Wednesday, June 17. 2009

Not the Marketing Message TomTom May Want to Send

More than one news outlet is touting that TomTom, even as it raises capital to retire some debt, is turning to Homer Simpson for help. If you've not heard, you can now download that famous voice for your device. I was a bit surprised to hear this as a local business story this morning on NPR. TomTom US headquarters is outside Boston, Mass. though frankly, it's rarely in the local biz news.

Australia Smarthouse notes that among TomTom's other challenges, authorities in that country are looking at banning various in car devices, including PNDs, for safety reasons.

Linking up with Homer either makes a company look cool or like a loser. I have a sense that although still wildly popular, Homer is losing some of his shine.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Geospatial Business at 07:28 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0) |

San Diego Preps to Be GIS Hub

It's not yet like cluster in Colorado, but San Diego is mustering forces to be become a hotbed of geospatial.

The San Diego Software Industry Council is organizing a GIS interest group - it holds its first meeting at UC San Diego’s Computer Science and Engineering building at 6 p.m. Thursday, June 18 (tomorrow).

The executive director of council, Bob Slapin, is starting to talk the talk: "There is a massive amount of data lying around that is related to a spot on the map, (environmental, traffic, health). This data is often in different silos and in most cases making sense of it requires running around, finding it and mapping it somehow. The data is often structured and unstructured."

Why the grouping around San Diego? Suggested sources:

- legacy expertise of the U.S. Navy in satellite-based global positioning technologies
- the development of location-based services for wireless devices at San Diego-based Qualcomm
- ESRI is about a 2-hour drive and hold its UC there
- local academic expertise also emerged in 2007, when researchers at San Diego State University’s Visualization Center tackled wildfires

- Xconomy

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Geospatial Business at 06:00 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0) |