Slashgeo

All Points Blog links to a timesunion article about Google helping drive advances at MapInfo. From the article: "Cattini said his company has added features to its MapInfo Professional software that allow customers to access Google's map data. He stressed in an interview after the conference call that Google is not a competitor and uses its maps primarily to drive people to the Google Web site."

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.""

Very Spatial shortly discuss the coming release of MapInfo 9.0. From the overview: "MapInfo Professional version 9.0 is the latest release of the most powerful yet easy-to-use desktop location intelligence solution available. Direct access to new data including ESRI SDE and GeoDatabase and the latest CAD formats lets you use MapInfo Professional in conjunction with colleagues and other applications without the need to convert data. Rounding out this release are capabilities to perform time- and event-based analysis, features that improve your productivity by streamlining commonly performed tasks, and functionality to help you create better looking, easy to understand maps."

Joe Francica comments from Directions Mag on Pitney Bowes (PBI) decision to eliminate the brand names Mapinfo and Group 1 in favor of a new division called Pitney Bowes Software. Mr Francica laments, "It's made it nearly impossible to distinguish the unique selling proposition of the combined entity that, while as separate companies, positioned themselves in an emerging industry that has enormous upside potential. By sanitizing the new division name they've relinquished any possibility of brand significance." Does brand significance in the relatively small geospatial world mean anything in the relatively large business intelligence world? I guess we know what Pitney Bowes thinks about that. Read their press release of the move here.