It’s a little difficult to keep up with everything while I’m traveling. Pleasantly I noticed in my inbox that an announcement from O’Reilly went out that included my name.

Brady Forrest and I collaborated on producing a business-oriented analysis of the phenomenal growth around geospatial technology. The report, Where2.0: The State of the Geospatial Web covers various aspects of providers and potential opportunities in a variety of domains that are affected by the emergence of many factors.

Some of these topics include: the impact of open and user-contributed geographic data on traditional data vendors and subsequent tools that rely on the availability, coverage, and quality of this data; highly-connected mobile devices, now often with developer available interfaces for location sharing and high-bandwidth internet connections; models for location-based advertising; and next generation applications such as games, augmented & immersive reality; as well as many more.

It was definitely interesting writing the report from a more practical and business perspective. My background has been in pushing and developing new technologies. I found it eminently useful to think of it from a reverse perspective on evaluating the percolating usefulness across markets and uses. It is valuable for both business development as well as application development to connect.

In addition to the discussion and analysis of the current state of the geospatial web, the report includes a fairly broad directory of companies, applications, and organizations in Where2.0 across the multiple domains. It also includes in-depth profiles of some of the major players.

The report is primarily for businesses that are interested in starting up, or entering, the geo- space and want to get a view of the landscape. It should also be useful for existing organizations that want to understand how the various technologies, acquisitions, and developments may affect their current market.

You can get a discount by using this link.

The report was originally written this Spring and originally announced at Where2.0. We’ve been continuously updating the report with new information such as the completion of the TeleAtlas/TomTom and NAVTEQ/Nokia mergers and the implications as well as the iPhone 3G with built-in GPS and Core Location API. The GeoWeb is a fast-moving space, so it’s definitely difficult to attempt to grasp for a quick snapshot. We hope to update it more in the future as Where2.0 evolves.

If Where2.0 is the cutting edge of geospatial technology – at least in the consumer space, then WhereCamp is the alpha brainstorm and prototyping of Where2.0 2010.

There are plenty of summaries around, and each gives insight into the different aspects of the unconference. You have your high-fallutin’ corporate types, developers, and ancillary community advocates that traveled from Portland just for WhereCamp.

Check out the constant stream of twitters of wherecamp.

So many hats

The most important thing I learned at WhereCamp actually had nothing to do with geo.

There has been a lot of discussion leading up to Where2.0 and WhereCamp about the benefits of open data exchange between a number of the geospatial repositories that are coming online to share and aggregate data. Both Sean Gorman of GeoCommons and David Troy spoke in their presentations about the importance and capability of interchange.

However, while the concept is easy – lets share data – there is a lot of difficulty in the specifics. 45 minutes in an ad-hoc session could very easily diverge into many channels of non-resulting vectors.

Instead, Steve Coast introduced us to a brilliant technique for investigating, analyzing, and brain-storming on difficult and potentially controversial issues. A technique that is perfectly adaptable to solving problems in short-time periods with a large group of people.

Six de Bono Hats is a process walking through various perceptions of problem solving. You preset a time limit on each, everyone in the group “wears” this hat and offers insight with this perception. After the fixed time, you move on to the next hat.

• White hat (Blank sheet): Information & reports, facts and figures (objective)
• Red hat (Fire): Intuition, opinion & emotion, feelings (subjective)
• Yellow hat (Sun): Praise, positive aspects, why it will work (objective)
• Black hat (Judge’s robe): Criticism, judgment, negative aspects, modus tollens (objective)
• Green hat (Plant): Creativeness, Alternatives, new approaches & ‘everything goes’, idea generation & provocations (speculative/creative)
• Blue hat (Sky): “Big Picture,” “Conductor hat,” “Meta hat,” “thinking about thinking”, overall process (overview)

By using this technique, we were able to lay out a good path towards interoperability and interchange. We acknowledged previous and current efforts in geospatial and non-geo domains and also the difficulties that will be faced. You can read the resulting notes here.

The technique was so successful I applied it at the GeoPrivacy session. It came in half-way through after I saw that the conversation for the first 30 minutes was turning into a ping-pong game of point-counterpoint with no real guidance or outcome. So we performed a much fore-shortened de Bono hats and came out with an adequate list of privacy concerns, and suggestions of future actions.

A week passes

With WhereCamp and Where2.0 2008 over, I completely collapsed on Monday morning. Having the two conferences back to back means that is an incredible concentration of experts and enthusiasts. There is also the follow-on of the well-packaged Where2.0 with the unwrapping to dig inside of WhereCamp that brings us back to innovating and collaborating.

It was a grueling but completely inspiring week. I’m not sure how the future will turn out, but I know I’m very excited about it.

Where2.0 is amazing in watching the trends over time. The ideas that are postulated and alluded to years ago are now emerging in products, tools, and companies.

Where-3D

One of the biggest of these emergent trends from the first day of Where2.0 were Augmented & Immersive Realities. Companies like EveryScapeEveryScape (homepage) doing immersive video and annotation – the next generation of QTVR. EarthMine (homepage) is capturing a huge amount of data to create high-resolution 3D models of the world that can then be utilized for annotation and analysis of the real world.

Ancillary to fully digitizing reality, aerial imaging is becoming as ubiquitous as GPS for capturing road information. Pict’Earth (homepage) are building the autonomous systems and tools for capturing and using imagery in systems like OpenAerialMap. What is the next generation of open-data collection?

Where-Design

Another common theme that has emerged was proper visual design of these new mapping technologies. Adrian’s opening keynote has clearly shown what straight-forward steps can be taken to use open-source tools and simple concepts to provide compelling, visually attractive interfaces.

Chris Spurgeon even asked the cartographers in the room to raise their hands, outing about a half-dozen. As map interfacespenetrate into most of our tools and websites, I hope there is continued growth in future dialog of technologists and cartographers.

Where-is-the-Money

While this has been present at previous conferences, Where2008 definitely included a large current of discussion around monetization strategies and opportunities. Greg Sterling’s panel was fairly narrow in breadth of members, consisting primarily of the sole geospatial advertiser(s) and mobile companies. Steve Coast of CloudMade and Ian White of Urban Mapping are both data provider companies, yet debate focused on “mobile coupons”. I would have liked to have a broader view of the monetization landscape – how in fact has Urban Mapping moved from data provider to ad-supporter. Skyhook Wireless is dabbling in a number of spaces: geolocation technology, social network, advertisements, and who knows what else. Even CloudMade had three separate businesses before getting funding. The common trend of that panel’s composition was that they are involved in a lot of markets.

On the second day Dev Khare of Venrock gave a much broader survey of the monetization landscape, looking at devices, users, opportunities and strategies.

Why Where?

One of my favorite components of Where2.0 are the closing series of talks that approach answering the question “Why are we building this technology?” It’s important, as innovators, engineers, developers, and businesses to understand the implications of our work. We cannot claim that we are not free from responsibility for the resultant uses of our applications.

Lisa Parks, a media studies expert, makes us realize the impact remote imagery has on the potential conceptual understanding and involvement of citizens. Even by the fact that someone of her expertise is looking at a complex technology as satellite sensing from the viewpoint of “media” should demonstrate the deep influence tools like Google Earth and WorldWind are having on users around the world.

Erik Hersman (blog) and InSTEDD both do incredible work to flex tools to serve the emergent and demanding needs of people in disasters and crises. Simple, yet compelling repurposing of mobile phones as observer data collectors and Twitter for in-the-field tracking and response are just a few examples of the good ancillary applications of geospatial technology. We should all be cognizant of how our tools may be modified ad-hoc to assist these unanticipated needs.

Mikel, Steve Coast, and I gave our 3-hour workshop yesterday talking through our work and thoughts on hacking geo sites and open data. I think it went well overall – and welcome feedback from anyone that attended.

Then last night I gave an Ignite talk on the work we’re doing at Mapufacture to provide customized GeoWeb services. It was less of a “production pitch” than other presentations – something that I’ll talk about in another post about the changing face of the Where2.0 conference. The video

This morning Adrian talked about what EveryBlock is doing to explore the next generation of Where2.0 apps that are bringing better cartography and localized news to the web.

I’ll try and cover more news and talks that are interesting as they happen.

Are you ready for it?

Where2.0 starts in one week, with the free and avant-garde WhereCamp the weekend after. I think the team pulled together a great program that captures many of the new companies and concepts of the morphing Geographic space.

Unfortunately not everyone that deserves the opportunity to speak got a slot. There are also very few returning speakers – we want to hear from new innovators. The conference is single track – which means we’re all part of the same conversation, and talks are already limited to 5-15 minutes so it’s a whirlwind of energy and ideas. That’s why WhereCamp is the perfect venue to really engage and still share your ideas with a broader community.

Mikel, Steve, and I are giving a workshop essentially talking about Neogeography and integrating geo-data and services into your web applications.

Monday night I’m giving a 20-by-20 (20 slides, 20-seconds per slide) lightning talk at Ignite titled “Building Customized Slices of the GeoWeb”. I’ll be sure to share the slides (once I’ve actually made them)

And I also have a couple of other things in the works that will be released as well that I’ll be able to talk about soon. Overall it’s going to be a really exciting, and crazy week. I’m thrilled looking forward to the inspirations and conversations that will happen at the conferences.