“Convergence is a nice, dandy word, but it means industries colliding”

So said Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo in an article published in Mobile Tech Today referring to the emergence of Google and Apple in the cellular phone space.

Industries colliding…have you seen it? GIS and search; digital geospatial data and cellular telecommunications. Web mapping and neogeography. Reminds me of the days of mini-VAXes and desktop computers. Mainframe image processing and desktop mapping.

And then there is the MISO (Microsoft, IBM, SAP, Oracle) group gobbling up BI firms…spatially-enabling business intelligence. GIS and desktop mapping are not just colliding with enterprise apps at the high end and neogeography at the consumer end but the inevitable enveloping of location technology into everything, long prognosticated, is rapidly upon us. It’s one big fusion reaction. Next week we will air an interview with Kanwar Chadha, founder of SiRF Technologies in which he states that "location will be native to everything we do."