as Autodesk hits customers when they are "down" (in the recression), it provides another opportunity for competitors.

Geography (and geographic thinking) in BusinessWeek

Where should you start your startup? San Fran? Boston? Or maybe a small town? GIS Planning (gee, they've been in the news, in mainstream media quite a bit lately!) ran the numbers and the small town may be just as favorable. See also: a slide show of a top small city for startups in each state. Here in Massachusetts, they picked Cambridge. Yeh, ok... Redlands certainly played out for one startup, eh?

Money quote from BizWeek article:

In fact, places like Boulder, Colo., (population 91,000) and Fairfax, Va., (23,000) are just as favorable for startups as San Francisco (733,000) and New York (8.2 million), according to research conducted for BusinessWeek by GIS Planning, a San Francisco-based geographic data firm that helps companies select optimal sites via its online tool ZoomProspector.

Why Doesn't Every Paper Have "Map of the Week?"

I'm sure many readers know of the Toronto Star's regular feature "Map of the Week." It's put together by Web editor Patrick Cain and covers all kinds of topics for the Greater Toronto Area that are not necessarily related to stories in the paper. He even includes a "Nerd Box" to share some of the tech and presentation issues he faces.

A few thoughts:

- Why doesn't every paper do this? Yes it takes some work, but the maps are immediate draws for the local community - no matter if they show car or bike accidents caused by cars or architecture parking tickets given. Can you help your local paper start such a feature and "do good for geography?"

- Wouldn't Patrick (or his peers at other papers) be great speakers at your conference or on GIS Day or in your class?

- With the new administrations talk about more transparency, the time is right for even more maps in the media here in the U.S. but also worldwide.

- This has got to be a lot of work and the commitment to one a week is impressive. Great job!

- In a related effort, I can't say enough about FortiusOne's dataset of the day on its blog. Now, there's no doubt the goal is to introduce its Finder and Maker tools to the world, but this is another regular effort (no daily, but regularly) to inform, engage the world through maps related to timely news topics. And, yes, I mention this because Finder! could be a great resource for data for Maps of Week.