Slashgeo

GIS User has the Daratech Research press release telling us the Geospatial Market grew 17% in 2005 to top $3.3 Billion. From the PR: "Worldwide GIS/Geospatial revenue is forecast to reach $3.6 billion in 2006, up from $2.82 billion in 2004. This growth is driven by sales of commercial data products and the emergence of desktop and Internet-based systems. Core-business revenue includes software, hardware, services and data products. [...] Software comprised over one-half of total revenue, with revenues from GIS software vendors reaching $1.5 billion. [...] Data was the second largest component of core-business revenues, accounting for a quarter of total revenue [...]"

Vector One discuss a ESRI's president Jack Dangermond post about educating upper management about the value and benefits of GIS. From M. Dangermond's post: " One of our favorite case studies is about Sears, where they invested 3-4 million dollars and saved 50 million dollars each year while improving customer service and reliability. [...] ESRI has published several books, case studies and examples that can assist management. Nevertheless, our profession has been delinquent in documenting a number of focused and easily understood benefits of GIS within government and business."

In my attempts to make sure Slashgeo readers don't miss anything geospatially interesting out there, here's recent interesting Directions Mag articles. First, an article on participatory GIS and it's impact on development. Second, a two-parts article on enterprise location intelligence. And finally, an article on the new age of geospatial interoperability.

Having finally catched up the latest geonews, here's a few interesting recent Directions Mag articles. There's an article on why location-based services applications fail. Then another on the future of the USGS for 2007. Another on intelligent reserve geocoding and location-based services and a last one on a OGC demonstration of sensor web decision support services.

dct writes "Direction Magazine has a story about the coming of Location Intelligence into the main stream processes of businesses. From the article: "Spatial processing, including standard GIS operations, geocoding, and spatial databases, is rapidly merging into the mainstream enterprise IT structure. Location intelligence is moving away from specific and “special” desktop applications operated and controlled by a few gurus off in the corner. Location intelligence must be integrated and distributed throughout the total business organization to provide all users with the data and analysis for sound business decisions.""

All Points Blog offers two entries on the purchase of MapInfo by Pitney Bowes. From the first one: "There'd been speculation for some time that Oracle or Intergraph or Microsoft might acquire the company, but I confess I never hear a rumor about Pitney Bowes. that goes to show, perhaps that I think of MapInfo as a GIS company and in fact it's more a "location intelligence" company to use its favorite term, or a "business to business" company to use my term. Pitney Bowes is based in Stamford, Ct. (I think we had a NEARC meeting there once) and is described variously as the "the largest maker of mail-handling machines" and a "mail and document management services" company. So, it's basically another B2B company in what it calls the "mailstream" business. PBI (per its website) helps "companies manage their flow of mail, documents and packages.""

Geography Matters, an ESRI blog, introduces a whitepaper named GIS and Business Intelligence: The Geographic Advantage [pdf, 301k]. From the blog: "GIS and business intelligence (BI) have traditionally addressed differing issues in organizations and have resided in mutually exclusive operational silos. [...] The BI community is looking to enhance the analytic capabilities of their applications because they now realize that location can have a profound impact on behaviors and outcomes. [...] This whitepaper provides an overview of the convergence of GIS and BI, the business case for integration, and various integration strategies in use today. It also briefly describes some of the more popular applications being deployed by various industries, such as retail, manufacturing, and financial services."

DUBLIN, Ireland—(BUSINESS WIRE)—January 16, 2008— Research and Markets has announced the addition of "Achieving Business Success with GIS" to their offering.

"Achieving Business Success with GIS" explores the business environment of making GIS technology successful for professional organisations using it. Unlike many other publications in the field, this is not a book about the technology per-se, rather the use of the technology to enhance businesses and provides a business-focused rationale for using spatial technologies to address real business problems. The original announcement can be read in this GIS Cafe announcement.

You can get this book from Amazon: Achieving Business Success with GIS .