I found quite interesting that the two main keynote speakers at the coming Navigation Strategies USA Conference in San Jose are Steve Coast, Principal Architect at Bing Mobile and Randy Meech, Head of Engineering, Local & Mapping, AOL.
Steve Coast is the founder of OpenStreetMap and CloudMade. He has recently left CloudMade to join Microsoft Bing Mobile and made Bing Aerial Imagery available to OSM mappers.
Randy Meech has been talking at the last OpenStreetMap Conference in Girona, Spain. He announced that MapQuest was testing OSM in its new portals across Europe and that AOL will spend the equivalent of 1 million $ to enhance the OSM mapping and routing of the USA.
A clear indication that OpenSource mapping is not only for geeks and open-source activists but is really breaking its way into the industry ! It is obvious that Open-Source is not woven into the fabrik of AOL and Microsoft. So it will be interesting to see what is coming up and how Open-Source (or rather Open-Data) and the commercial web industry can find mutually beneficial agreements.
