I’ve mentioned before that in my day job I tried to fire up some collaborations with GeoIQ (née FortiusOne). Never could get anything off the ground but enjoyed my interactions and visits to their Clarendon office space. Always admired their scrappiness from afar and the neogeographer community they built up around GeoCommons.
Yesterday GeoIQ announced their acquisition by Esri, the 900 pound gorilla of GIS systems. On the one hand, it’s a little sad to see the little local guys get gobbled up. On the other hand, I hope it created a reasonable exit for the folks I got to make a personal connection with. Probably wasn’t lifechanging but beats going bankrupt.
And I find it interesting that they’re going to establish a Research and Development center in the DC area. Between the rapid tech changes in massive data analytics, mobile development, and Web mapping, must be an interesting time for GIS folks. I sort of realized that DC was a bit of a geonerd center, but this is just another confirming datapoint. Makes complete sense what with the concentration of gov, mil, spook, sci, campaign, and NGO types in the DMV.
Good luck, Sean and crew!