After much, um, debate, the nominating committee has cast their ballots and winners have been decided on in the categories of “Best Legal Eagle,” “Best Community Activist,” “Best Toolmaker,” and “Best All-Around Developer.” These awards aren’t just acrylic and applause–winners also receive cold hard cash! Chris DiBona and Nat Torkington will reveal the names of the recipients during the Opening Night festivities at OSCON on Tuesday, June 25, so stay tuned.
Glenn Letham poses some excellent questions in this article:
What do Rachel Rosmarin and myself have in common? Well, she writes for industry-leading Forbes Magazine and I write/manage GISuser… big deal eh? [just kiddin around!]
Ok.. but really, something we do have in common is that we were both in attendance at Where 2.0 recently and looks like we both still have a big ? on where the money will be found in the mashup space. There’s no doubt that there’s money to be had, however, companies still haven’t ironed out their business models and the most common model being sought after in the mashup space to date is advertising revenues.
Jeanette Borzo joined us at Where 2.0 last week and had a number of observations about how some conference participants are attracting business from previously web-wary merchants. “The magic of maps and location-based technologies may lure small businesses to advertise online.”
Podcasting maestro Daniel Steinberg has posted Where 2.0 related audio:
You’ll hear an interview with the Platial team about their “people’s atlas” site, we visit the Where Fair the second night of the conference and speak with exhibitors, Greg Trefry and Kevin Slavin talk to Brady Forrest about games, and we play Pixie Hunt with Microsoft’s Jordan Schwartz.
Alan Glennon posted another entry from Where 2.0:
Last Wednesday, Patrick Hogan, Project Manager of NASA World Wind, spoke at Where 2.0 in San Jose. Hogan’s fifteen-minute talk was a straightforward description of the software, including comments on its open-source nature, Earth and planetary visualization functionality, and ongoing data import development. As Hogan spoke, World Wind Designer Randy Kim demonstrated and drove the software. The most newsworthy item was that World Wind has had 20 million downloads; SourceForge numbers for World Wind list over 7.5 million in the past year.
For you readers of French, Francis Pisani has posted a short entry on Where 2.0:
Les deux grandes découvertes, pour moi, ont été la démo de la nouvelle version de Google Earth lancée hier, et celle de MetaCarta, une compagnie du Massachussetts dont les logiciels sont capables de tirer toutes les informations géospatiales contenues dans des textes quelconques, qu’il s’agisse d’un document d’entreprise, des nouvelles de CNN ou de La Guerre et la Paix.
Tim O’Reilly has posted three more of his favorite Where 2.0 presentations: Chris Spurgeon of American Public Media, Claus Dahl of Imity, and Gary Lang of Autodesk.
Take a listen to some of the discussions Sue Bergeron and Jesse Rouse had with particpants on Where 2.0 opening day.
Having a CNET News.com camera roaming the show floor is always A Good Thing. Rafe Needleman interviewed three of our sponsors during the Where 2.0 Conference:
Like the rest of the audience, we had a diverse group of journalists at Where this year, from university bloggers to spatial podcasters to traditional media to the business press. Over at Forbes, Rachel Rosmarin had this Where 2.0 take-away:
Most Web surfers use online maps to get from point A to point B. But marry an online map with something else–a collection of photos, a set of real estate listings or even some user-generated gossip–and you might be able to start a business. Or at least a cool-looking Web site.
That was the thinking at O’Reilly Media Where 2.0, a conference where hundreds gathered this week to celebrate a concept that barely existed a year ago: the “mash-up,” which merges map data from the likes of Google and Microsoft with…well, pretty much anything.
Alan Glennon had several conference-related posts this week:
Notes Jesse Rouse and Sue Bergeron: “We went around the exhibitor hall on Tuesday to hear about new announcements and existing products from various companies.” Hear all about it in their podcast.
Glenn Letham posted this about Google Geo Developer Day, an event Google organized in concert with Where 2.0:
What a day… I knew it was going to be full of news and cool stuff when Eric Schmidt (CEO), Larry Page and Sergey Brin (co-founders) walked onto the stage at the Googleplex - they note that geospatial is a defining opportunity in search!
Writes Margery Conner:
I spent the past two days at Where 2.0 in San Jose, CA, which is an O’Reilly conference devoted to trends in geospatial data rendering and interaction with this data. The audience/customer for geospatial data and interaction can be roughly described as people saying, “I need to make a map of something.” Their data has more meaning - or only has meaning - when you know its location.
Annalee Newitz of Wired News focuses her report from O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 Conference on the “neogeographers” who are working on location-based technologies we can all use. As she puts it:
“Undoubtedly, the most interesting map geekery was coming out of a growing group of open source programmers who’ve devoted themselves to liberating the tools once used by experts to do geographical analysis.”
In case you missed them, here is a roundup of O’Reilly Radar blogs on this week’s Where 2.0 Conference:
From Nikolaj: Where 2.0: Mikel Maron on GeoRSS and Where 2.0: Location Sensing Lightning Talks
From Tim: More Favorites from Where 2.0, Gutenkarte: Geo annotation of Gutenberg texts, and Google Earth, Sketchup, and Second Life
Another excellent announcement from one of our Where sponsors, Talent (thank you!):
Talent Information Systems, a high-tech start-up company located in Athens, Greece, announces the launch of Cruiser, a new platform for delivering internet services that use geo-spatial data, maps, and location-aware information.
And be sure to visit Talent’s Cruiser web site for more information.
Just want to draw your attention to a paper authored by the Where 2.0 Conference co-chairs, Brady Forrest and Nat Torkington: The State of Where 2.0 (pdf). It’s a succinct take on this space.
Seems Google’s release on Monday of its latest version of Google Earth and Sketchup has people talking, both at this week’s Where 2.0 Conference, and on O’Reilly Network. Here’s a roundup:
From O’Reilly Radar, Tim posts: Google Earth, Sketchup, and Second Life
From LinuxDevCenter.com, Lyz Krumbach posts: Google Earth for Linux
From MacDevCenter.com, Giles Turnbull posts: Google Sketchup for OS X
From ONLamp.com, Jeremy Jones posts: Google Earth R4 Beta is out for Linux
Couldn’t be here this year? Or had such a great time that you want to come back next year? Mark your calendar–we’ll be back at the San Jose Fairmont, June 19-20, 2007.
Over at Alpha, Rafe Needleman wrote yesterday:
I’m at the Where 2.0 conference in San Jose. Unfortunately, the Loki location-finding software on my laptop, which I raved about in a previous blog post, thinks I’m in Toronto. Probably the conference team picked up its Wi-Fi access points from an office or event in Toronto and shipped them down here. At any rate, it’s ironic, given the topic of the conference, but more importantly than that, for a few moments, Google thought I was in Canada and sent me to the Canadian version of the site (www.google.ca) when I tried to search. It was no big deal, but it shows you how location data applies to things you don’t always think of as location related. And the potential downsides to poor location data can be serious. Imagine if I had some emergency-response product that thought I was in Toronto instead of San Jose–or if I was on a VoIP phone that was registered to a different location, and then I dialed 911.
Rafe made an excellent point, so we asked our longtime conferences networking provider, GESI, to investigate. Their response? “All six AP’s were reset to factory defaults before I configured them. However, we’ve looked into this some more and found that the Fairmont Hotel IP block is registered in Toronto Canada. All our traffic uses the Fairmont IP.” There it is then.
Another post from Rafe Needleman:
At the Where 2.0 conference, execs from three companies in a row got up and presented their view of the next consumer publishing phenom (or so they hope): geo-focused consumer content. Each of these companies has launched a site that collects stories associated with peoples’ relationships to places.
Gregory Trefry (gamelab) and Kevin Slavin (area/code) just gave back-to-back talks at Where 2.0 on Location Gaming and Big Games. These are exciting new games incorporating location and geospatial technology as core components of gameplay. Gregory is organizing the Come Out & Play Festival in New York that will focus on these games (”turning New York into a giant playground”).
Big Games can be both large and small. The playing field may be an entire city or a park or basketball court. Gregory talked about two games, pacmanhattan and Payphone Warriors. Pacmanhattan used the grids of streets as a pacman grid and Payphone Warriors is a version of capture the flag using city payphones. Currently, these games require lots of set-up and management. Payphone Warriors requires a scorekeeper and most games require several months advance setup. Gregory spoke about the great future potential of these games and working to have the cellphone be a gaming device on the level of a basketball — ready to play without any configuration/setup.
Dennis O’Reilly writes that, “web sites let you personalize maps to share the times and places of your life.”
No Web site knows your favorite haunts as well as you do. But now there are five new online services looking to tap into that information. These new sites invite you to share your knowledge and memories of your most beloved locales with the rest of the world, whether those spots are in your hometown or on the other side of the planet.
The five, Wayfaring.com, Platial.com, 43places.com, Plazes.com, and Flagr.com, all hadcoming-out parties this week during at the Where 2.0 conference here, which is presented by O’Reilly Media.
Stowe Boyd was only here for half a day, but did post this:
Geoloco is going nuts. The small, entreprenuerial companies — Platial, Plazes, and so on — are running side by side with the giants. Google’s announcements yesterday at the Google Geo Day (see here), and Stephen Lawler’s demo today of Microsoft Virtual Earth indiciate the pace of innovation in this space. The Google SketchUp app caused a lot of gasps, but I wonder whether manually rendering a building in a few minutes will really compete with completely automating or the use of photos.
Wow, can’t keep up with Glenn Letham:
I was happy to see a preview of O’Reilly’s upcoming Emerging Telephony conference on the schedule at this week’s Where 2.0 conference, and ETel conference chairs Surj Patel and Brady Forrest did a great job of summarizing the interesting developments we’ll be examining in the communications space at the next ETel conference. It makes a lot of sense to preview ETel here as there’s a good amount of overlap between the location-based services being discussed here at Where 2.0 and the emerging communications technologies that we cover at our ETel conference and on our ETel site.
Patel explained how we’re tracking things like the growth in open source communications tools and VoIP, and will be featuring presentations that demonstrate the innovations that are happening on the edge of the telecom networks, and not just looking at the industry from a telco perspective. The conference will provide a forum for developers who may feel marginalized by the traditional telco models. ETel will also address issues like security and surveillance topics and the regulatory hurdles that are impacting telecom innovation in the U.S.
Glenn Letham shares these notes from Stephen Lawler’s Microsoft presentation at Where 2.0 yesterday:
Microsft has a goal of providing global access to local knowledge via Windows Live Local. The new release brought on real time traffic counts, more International coverage (30 countries) mapping, routing, directions.. all available via the API.
O’Reilly Radar: Tim O’Reilly writes:
Another “wow” from Where 2.0: Schuyler Erle demoed Gutenkarte, a fabulous site that uses Metacarta’s geo text mining engine to link classic works from Project Gutenberg to accompanying maps. How often have you read a book and wondered about where it took place and how long it might have taken to get from here to there? Schuyler’s demo, showing Thucydides’ classic The History of the Peloponnesian Wars, accompanied by a map showing the locations mentioned in the text, suggests how useful MetaCarta’s technology is in automatically adding geo-annotation to texts.
Gutenkarte is build in part with Openlayers.org, Metacarta’s open source toolkit for associating a map with any web page.
YAA (Yet Another Announcment) from one of our Where sponsors–deCarta, the company formerly known as Telcontar (thanks!):
deCarta (formerly Telcontar), the leading supplier of software platforms and services for the location-based services (LBS) industry, and Inrix, the leading supplier of real-time and predictive traffic information services, today announced the integration and immediate availability of Inrix’s traffic information into deCarta’s Drill Down Server(TM) (DDS) and Traffic Manager(TM). At the Where 2.0 Conference in San Jose, the two companies will demonstrate their ability to optimize driving directions based on current traffic conditions including detour rerouting. The companies also announced that Inrix is using deCarta’s DDS to align location information from millions of commercial vehicle probes collected each day to the relevant road segments, as part of the Inrix Dust Network.
Cyrus Farivar posted this article from the conference yesterday:
Tuesday I fled from unseasonably foggy San Francisco and headed south to the warmer climes of San Jose, to attend O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 conference, which covers “the future of mapping and local search.”
On Monday Google released the latest version of Google Earth and SketchUp, and so attendees were anxious to hear from the search giant.
John Hanke of Google was here to show off some of the latest features in Google Earth. At last year’s conference, Google showed off Google Earth and said that Mac users would have to wait. This year, Hanke said that he’d recently switched back to using a Mac, and that Google Earth “screams” on a MacBook.
Patrick Hogan of NASA presented on the impressive open source World Wind project to a very appreciative audience this morning at the Where 2.0 conference. Hogan describes World Wind as an interactive 3d geospatial visualization platform and NASA has clearly embraced the open source model with World Wind.
Part of what makes NASA World Wind so compelling is that it provides access to and seamless integration of multiple data sources. It’s designed to provide the latest data from organizations like NASA, USGS, NRL, and NOAA on a 24/7 basis, and is entirely configurable to service individual specific needs. A partial list of data sources that are included in World Wind are Blue Marble, LandSat 7, SRTM, TerraServer and National Atlas. Hogan points out that by combining multiple data sources we can better understand the ramifications of things like changes in the atmosphere and other complex interactions that can be discovered by overlaying and analyzing disparate data.
David Battino, digital audio editor for O’Reilly’s Digital Media site is giving his right-brained side a jumpstart at this week’s Where 2.0 Conference. He writes:
Visionary architect Buckminster Fuller reportedly liked to jumpstart his creativity by grabbing the magazine at the top right corner of the newsstand rack, no matter what the subject was. I’m trying the same experiment this week by attending O’Reilly’s decidedly non-musical Where 2.0 Conference.
Where 2.0 is all about digital map-making. The stars here are the creators of Google Earth (amazing new version released yesterday), Microsoft Virtual Earth, and dozens of start-up companies that build wild new ways to interact with geographic data. Even though all of the presentations have been silent, they’ve got me thinking about the future of music software.
In fact, the word that came up over and over was a musical one: mash-up. Continue reading…
After a full day of sessions at the Where 2.0 2006 conference, attendees were treated to BOFs, a pair of receptions, and the Where Fair. In this podcast we hear from three of the exhibitors at the Where Fair: Ning, Onomy Labs, and MLB Company. You’ll hear about a new platform for your application, about miniature airplanes that are gathering images, and about a map that projects onto a table top that can be controlled by tilting and rotating the table (5 minutes, 00 seconds)
Writes Frank Taylor:
Today was the opening of the Where 2.0 conference. This conference is well organized, and the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose is a very nice location. The format of this conference is a little different from many technical conferences I’ve attended. They have a technique of greatly limiting the amount of time allowed for presentations. Even their big sponsors like Microsoft and Google only got 15 minute slots for their presentation.
There are two important XML schemas covered today at Where 2.0 — GeoRSS and KML.
GeoRSS is location data within RSS or Atom. Mikel Maron’s presentation covered GeoRSS in detail, examples, uses and aggregations. USGS Earthquake Alerts are available via GeoRSS. GeoRSS has been adopted by Yahoo! and Microsoft. See Mikel’s Where2.0 specific aggregation - mapufacture. GeoRSS leverages the ubiquity of RSS and the GML schema to create the best method for geo-syndication.
KML is the file format for Google Earth. Brian McClendon describes it as “the PDF of GIS”. It is designed to be a package file format — containing or linking to all the resources needed to display a model or graphics within Google Earth. Brian spoke about the new features in KML 2.1 (supported in Google Earth 4). Announced yesterday, KML is now supported in Google Maps in addition to Google Earth.
There is concern about the possible overlap of these two schemas. The question was raised after Mikel’s presentation; however, no answer exists yet.
There’s no doubt that privacy issues loom large on the horizon for most of the companies and developers working in the location space. Conference co-chair Nat Torkington gave low marks to a panel of representative from social mapping application companies this afternoon when no one had a good answer for an audience question about data privacy, and it was a welcome reality check to hear from a lawyer about these issues in between all the gushing demos of radical new location-based applications.
It seemed that many in the room sat a little more attentively during Lauren Gelman’s presentation on Privacy and the Law. Gelman works out of the Center for Internet Society at Stanford and was very knowledgable about the new technologies being discussed here at the Where 2.0 conference, and how they will be pusing the boundaries of existing privacy law.
After a mind-bending day of talks and demos and then a lively and packed exhibitor hall reception, the hands-on Where Fair event still did not dissapoint. For those that were at the first Where 2.0 conference, it’s really striking what a difference a year has made in the progress and uptake of these location technologies. I think John Hanke of Google summed it up well when he told the audience this morning, “I think we all share a sense of collective shock at how much has happened in the past year.”
The Where Fair is a fun event that highlights some of the new and smaller projects in the location space, often led by young and independent developers, and was a great place to sample the energy and excitement that many are feeling at this conference. There was a wide range of varied technologies and applications on display — from spy “Bat” planes, to location-tagging applications, to an awe-inspiring “Tilty, Twisty, Twirly” table for interactive map displays. I can’t cover all the neat projects that were on display in this space, but here’s a few details on some of the ones that caught my eye.
Writes Michael Calore:
For the next two days, San Jose will become the center of the mapping universe as the latest in local search, map mashups and map technologies crowd the agenda. I (Webmonkey Mike) will be at the conference on Tuesday and Wednesday, and I’ll be posting updates and news about the presentations and demos.
Here are his first posts, good summary “bites” of many of the day’s presentations:
Ben Nolan from Projectx Technology showed off their unique and simple Zopto location addressing scheme to a very favorable response here at the Where 2.0 conference. Projectx is based in New Zealand and started out building community mapping sites for New Zealand and Australia, as the big map players were not yet indexing these countries and this resulted in them building their entire system from the ground up, including the geographic addressing scheme. Based on the same type of addressing that has been commonly used on the web and incorporating aspects of the world’s postal systems, Zopto’s format uses URLs that include the common words for the location information of a physical address being cited. For example, the Zopto URL for the Fairmont Hotel here in San Jose would look like:
/ca/santa+clara/san_jose/market+street/170/
There’s lots of advantages to a format like this including that it supports unique addresses, it’s human readable, self-descriptive, and easily indexable. As conference co-chair Nat Torkington pointed out, there is a lot of power in making use of the fundamental properties of the web as Zopto has done to create a basis for deriving and connecting geographic locations on the web.
