Last reminder, proposals for the O’Reilly Where2.0 conference are due December 3. So make sure and get your submissions in!

The ‘topic’ this year is “Location is Relative”. Claus Dahl said it best during his presentation on Imity two years ago: “It’s not the fact that I’m *here* at this hotel, it’s the fact that I’m surrounded by all of you that makes this location important” (paraphrased)

Are you buiding a business based on proximity? How about hyperlocal search and collaborative routing? It’s not enough to assume your users are driving a car and want to get from A to B the ‘fastest’. Maybe they want to go the greenest/prettiest/easiest/funnest (ok, that’s not a word). How does someone find out what’s interesting around them? Whether it’s a concert, friends, construction, transportation, or shops?

Two of the finalists in the latest LBS contests both included “find products near me”, and Dash networks demoed a similar functionality coming up in their internet connected PND. But what’s the next step with “near me” search?

PND’s advertisements are ubiquitous this Christmas shopping season. Nearly every “Black Friday” circular sported a Garmin, Miro, Magellan, or other Navigation aid on the front page. Why this new rise in public interest of GPS? What will be hot next Christmas?

Crowdsourcing is getting hot – OpenStreetMap led the way in large-scale community driven mapping, but now both TomTom and Googleallows you to submit corrections. Where is that data going and how to you enable community-mapping?

Where2.0 next year will also feature a day of tutorials. So if you have some new tools or techniques you want to share, you should submit a proposal to teach other attendees about it.

For more inspiration and ideas, check out the CFP suggestions.

I’m back home from a grueling and invigorating trip to the left-coast to geek on all things ‘location’. Unfortunately I got little time to blog myself, but I made lots of notes and am trying to digitize them all. I’ll be blogging about some of my own specific announcements that came out at Where2.0 shortly.

Google’s Dev Day was in fact the cattle drive I was worried it might be. However, it was still an incredibly fun event because of the hallway track and getting to meet a large number of the Google ‘geo’ team, as well as various others from other companies.

Apparently I was part of a “geo digerati” party, check out the reciprocal ValleyWag post. Congrats to Ian and the Urban Mapping team.

One of the more mind-boggling things at WhereCamp was Mikel building a mashup into someone else’s site. You can now automatically see Google Pano’s of Upcoming event locations within Upcoming. I do truly hope that the WebKit party was a blast – looked like it was going to be one based on their pano’s.

For the in-depth info, check out all the social sites with the tag wherecamp. For extra geekiness, tags I made use a machine-tag for the specific session. e.g. wherecamp:session=lightningtalks

a couple of highlights off the top of my head:

• Great conversations on the “Gist of an Area” with Travis of Neighboroo, Tim with ThinkWhere/Geocodr
• Being amazed by the skill and wit of Poly9. They type too fast for their own good.
• Lightning talks from GeoTude
• dancing to Viscious Groove

Many thanks again to Ryan Sarver and Anselm Hook for being awesome coordinators & hosts, and to all the sponsors: Yahoo, O’Reilly, meadan, Google, uLocate/Where.

Here are the slides from my talk at Where2.0 2007 – Using and Enabling the Emerging GeoStack

Thoughts

I really enjoyed giving this talk. I hope the people who heard it, or check out the slides find it compelling to do their part to integrate into the GeoStack by working with common data standards and tools where possible. I think it was received very well overall – based on the amount of people that talked to me about it afterwards. I even got cited by Jack Dangermond of ESRI in his panel discussion.

Upcoming

I’ll be giving similar talks this summer at State of the Map and GUADEC in the UK with Henri Bergius and Tuomas Kuosmanen.

Where2.0 2006 is over, and people now disperse back to their origins, their heads full of sugar plum fairies, and mapping ideas. As with any conference, there was a lot of good brainstorming, and dialogues that should spark some interesting projects. It would be neat to see a list of all the projects and companies that are spawned at the previous Where, and next year to see what was formed at this Where.

Bring out your geeks. Bring out your geeks…

I was actually surprised there weren’t more useful hacks for the conference itself. There was no SketchUp and GoogleEarth model of the hotel and various locations that users could walk through an annotate. There wasn’t a demonstration of Imity’s technology or another bluetooth/social software that users could install on their Symbian/Mobile phones for sharing contact information and localized information. There was no central GeoRSS feed of speakers, where they’re from, local events and sites in the San Jose area.

I would think with a very specific, and technical, group of people that such hacks and demonstrations would be emminently useful and cool to see. I am as responsible of this lack as anyone else. My time was restricted getting SpeedLimit up and going, and then being over in Europe for several weeks before hand. If I get to attend the next Where2.0, or if I can attend Web2.0 or another conference, I promise to bring my alpha-geekhood and demo the kind of tech they’re talking about at the conference.

Shazzam!

There were several sets of “Lightning Talks”, where 3 presenters each had 5 minutes to present some topic. I thought these were very well done. They forced the presenter to get directly to the point of their topic, allowed more people to present, and also broke up the longer 15 minute presentations. Each set of Lightning Talks was centered around a topic such as: mobile games, social mapping sites, or open-source GIS applications.

The Next Big Thing

Obviously, the end of the conference wrapped up with the question of: “What is the next big thing?” What will we be talking about and presenting at next year’s Where2.0?

So far it seems like better incorporation of large-scale, commercial grade tools into the Open-Source and consumer-level community as supported by groups like the OSGeo, and popularized by Google Earth and NASA WorldWind.

Mobile presence and location-aware applications had a shimmering here from people like Socialight, Mo’Blast, and Imity. The next breakthrough will be when major mobile providers (Sprint, Cingular, T-Mobile, Orange, Vodafone, et al.) open up the location information that already exists on mobile phones to developers and users.

Overall, Where2.0 was a terrific experience. A lot was crammed into 2 days (plus a day at Google) and I hope I can get to another one in the future!

Coordinates:

Technorati Tags: where2.0, where2006, where2con

ESRI, one of the big names in GIS, presented some of their open services (as they were wont to use the word). These are many web tools for obtaining, viewing, and manipulating geographic data and were very impressive.

The first was an SVG Map Viewer, which is a really cool utility for viewing maps in a browser. By using SVG, it can quickly reorganize the actual data such as changing map projection on the fly. You can also reorient, add/remove layers and other cool stuff.

The second was National Geographic’s map machine where you can investigate various layers of science and climatological data.

The next presentation was by a company Inrix, which showed off some of the new technologies and techniques in traffic monitoring, traffic history, and traffic prediction. So their system would show you the current congestions, as well as the predicted future conditions based on historical conditions and also planned events (sports, concerts, etc.)

They’re using the “Inrix Dust Network”, which consists of sensored delivery trucks, service vehicles, and toll pass devices. Therefore they’re constantly, almostly for free, gathering large sets of data.

Of course, not all these sensors and such are good. By use of toll sensors, they will know where you are. Now is the time to start putting in place and defining geo-privacy standards.

Technorati Tags: where2.0, where2006, where2con