SecurusGPS released their advanced pet locator Spotlite 2.0 in early March 2013. I had the privilege of trying out this nifty gadget. It is designed to be worn by a 10 pound or greater sized dog. I don’t have a dog, so I did the next best thing. I used it to track my car and to track my partner’s suitcase (with his permission of course) as he traveled from Colorado to the East Coast. Let’s call them both Spot.

Marketing, operations, and business managers have been asking their IT departments for several years now for ways to see data on a map. IT and GIS (or IT and geo applications) have not mixed well as departments or as integrated priorities. This difficulty left many managers and departments to seek other solutions or to engage in skunk works projects with a variety of available technologies, including free and open source applications. These work-arounds to productivity have had both their successes and challenges. Microsoft has come to the rescue...

Designers of large projects, such as a highway expansion, a new shopping mall, a sewer or water lineupgrade project, or a gas line replacement, are often presented with unique challenges – including those that lie beneath the earth’s surface. Although not seen from a casual, above-ground glance, there is a world of assets and critical infrastructure that exist underground. When new projects are in the early phases of development, it is vital...

From governments to businesses, Office data is on the map. If you are an ArcGIS Online user, you can now turn your Excel spreadsheet data into an interactive map without ever leaving Microsoft Office. Esri’s Maps for Microsoft Office can produce maps from spreadsheets just as quickly and easily as you can create a chart. Creating interactive maps of Excel data is simple. Maps can display locations, for example...

What is personal privacy worth? It is certainly with different amounts to you as an individual, versus to companies that may potentially violate it. And how much is it worth to society as a whole in terms of protecting the last few shreds of human dignity left in a digital world? The FTC recently fined Google $7 million for Google’s admitted Street View privacy violations. France fined Google for the same violation in 2011, 100,000 Euros (approximately $140,000 U.S.)—the largest ever French privacy fine. Last year the FTC issued its largest ever civil fine of $22.5 million to Google for bypassing the privacy protections of the Safari web browser.