The second annual conference on GIS - Location Matters in Business 2007, organised by JK Institute of Technology and Management, was held recently in Mumbai.

The conference was unique in its own way and was attended by national and international delegates apart from students from the JK Institute. Introduction to the conference was made by organising committee chairman KM Jagadeesh. The chief guest of the day-long conference, Ashtosh Pande, Managing Direcotr, SiRF Technologies was the opening speaker. He made an interesting speech relating the granuality of time to location and technology.

Tapas Ghatak, Director, JBIC Project and In-charge of Environment Cell, Kolkata, enumerated the importance of location in health (pulse polio) and the use of GIS for various strategies in health improvement in the rural areas.

A presentation relating location in navigation with the use of technology was made by Shivalik Prasad, Vice-President, CE Info Systems and MapmyIndia, map and data provider across industry verticals.

Vatsal Dave, General Manager, NIIT GIS Ltd, ESRI India and head, Enterprise GIS solutions business and utilities, delivered a presentation on the latest trends in technology in relation to location. Special speaker, Jaishree Kundu, gave away a motivational talk, "Never judge a book by its cover". Chief guest Ashutosh Pande released the first edition of Location Matters magazine.

The inaugural session was followed by an interactive session between the diginitaries and the audience. This was followed by Location Quiz. Students of JK Institute put up interesting posters related to their work. A poster on feasibility analysis to explore business and career opportunities, pollution levels, hospitals market size and education levels of the top ten cities of India was presented by Vinay and KM Kavita. In addition, another poster was presented by them with Dhirendra Dubey on the mapping of petroleum refineries and exploring business opportunities in petroleum sector. Deepak Kumar presented a poster using GIS to study the suitability for mapping of rice crop and soil in Orissa. Kamal Kishore and Sumit Sen presented an analysis of mobile users for different service providers amongst the 32 states in India. Prizes were awarded for the posters and quiz competition.

Organising committee chairman Jagadeesh announced that the institute would felicitate young achievers in the industry from the next conference in 2008. He also announced that the bookings for sponsorships and exhibition stalls for Location Matters in Business 2008 would be open from Dec 15, 2007.

The one-day conference was a grand event and participants could gather lot of knowledge on the use of GIS and GPS technology. The conference concluded with the programme, 'Location at your figner tip'. One need not go from place to place asking for the name of a road, a particular street or a location. Technology offers a one-touch-key solution to all our day-to-day problems with the introduction of new devices in the market. One can have effective time management, location management and work more effectively. It conveyed a strong message to the participants that awareness has to be created about the advancement of technology using GIS. Recent incidents involving call centres in Pune and Noida were cited and it was observed that such cases could have been avoided if technologies like GIS and GPS are put to effective use.