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

Is the geospatial industry affected by the world’s financial situation? Not as much as you would think, according to Jeff Thurston and Matt Ball of V1 Magazine . Thurston claims the geospatial industry tools are relevant because they are based on reality. Ball states that as long as geospatial technologies serves critical markets (government, homeland security, etc.), the industry can weather out economic downturns. The geospatial industry is innovative in its technology, which drives growth and will certainly provide career opportunities and a bright future for those involved.

Google adds a voting mapplet, offering registered voters polling location information by just entering your address. The developing site will feature voting information in mid-October. Visit your state or location election sites for registration information. Still want more political maps? Check out Electoral College map predictions and John McCain’s geo-biography in Google Earth.

Google Maps isn’t always perfect though. This week, reports on map spamming surfaced, also recent changes to Google Maps (switching from TeleAtlas to NavTeq) is rendering both Google Earth and Google maps incorrectly, according to Chad at Earth is Square.

Nokia 1.5 introduced their new mapping application, Nokia ViNe. The application gives users the ability to add location information to their geo-tagged photos. Nokia Photos uses map data from Navteq through the Maps on Ovi service.

GIS made the front page of the Coloradoan-Fort Collins. The Poudre School District received a small grant to help educate future high school graduates interested in geo technologies. The district will provide two courses for 50+ students to take in either clean energy for companies or GIS technologies.

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