There are four open positions in the Redlands office. I didn't know Canada-based PCI had a Redlands office.

I've noted before that Pictometry does a great job getting its story into local papers. That continues to be its marketing strategy. This week I found two examples:

New aerial photo system develops into government tool (Minneapolis St. Paul Star Tribune)

New kind of map proving useful (Rosemount MN, Town Pages)

Steven Johnson, author and the fellow behind hyperlocal news site outside.in, provided the keynote for the event "for people designing and building the latest generation of social web applications" which was held last week in Brighton, UK.

Some tidbits from the coverage:

Mr Johnson and many others at the conference argued about and how to program for the so-called "geographic web". For most of its life, the web has been "out there", a boundless but ethereal construct. While it could provide information about particular places, web surfers had to find and assimilate it themselves. Where that surfer was, or lived, wasn't even possible to specify.

Mr Johnson closed his talk with what he hoped was the take-home message. Teething problems and privacy concerns aside, the geographic web should be a tool "not to use the web as a mechanism to escape the real world but instead use the web as a way of enhancing the real world, making you feel more connected to your community".

- BBC

VectorNet, is a GIS to manage efforts to cull the possum population and thus control TB in wildlife. A few years and a few million dollars in the making, it took it won a Computerworld award for excellence in the use of IT.

Alison Barrett, the Animal Health Board's business strategy and systems manager says it's so effective, that the cost should be paid back within a few years.

Thanks to reader Duane for pointing out the previous geographically incorrect headline.

- New Zealand Herald

I confess when I heard about the deal on new devices that include "free for life" traffic information, I didn't get too excited. Apparently, it was for good reason: the traffic comes with ads. A PC Mag review explains:

One gripe: The nüvi 755T comes with advertisements. My evaluation unit arrived with three preloaded vendors (BP, Walgreens, and Wells Fargo). When you access the traffic menu, one of these advertiser's names always appears at the bottom of the screen. Also, from time to time, one of these ads will pop up on the map view screen (they won't appear when you are in motion). A single tap of the advertisers' name will perform a POI search for nearby retail locations. Unfortunately, you can't disable these ads, but it's likely that they help Garmin offset the cost of the live traffic information that it offers free.

It'll be interesting to see if a backlash causes any changes in the plan.

Rafe Needleman has the list of folks presenting at DEMO Fall. Among his current "top ten to watch" are two geo-related businesses.

Sharelift by Mapflow: Adds intelligence to casual carpooling with a car-service-like gizmo that tells drivers where riders are that want to go where they are going. It's hitchhiking 2.0: Scary but cool, and very green.

WebDiet: Location-based diet helper. Gives you food advice based on what's close to you. Unknown if it gives you an electric shock and shrieks, "Keep walking!" when you pass a McDonald's.

- Webware, via C|net

"Idiot I am, I forgot to give the owners [of GeoEye-1] name. It's Mark Brender."

- In the comments of a post at Gizmodo, reporting on an interview GeoEye vice president for communications and marketing Mark Brender gave to NPR.

ESRI had acquired land including a warehouse used by a charity, Joseph's Storehouse. The City of Redlands Redevelopment Agency, along with a task force and the two parties, helped arrange for a land swap.

Property One, LLC, an affiliate of ESRI, closed escrow on the Stuart Avenue property and, through the agreement, would exchange the property for the current Joseph's Storehouse building at 457 New York St.

The charity, which feeds and clothes those in need, will now have more room and the city is pleased to keep the community resource.

- Redlands Daily Facts

Professor Stewart Fotheringham from NUI Maynooth (Ireland) leads the project called StratAG – Strategic Research in Advanced Geotechnologies. It focuses on research related to geospatial monitoring and early warning systems. The €9m is from Science Foundation Ireland (SFI). Forty researchers are onboard in Ireland, along with industry partners including "ESRI, eSpatial, PMS and Navtech [sic]."

Fotheringham offers this vision of the future city:

Picture a person walking down the street with a hand-held device, which they point at each building. As they pass the cinema, the device will tell them what’s on; as they pass a restaurant, the device gives them the menu; as they pass an office block, the device tells them what firms are located in the block, their line of business and contact numbers.

- Silicon Republic

The head of the Russian Space Agency (Roscosmos) announced that the number of satellites in the Glonass constellation will jump from the current 16 to 30 by 2011. That includes six to be launched by the end of this year. Glonass will have strong coverage at the poles, something key for mining natural resources in those areas.

- Novosti

GPS Business News put the pieces together including:

- CEO Nelson Chan left.
- Christian Bubenheim, who was vice president Product Marketing, left.
- Clay Babcock, who was Senior Director, Product Planning left.
- The Magellan booth at the IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin was cancelled.

Marketshare is down and there's no growth in Europe. The last big Magellan professional campaign I recall was for its MobileMapper mobile data collector.

I'll add another measure of health: the last corporate press release was from April of this year.

The press release from 3Tera is about their global cloud solution. The geo "example" is EveryTrail, a post your trail route and pics app. One of my students reviewed it earlier this semester; that's the only reason I'd heard of it.

"The nature of our application, a Web 2.0 platform where users from all over the world are uploading GPS data and photos to share with others, will greatly benefit from a global cloud solution," said Joost Schreve, founder and CEO, EveryTrail, Inc. "With users and trips from over 160 countries, we find it extremely beneficial to be able to run in multiple locations without having to deal with infrastructure and hardware configurations. AppLogic technology and 3Tera's business model of working with leading datacenter operators has given us the ability to access world-class computing infrastructure. It really removed barriers for our company."

The new marketing deal for Whrrl involves updates via Whrrl for characters on Entourage, an HBO TV show. I guess if the locations in the show were somehow important to me this might be interesting, but this doesn't sound like something that'd prompt me to sign up. That said, this is clever.

The current challenge to such network, offers Venture Beat, is that these location-based networks don't have enough participants to make them interesting. "Fake ones" are a way to up the ante.

This makes no sense to me, but I guess we are still in the "solution in search of a problem" mode for LBS. Here's the deal: Everyone gets the last short episode first. The rest are delivered in an order based on location. Does that sound fun or interesting?

The film, Nine Lives, cost of $25,000, and is a collaboration between Singapore's Nanyang Technological University's (NTU) School of Art, Design and Media undergraduates, and its computer engineering undergraduates who developed the GPS apps.

- Straits Times

So far the results of our poll on Map Hawk as to what's next for CNN on using their "wall telestrator" is that they will have to beef up their maps to go at least to the zip code level. There is only one day left to vote in the poll. Go to the Map Hawk Blog to vote.