WOM World, The Connected Life and the future of geospatial

Finland or bust... It's been a couple of years but once again I'm preparing for a trip to Finland. I haven't mentioned much about this but given that I'll be absent most of next week I figured I'd share a bit of what's taking place next week.

To my surprise I was recently sent an invite to what's billed as WOM / World, a Nokia-sponsored workshop that will conincide with the Nokia Open World Event - recall WOM World is also a blog that covers off what's happening in the social media space coupled with related developments with Nokia devices and services. Given that I've been covering the topics of Geospatial / LBS, and Symbian OS devices for a number of years now I guess I was a good fit to take part in the event! What I find exciting about this event in particular is the heavy focus that LBS will play in discussions, particularly with respect to social media apps and services... heck, just think about it, just today I mentioned a new application from Singapore called GPS Movies that enables users to essentially affect the content and outcome of a movie depending on where they are geographically located when watching the movie on their handset. This and other exciting technologies will no doubt be hot/fun topics of discussion at the event.

Of particularly interest next week will be a workshop that I'll be moderating - the topic of discussion - The Connected Life. During the session we'll look at attendees views of how location aware technologies are developing and will involve discussing future solutions for geospatial services and they might integrate in mobile apps and services. Should be interesting.

This first of it's kind event is scheduled to take place Sept 11-14 in Helsinki. According to the event planners, "the aim is to involve everyone from creative’s, designers, video producers to open source software bloggers and mobile tech pioneers thorough discussion on what the future holds, for everything from mobile tech to media co-creation." During the week we'll also be outfitted with a new trial Nokia device, the E71 http://maps.nokia.com/e71 so we can share stories and thoughts about some of the supported location-aware apps like Twibble, Joikuspot, Wcities and others. I'll also be sure to discuss some of the other location-aware mobile apps that i use like Google maps, Spoprts Tracker, ZoneTag, locr, Earthcomber, WHERE, Boopsie, Qik, Lightpole, and others.







For more on WOM World see the blog at http://www.womworld.com/Nokia