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CoStar Offers ESRI Business Data to Commercial Real Estate Professionals
ESRI Data Offering More Accurately Reflects Current Market Conditions

www.costar.com

CoStar Group, Inc. a provider of information, marketing, and analytic services to the commercial real estate industry, is licensing ESRI geographic information system (GIS) demographic data and software. The new agreement gives customers online access to data that is more precise and up-to-date than ever before. CoStar customers, including retailers, owners, brokers, and appraisers, will be able to benefit immediately from the new demographic and business information.

“CoStar chose ESRI as our demographic data supplier based on our confidence in ESRI’s veteran team of demographers, statisticians, economists, and analysts,” says Bob Evatt, vice president, software development, CoStar Group. “Their high level of expertise and professionalism ensures that CoStar subscribers will receive the most accurate demographic data available.”

first published week of:   04/19/2010

CSC Study Reveals Opportunity for Global Utilities as Grids Get Smarter

www.csc.com

A study released today by CSC (NYSE: CSC)  found that business and IT executives at the top 20 utilities and retail energy providers worldwide are finding opportunities for growth as new smart utility and meter-to-cash advancements are unveiled. Participants of the 2010 Smart Utility and Meter-to-Cash Study reveal that there is optimism in the utilities sector about implementing new technologies to support the “smart grid,” but that the business processes to support them are just beginning to take shape.

The study, commissioned by CSC and conducted by leading analyst firm, IDC Energy Insights, in the winter of 2009-2010, queried business and IT executives from leading utilities from Australia, China, the United Kingdom and the United States about their major initiatives, objectives, expected payback, readiness and challenges. IDC Energy Insights is a division of International Data Corporation (IDC), the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications, and consumer technology markets.

Responses indicate that smart utility and meter-to-cash technologies are creating significant amounts of data and analytics for customer intelligence, which allows utilities to study consumer reaction to pricing, identify potential revenue leakage, forecast customers’ ability to pay and limit unbilled usage through move-in/move-out disconnections. Despite these advantages, less than half of the top 20 utilities are currently applying analytics to energy consumption, but utilities executives across all regions believe that with the proper planning, organizations can achieve desired profitability goals in a relatively short amount of time.

“Smart meters and a diversity of transmission and distribution grid sensors are generating volumes of data, and this has the potential to have a profound effect on the business,” said Jill Feblowitz, practice director, IDC Energy Insights. “Surprisingly, utilities executives indicated that they are not yet at a point where they’re making full use of this data.”

The study also showed that utilities recognize that they must do more to adopt new meter-to-cash processes to drive the bottom line.

first published week of:   04/12/2010

Czechs halt Google’s “Street View,” cite privacy

The Czech Republic has refused to grant Google permission to expand its “Street View3 because the mapping feature invades peoples’ privacy, the government’s privacy watchdog said Wednesday.

The Czech Office for Personal Data Protection has been investigating the issue since April, and last week it did not give Google Inc. the necessary registration for “Street View” in the eastern European country but did not explain why.

Google at the time considered it a temporary decision. On Wednesday, the U.S. Internet giant said it was closely cooperating with the Czech government agency and providing all the details required to be allowed to continue in collecting data.

“Thanks to the ongoing cooperation, most conditions … have been met,” Google said in a statement.

But office head Igor Nemec said Google, while gathering the data, uses technology that “disproportionately invades citizens’ privacy.”

“Street View” provides Internet users with panoramic views and photographs of neighborhoods along many streets across the globe. It is popular but has been controversial in Germany, South Korea and other countries amid fears that people — filmed without their consent — could be seen doing things they want to keep private or being in places where they don’t want to be seen.

Google also lost the trust of many in Europe this spring when it had to acknowledge that the technology used by its “Street View” cars had also vacuumed up fragments of people’s online activities broadcast over public Wi-Fi networks for the past four years.

Details Here

first published week of:   09/20/2010

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