If you've known Jack Dangermond for a while, or at any time during his illustrious career, he hasn't changed over time.  He's still as passionate about GIS, geography, and mapping as my son is about chocolate in a candy shop.  Jack is genuinely interested in his users work across industries, and as usual, he kicked off the 2008 ESRI Users Conference by publicly recognizing their efforts—noble efforts in what Jack considers a necessary professional calling to improve conditions of the planet, society, and humanity.  Award after award, Dangermond recognized the accomplishments of users around the world with use cases ranging from mapping poverty in Venezuela for economic development initiatives, to the US Dept of Interior's use of GIS to contain wildfires in California & their program to map threatened polar bear range habitats in the arctic.

Beyond these annual recognitions, Jack always has a vision to present.  This year, his vision was Action—geography in action.  By action, he discovered through his decades of work with ESRI users that they are collectively creating more sustainable action leading to better, smarter, more informed decisions .  He attributed this phenomenon to what he coins "the GIS Web" of collaborative mapping and geographic knowledge sharing.  Jack's GIS Web is clearly a social fabric, but also an information architecture to support social exchanges.  ESRIs GIS Web is not only a global participatory system of content publishers, but also an architecture designed around cloud computing concepts of the world wide computer for consumption.   And all publishing, consumption, and sharing of geographic information & knowledge is available to all citizens & consumers, knowledge workers, GIS workers, and enterprises - across desktops, mobile devices, and on Web browsers. 

The ArcGIS 9.3 release is the underpinning of this social and information architecture, and Jack cited and demonstrated improvements in the areas of performance & quality in the way of map caching (which was lighting fast) to share more efficiently, extended support for connected mobile GPS-enabled devices, and in the areas of extensibility with new Web mapping API support for FLEX, javascript, and Silverlight designed to extend more for the Web developer.  His anticipated patterns of usage for the new technology inlcude mashups, Web mapping, mobile mapping, enterprise computing, distributed spatial data infrastructures, and support for Google's user-generated GeoWeb by way of KML standards support.  All of these, plus making Microsoft Virtual Earth services available for ESRI users to consume, are part of ESRIs endless mission of making geographic knowledge available to everyone.  They are clearly on track to making that mission a vision reality despite all the disruptive mapping innovations they've encountered in the last three years.      

One of the things we (meaning the LBS community) talked about in the early days of 911, was using call log histories to improve wireless coverage.  The idea is simple.  Take identity-ridden, non-intrusive logged caller locations (which include signal strengths) and create an interpolated GIS model to then isolate under served areas denoted by weak signals in a continuous field- red being strong, yellow being weak.  We saw this GIS modeling work as an opportunity to replace expensive drive-by systems used at the time by mobile operators to improve their coverage and optimize service.  While the idea was noble, it never took.  All the carriers we worked with just let the data hit floor and it was swept away into dust bins or saved only for odd court-issued subpoenas.  What a waste.

Since then, lots of folks have caught on to the idea that anonymous logged mobile locations in any transaction context can be used for all sorts of modeling and new data creation.  From traffic models to isolating target-rich advertising zones, modeling based on post-transaction analytics and business intelligence is the new trick of the Google era. 

Researchers at Northeastern University are with it (I think most around the world are.  City University in London was doing this in the late 90s).  Northeastern recently used 100,000 anonymous mobile locations to map social patterns of geographic interaction.  No surprise - we humans are for the most part sedentary creatures, staying within 20 miles of our homes (begs the question why we need TomTom's!).  Researchers hope to extend the data findings into epidemiological analyses and use it in a similar context to John Snow's famous cholera outbreak analysis map of central London produced in 1854.  It's good to see this advanced GIS work finally happening with LBS...

Untrue to typical loud form in the press, deCarta quietly raised $10.5M towards yet another round of $21M financing - this one on top of about $40M raised over the years from multiple rounds.  It's unbelievable that the company can continue to convince investors to spend more money when deCarta's core geospatial primitives such as geocoding, mapping, and routing have been reduced to commodities care of Google and Microsoft, and when more mobile & GPS device manufacturers now have their own processing engines. 

deCarta is the last remaining platform vendor that emerged during the first spike of interest in location-based services around 2000 prior to the bubble burst, and that experienced some glory in 2004-2005 when the local search wars started.  All other providers focused on simple geospatial primitive processing have either dried-up-died-and-been-buried, have been acquired (e.g. Kivera by TCS, Webraska by Sanef), or have left the business behind and moved on to more sophisticated offerings.  With timing being everything, I suspect it's now too late to sell the company for a price that would reimburse investors for the contributions made over the years, and unlikely the company can make back the money in sales...   

Capturing and leveraging user contributed data (voluntarily or inadvertently produced) is the new business of the Web, enterprise computing, and Mobile.  The idea is that if user data can be harnessed and made sense of through backend analysis, then whoever has the most of it gains the strategic and competitive advantage by growing smarter through collective wisdom generated by millions of people unknowingly amassed into one monster publishing organism.  This is of course just a theory though because anything generated unknowingly, organically, and in chaos is by definition constantly mutating and without predictability, constancy, or deliberate decision making intelligence.  Ok Darwin.  

While the Web, and to a lesser extent mobile, have clearly evolved towards crowd-smart hyperspaces of information based on mass contribution, it's hard to draw a similar parallel for GIS mapping and maps.  Aside from OpenStreetMap, which is nothing more than a social experiment aimed at challenging authority and reducing expert-edited premium goods to a commodity, there really aren't any sources of real map data (sorry chumps, dots don't count).  The real stuff of choropleth regions, complex networks, and continuous fields of environmental phenomenon are part of a school of GIS professionalism where cartography and geostatistical interpretation is science, and the skills of geographical interpretation are rooted in mathematics and other scholarly pursuits requiring people to take time to study and learn.  

To argue for this favor of discipline, I leave you with an example map from Google with a piece of user-created geodata, devoid of any expert-edited oceanic basemap information such as bathymetry, buoys, passages, channel restrictions, etc.  Do you see the value?  No. It's the data, stupid, that is missing - the expert-edited variety. 

Back in the day of GIS 0.1, GIS pros passed around shp files and mif files.  Geometry was described in one file with associated attributes in another.  It was an elegant, simple design for an offline desktop GIS environment, and still supported today by commercial vector data vendors (e.g. NAVTEQ, TeleAtlas) and by private folks swapping files & sharing geographic data.  The OGC adopted these ESRI and MapInfo creations as de facto standards of the day, and are now doing the same for an online Web world of geographic information exchange by adopting Keyhole Markup Language (KML), an XML format designed by Keyhole (now Google Earth).

I often find standards strange in that groups form with the intention of creating a collaborative environment in a competitive sphere.  I never did get that.  OGCs OpenLS started this way, with reps from all walks of LBS life getting together to pontificate what a saving grace standard should look like for a struggling LBS segment.  That de jure standard was built, but who uses it?  No one.   For me, that was narcissistic work and a waste of time and energy.  KML on the other hand fortunately was not conceived, but rather adopted by OGC after hundreds of millions of people downloaded Google Earth.  This adoption in of itself historically suggests a format like KML has promise not because it's technically advantageous, but simply because people use it - just like they use shp files.  And that use will continue, with or without OGC's blessing.  

The Microsoft VE team outdid themselves again and released a ton of features in the latest Live Maps and Virtual Earth Gemini release—what the author calls the "Live Maps 2.0" release. With some reports suggesting the effort narrowed to 411 and mobile local Search, there's much more to this release than mobile. Case in point—check out the photosynth drapes atop their amazing Vexcel 3D imagery.  This stuff is in a league of its own!

Vodafone Australia is now offering a free, promotional Blackberry 8310 navigation service for one year if users register by December 1, 2007, with future plans to fully subsidized the application with business-sponsored local advertising.  White labeled by Yapp Mobile [with backend GIS support provided by MapInfo!], Vodafone Compass offers all the basic bells and whistles found in other pay-for navigation applications.  Thanks for the shakeup mates! 

To my knowledge, there are 94 commercially deployed US mobile LBS applications spanning both consumer and business market segments.  Four years ago, there were about a dozen.  While the market now supports many options for Navigation, Social Networking, Search & Merchandising, Fitness, Locators, Infotainment, and a diversity of business mobility solutions for any professional palette across industry verticals, a cursory review of GIS market share conditions across these categories reveals the proverbial paradigm shift has not yet occurred –where’s the de facto GIS Gorilla needed for market stabilization?  

Jack Dangermond, President of ESRI [and my former employer], reminds us of the importance of geographic information science and what he coins The Geographic Approach—a professional discipline that fuses physical and cultural geographic sciences and associated knowledge through common collaboration GIS tools. Jack reinforces the idea that while individual scientific disciplines continue to aid the discovery of geographic conditions and phenomena that are changing our environment, skilled professionals within these scientific communities who share information amongst each other through close collaboration are changing the collective knowledge of the planet through shared cross-discipline scientific observation. He attributes this cross-discipline discovery to GIS the tool, and says GIS professionals will play an instrumental future role in helping various scientific communities improve deteriorating conditions of our planet.

The Geographic Approach vision is one that builds off of a heritage deeply rooted in GIS Professionalism—an industry creation supported by scientific principles and academic discipline, and one that is currently challenged by neogeographers—skilled technologists who lack education or formal training in GI Science, bet yet nonetheless produce useful geographic information applications with standard Web tools and APIs. I was recently accused of belonging to the GIS high-priesthood by someone who considers himself a neogeographer. As unfunny as it may be, I don’t think of myself as either. I had not heard the term "GIS High-Priest" before, but apparently it’s one used by a group of disgruntled neogeographers when referring to GIS Professionals [a label received by default if you’ve been employed by ESRI], or to folks who have pursued academic qualifications and extracurricular pursuits to advance GIS professionalism. Well color me a High-Priest then. Ironically, I happen to have been educated under catholic scholasticism, monks taught me Anthropology, and I did put myself through Geographic Information Science graduate school taking my career quite seriously. So while true I am proudly affiliated with these communities, a guilty-by-association label as an elitist is unfounded and ridiculous. Take it easy man…

Rapid-response and high-volume transaction scalability-specialist DeCarta has secured another round of financing from the same committed camp of initial investors further demonstrating a faithful pledge to continued growth under existing leadership. Executives say the funding will be used to support Asia and European expansion efforts in addition to planned diversification into market segments historically underserved.