"The classic American summer road trip entails long hours of roadside observation, with stops at cultural landmarks, parks and the occasional kitschy roadside attraction. The family-oriented tour offers some enduring geographic lessons, with the chance to create memories and connections to an expansive land. " - Matt Ball, editor, Americas / Asia Pacific - This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

The 2009 ESRI International User Conference took place in San Diego, Calif., from July 13-17. This year's event attracted more than 12,000 people this year, with the theme, "GIS: Designing Our Future". Sustainability was again a strong theme in the plenary session as well as throughout the conference program.

The annual Geoinformatics Forum Salzburg (GI Forum 2009) was held at University Salzburg in Austria  July 7 - 10. About 1000 people attended the English speaking event which is combined with the Deutsche language AGIT 2009 event. GI Forum is a GIScience focused event with a strong educational component and AGIT is oriented around applications involving new discovery, research and education involving geoinformatic related technologies.

The concept of the GeoWeb has been gaining ground for some time, but the full vision is only just beginning to be addressed. V1 editor Matt Ball spoke with Ron Lake, founder and president of Galdos Systems, and creator of the GeoWeb Conference, about the current status of the GeoWeb, and priorities for current development efforts.

New tools for modelling infrastructure design are helping to create high quality results while decreasing design and modelling costs. Mark Paraskeva was recently appointed Vice-President of Europe, Middle East, India and Africa (EMIA) for Autodesk. New development and re-development in these regions is contributing significantly to company revenue and several new products are contributing to this growth and solving project needs. V1 Magazine editor Jeff Thurston interviewed Mark Paraskeva about his new position, the growth in these regions, the products and some of the challenges in the future.