Monday, August 10. 2009

The State of GIS in NZ

"We’re definitely seeing an upsurge in implementations, but I think that the bulk of the demand for these applications is yet to come. When mainstream solution partners have fully adopted GIS solutions as part of their offering, I think we’ll see the market surge in this area."

That's the word from Kevin Ackhurst, managing director of Microsoft New Zealand in Reseller News article touting MapIt, the enterprise app introduced at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference and the ESRI International User Conference. As for the uptake of MapIt by developers? "Ackhurst won’t say which local developers, other than [ESRI NZ Distributor] Eagle, are developing on top of Mapit and won’t provide numbers, saying it’s 'commercially sensitive.'"

The last sentence of the article, which I believe is sourced to Gartner (and maybe this research note?), seems to need some corrections as MapInfo has not been mentioned thus far and one would be hard pressed to compare Bentley's Geographics to MapInfo's products or MapIt:

While Google Maps continues to dominate the consumer end of GIS, current commercial competitors for MapInfo include Bentley Systems’ GeoGraphics, Smallworld Spatial Intelligence, Spatial Insights’ TrendMap, alongside open source GIS systems such as GRASS and a vast range of free products indexed by organisations such as OpenSourceGIS.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in ESRI, Microsoft at 06:00 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

Thursday, August 6. 2009

Falcon Eye: Bing Maps, Windows 7 Touch App

Toronto-based Infusion Development has rolled Bing Maps with Windows 7 and put the whole thing on a touch screen. Called Falcon Eye, it's touted as yet another single, intuitive interface for all kinds of geospatial data and thus all kinds of applications. future structure.

Since Windows 7 supports multi-touch an app like this can run on desktop computer in addition to specialized hardware such as Microsoft's Surface.

- IT Business (Canada)

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Microsoft at 08:07 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

Monday, August 3. 2009

Impact of Yahoo/Microsoft Deal on Local Search?

This is not an area I follow, but Matt McGee at Search Engine Land dug into the possibilities. Among the questions: will/should Yahoo drop its own maps for Bing Maps?

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Microsoft, Yahoo, Local Search at 07:14 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |