Thursday, December 13. 2007

"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."

Posted by Joe Francica in Location Intelligence at 10:19 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0) |

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Convergence has been the essence in the discussion all along, at least in the circles I've resided. I'm really not sure why it's as if one night someone woke up to realize it -- when it seemed apparent that it was the underlying goal the entire time by many.

As long as we don't end-up with a tagline like 'Real men use Nokia.' (ESRI pun intended) -- I think I'll be okay.

#1 Daniel (Link) on 2007-12-13 22:33 (Reply)

Let me see -- convergence is collision. Open platforms are countered with 'Nokia is responding vigorously to these challenges by loading its phones with multimedia technology that is tied to (its)revenue-producing services.' Can you say AOL of the handset world? This guy is so out of it that I cannot believe he runs a company as currently successful as Nokia.

#2 Sam Bacharach on 2007-12-14 14:53 (Reply)

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In reply to	[ Top level ]#1: Daniel on 2007-12-13 22:33 #2: Sam Bacharach on 2007-12-14 14:53
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