About the Author:  Sean Gorman founded FortiusOne in 2005 to bring location based analytics to the mass market. Sean brings over 10 years of experience at the forefront of the geospatial revolution as a researcher, practitioner, and entrepreneur at FortiusOne. Through both academic and entreprenurial efforts he has been working to make geographic data more accessible to the public since 1997 culminating in the creation of GeoCommons – a crowd-sourced repository of statistical data and social feeds that can be easily mapped, remixed and reused by non-technical users. Sean has been featured in media such as, Wired, Der Spiegel, ABC, Washington Post, Business 2.0, MSNBC, CBS and CNN. He also holds a PhD. From George Mason University in Public Policy where he was the Provost’s High Potential Scholar and was the recipient of the Fischer Prize. He has published dozens of articles on geographic data sharing and analysis, and authored the book Networks, Complexity and Security: The Role of Public Policy in Critical Infrastructure Protection. Read more from this author

Google Maps is moving above and beyond with their new mobile offering for Street View. The application now includes a 360 degree pedestrian perspective. Google Map’s mobile version was introduced this week and is available for the Blackberry and other smart phones.

Speaking of Google Maps, Googlers (members of the Google Team) were invited to visit the University of Alaska at Fairbanks to make tools like Google Earth more accessible. The team will be conducting a series of workshops, conducting geography trivia contests and building maps (using Google Maps of course). Could Google be paving the way for mapping education?

Netezza, a global leader in data warehouse appliances and data warehousing, announced their spatial extension to its database. They will support spatial data types and operators (specifically vector data types: points, lines and areas). Netezza’s architecture is intended to work for mass queries and analysis, not operational geospatial applications.

GeoServer introduced their newest version of GeoServer and last release of the 1.6x branch, 1.6.5. The latest update features Dutch translations, and 65 bug fixes and other additional improvements.

Click2Map revealed a new feature for online crowded maps. The auto-cluster feature allows map makers to create a ‘unique marker’ for areas that are densely concentrated. The tool also enables you to laser-tune the display based on three parameters; clustering rate, minimum markers and maximum zoom.

Open Street Map is now available in Shapefile format thanks to some work from the team at geofabrik. With this addition, there is no longer any need to convert the osm.bz2 to Shapefiles as it is now supplied for users.

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