Catching Up After a Busy Week

When you have your head down and working hard, you fear missing some good stuff. Sadly it appears our space is getting a bit stale with news.

Are We Headed Off the Cliff?

I was able to find a couple interesting tidbits though: * GITA cancels the 2012 Oil & Gas Pipeline Conference:>It is with regret that GITA announces that the 2012 Oil & Gas Pipeline Conference has been cancelled. We sincerely appreciate the interest shown by exhibitors and sponsors for this year’s event, as well as by attendees from previous years. The decision was made based upon several factors, including financial considerations and overall risk assessments.

The GITA Board of Directors is meeting in the near future to discuss what the future holds for the association. More information will be released on this website, as well as to GITA’s various stakeholder groups as soon as possible.

Yikes, sounds like GITA is going to be shut down. These niche organizations are having trouble being relevant these days. Too bad, I know a ton of good people over there who worked very hard on FOSS4G 2011. * GIS Cloud releases Publisher extension for ESRI ArcMap:>The GIS Cloud Publisher for ArcMap extension enables you to publish your maps from ArcMap to GIS Cloud with only one click. It automatically uploads your data, symbology, layer structure and spatial references. The idea is that what you see in your desktop GIS is instantly replicated on your GIS Cloud account. Once your maps and data are on GIS Cloud, they are easily published to the public or embedded into your website/blog without a need for having your own servers.

So is GIS Cloud now an ArcGIS.com competitor (or whatever that’s being called these days)? I’m curious to see if people are interested in these services. My money is on MapBox over Esri and GIS Cloud in the consumer/commercial space, but I’m not sure about government customers. I guess we’ll see. * Speaking of MapBox, they’ve got some nice news this month. First off TileMill 0.9.1 is now out and supports some great new features including large rasters. Second they’ve got new retina tiles available for users of iPhone 4/4S and the new iPad. Third they’ve got this new static map API. I’ve been a big fan of Google’s Static Map API so I’m looking forward to playing with MapBox’s when I have some time. * Lastly Esri may finally have a business plan, name and cost for ArcGIS Online for Organizations. I guess this is going to be the “big” announcement at the UC? Is there demand for these products? Am I missing something here? If you work for an organization that is waiting for this and is excited, I’d love to hear about it. Doubt I’ll see anything though.