Slashgeo

From the Spatial Sustain blog : "I’ve just posted the second segment of the interview that I conducted with Jack Dangermond, founder and president of ESRI, back in May at the American Planning Association’s annual conference. The first part of our discussion focused primarily on sustainability issues. This second segment focuses largely on research and development priorities for GIS technology advancement."

Paul Ramsey's clever elephant blog offers a very interesting interpretation of a Jack Dangermond interview, the founder of ESRI, on ESRI and geospatial open source software. Here's the actual CBR Q&A article. From clever elephant: "Most important, Jack is ceding arguments about technical superiority here. It's not about software anymore, it's about support. And the gauntlet is thrown down – if your company can create a credible open source whole product you can play with the big boys. Mind you, a good deal of the psychological comfort decision makers draw from things like "support contracts" comes from enterprise size, and there's a serious chicken-and-egg problem to be dealt with there for open source enterprises." There's also Spatially Adjusted that chimes in on the absence of ESRI support of iPhone, Blackberry, Android, etc. Dangermond said: "We are looking at other platforms, but see Windows Mobile as a primary IT platform for professionals." See also very pertinent related stories below.

Vector One discusses an interesting question, are geospatial tools design tools? From the entry: "From the moment a spatial project begins, design begins. The planning, constructing, operation and maintenance of a GIS or survey total station require a series of step-by-step procedures and the application of methodologies and protocols to ensure the project progresses toward successful completion. Is the beauty of a building any different the beauty of designing a spatial analysis procedure for use across a network or the implementation of an efficient GPS data gathering project for wildlife?"

All Points Blog links to two interviews with ESRI's Jack Dangermond, one with O'Reilly (part 1/3 focusing on web mapping) and the other with GovTech. A Dangermond quote from the APB notes of the second interview: "The integration in an analytic environment of many types of geographic data - those [Google Earth and Virtual Earth] platforms are not designed for that. What is designed for that are GIS servers. We now have about 40,000 of these servers that are running in the open Web. I like to call this "Web GIS," and it's a similar architecture in the sense that it's server-centric and serves out freely to thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people views, page views or intelligent views of geographic data." See previous Dangermond stories copied below.

Mentioned earlier this month, Directions Mag announced the winners of their "Most Influential Geospatial Person" poll. From the entry: "The person receiving the most votes was Jack Dangermond, president of ESRI, closely followed by Steve Coast, founder of Cloudmade and OpenStreetMap, and the founders and current chief geospatial technologist from Google. Though some may question the use of polling to ascertain who is influencing our profession, it represents a snapshot of current impressions from the community. Of equal importance are the comments written by survey respondents, which provide an even deeper understanding and appreciation of the accomplishments of these individuals." Read the comments directly on the site, there's even a second round of comments.

Here's a few interesting DM articles I noted that have not been mentioned here so far. There are two articles on usability and the geoweb, an article named First Half of 2009: State of the Industry, another Geospatial Solutions in Challenging Economic Times, and Open Source Web Based Geospatial Processing with OMAR and a last one named OGC Geospatial Rights Management Summit: Moving the Discussion Forward.