Just about a month ago Canadian Industry Minister Jim Prentice rejected the proposed $1.3 billion sale of MDA's space and information systems divisions (maker of the Radarsat-2 satellite) to Alliant Techsystems Inc. The reason: there was no "net benefit" for the country.

Alliant had 30 days to respond and convince official otherwise. Today's the end of that period and it looks like the decision will stand. Alliant announces year end earnings today. It's expected charges related to the failed purchase will be applied to Q4 earnings.

- CBC

That's it's latest offering. Mashable explores it and it's a bit more than that - more like Yahoo! Pipes to me. If you want a map on your app you add a single tag to create it an pop it onto the dashboard.

Most interesting is Adam Ostrow's take on Salesforce.com, an actual company that makes actual money, in contrast to the many, well free toys.

Is it just me, or do the announcements we hear from Salesforce seem to just make a lot more sense than a lot of the tie-ups we hear about on the consumer side of the Web? Last month, the company announced a deal with Google to launch Salesforce for Google Apps, and from what I’ve seen in my brief tour of Visualforce, we’re about to see a lot of really useful applications being cranked out by developers in the Salesforce community. It certainly adds more credence to the theory that Facebook apps are just for fun.

Bloomberg actually cited "wo people with direct knowledge of the case" on the matter:

The European Commission will clear the 2.9 billion-euro ($4.5 billion) purchase on May 14, a week before the regulator's May 21 deadline to rule on the transaction, said the people, who requested anonymity because the decision isn't public.

That'd be next Wednesday. TomTom of course said nothing.

The Realtor is John L. Scott Real Estate, one of the early implementers of Microsoft Virtual Earth for its business. (The company originally used ESRI and Google technology for its mapping.) Scott acquired nine person Real Tech, the consultancy that did the implementation work this week (press release, pdf, including Word markup...). Real Tech will become part of the in-house marketing team.

- Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Senior executives from leading technology companies, speaking at our Location Intelligence Conference last week shared that the entire value proposition for spatial enablement is a "push" to the market rather than a "pull" or demand for the technology. Our editors ask: Are we doing an adequate job of selling the technology to more of the people that will eventually implement geospatial tools with other IT solutions.?Why is it still so hard? What are we not doing well? Will it take another "Google Earth" to push the technology deeper into corporate computing or a new crop of graduates to be more geospatially enlightened?

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Jordan Thomas started WineMap.org, an Internet business that matches grape growers with buyers. This week he pitched it to potential investors. Here's his status:

Thomas and his partners already have put $400,000 of their own money into the two-year-old business. They're looking for another $700,000 to take it to the next level, Thomas said.

WineMap.org has the potential to revolutionize the $3 billion annual winegrape market, he said. It allows growers to show their vineyard locations online and offer their grapes for sale.

Growers will pay WineMap $1,200 per year, less than half of what it would cost to sell through a broker, Thomas said.

So far, about 1,500 growers are using the Web service, representing 3,000 vineyards in California and Oregon.

- press democrat