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Economics Information Technology Trend Watching

Information Technology in Brazil: Launching Investment Program to Boost Software and IT Industry

Brazil’s Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MCTI) has unveiled a new Strategic Program for Software and Information Technology in Brazil, announcing R$ 500 million (approximately US$ 248 million) in planned investments from 2012-2015 to build and strengthen Brazil’s competitiveness in this sector [..]

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Economics Information Technology Trend Watching

Watch Clay Shirky’s “How social media can make history” talk at TED

While news from Iran streams to the world, Clay Shirky shows social media help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly). The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics […]

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Design

Erik Hersman’s “How texting and GoogleMaps helped Kenyans survive crisis” talk at TED

Erik Hersman presents the remarkable story of Ushahidi, a Google Maps mashup that allowed Kenyans to report and track violence via cell phone texts following the 2008 elections, and has evolved to continue saving lives in other countries […]

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Design Information Technology Innovation Software

Howard Rheingold’s “Way-new collaboration” talk at TED

Howard Rheingold talks about the coming world of collaboration, participatory media and collective action — and how Wikipedia is really an outgrowth of our natural human instinct to work as a group […]

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Innovation Software

Autodesk Announces Availability of New FDO Providers: Geospatial Open Source Community to Drive Faster Innovation

Furthering its commitment to providing the geospatial open source community with faster innovation and support for standards worldwide, Autodesk announced the availability of new providers developed on Feature Data Object (FDO) open data access technology. FDO technology, originally created by Autodesk and now a fully endorsed project in the open source community through the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo), allows users to store, retrieve, update, and analyze geospatial data…

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Information Technology Innovation Software

Autodesk Contributes Coordinate System Software to the Open Source Community

Autodesk has announced that it has donated the source code for CS-Map coordinate system technology to the open source community and is seeking to establish it as part of an official OSGeo Foundation project for coordinate reference systems. The contribution represents Autodesk’s third major contribution to the open source community, following its MapGuide Open Source and Feature Data Object (FDO) Data Access Technology donations […]

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Information Technology Software

Autodesk sponsors project to develop Open Source GIS tools for kids

KidsGIS is a cool project from a group of professionals and educators out in Oregon (USA), who have been using MapGuide Open Source tools to create an open source geospatial portal as a tool for educating kids about environmental issues and about using open source software and open data standards. The project has an impressive group of sponsors, including the Open Source Geospatial Foundation, Autodesk, the San Diego Visualization and Supercomputer Centers, URISA, local governments and schools, and private companies such as Spatial Integrators and SPATIALinfo