Where2.0 wrapping up

Where2.0 is close to wrapping up. One of the most confusing aspects of this event is no doubt the selection of presenters / speakers (ie. who gets selected to present) and how long they get on stage. Some presenters get 5 minute "lightning" slots and others get 15 minute blocks of time. As we wind down is seems apparent that many people are wondering how the final speaker manages to score a marathon 30 minute block of time. Nothing against the presenter or the topic "Where is "here" and what's mapping got to do with it" but how is it that she gets 30 minutes and Michael Jones gets only 15 minutes, Christian Dwyer (Mapquest) a mere 5 minutes.. what the hey... that's where2.0 for ya! Nice job Brady et al. FYI, Brady Forrest, conference chair informed me that there were some 200+ submissions by people wanting to present at this year's event. Keep this in mind if you plan on showing your stuff next year - it better be good!

Michael Jones, Google CTO at Where2.0- sports triquarter and Apple iPhone

Michael Jones, Google CTO took to the stage of Where2.0 today carrying of all things… a triquarter. Why? Well, if you thought it would be impossible to be in possession of such a device Michael would like you to know that it is indeed possible... as is much more – like perhaps the 3D web! We all know by now that Google’s mission is organizing all of the World’s information. The Challenge though… there’s a second web, a geospatial web and Jones notes that it’s underserved… perhaps it’s a little less underserved after the Where 2.0 event! We were reminded about spatial modality and that what makes it great is the connectedness - think “The 3D spatial web”… Google is indeed working hard at not only organizing the World’s information but is also aggressively building out the 3D web. This week we’ve heard about Google’s high-res street-side imagery, the addition of mapplets, and recall SketchUp coming into the fold and being given away to the user community… today Jones confirmed that the company has indeed acquired Panoramio… all pieces of the puzzle in developing the 3D Web. I’m sure we’ll hear more about all of this tomorrow at the Google Developer day. Finally, in addition to the triquarter, Jones also brought with him an Apple iPhone (which also was sporting what else... maps!) - see video below from my youtube:

Browsing + shopping = NearbyNow

NearbyNow makes a shopping mall searchable – fromm the developers... search before you shop with your mobile device. Find anything you need near you…signs in a mall prompt users to txt in to win, search etc… a unique mall code is provided for each mall. The service also offers sweepstakes like daily prizes, spotlight specials. Currently live in 50 malls, 110 by December. They offer “reserve this product” service enabling users to hold items at a retail outlet. Driving the uptake:

Thanks American idol

Sweepstakes are helpful

Has more “sale” interest than the web

The right offer can create stampedes

See more info on this innovative LBS app at http://www.nearbynow.com

Dash Navigation in-car search and building a community of drivers

Dash Navigation is building a community of drivers & providing in car search - Eric Klein and Mark Williamson took to the stage to describe the first connected navigation device for the US – standard navigation + GPRS and WiFi connectivity enabling send and receive data. They ask… “What happens when you leave your computer and hop in your car?” Simple… Dash enables you to bring information into your vehicle. The device has a real-time traffic model, each device gathers information as they drive… think of a community of drivers gathering data and reporting / sharing with others... community-based traffic probes. Drivers are also gathering updated basemap information. Sample – search yahoo!, locate address of interest, right-click and send to car.
Also available via Dash is Search in Car – a fundamental approach to changing consumer behavior. Partnered with Yahoo! users can search in their vehicle for local results… imagine searching for WiFi while driving through San Fran while attending a conference. Or, imagine driving down a road and your searching for a building. Now you can view an image of a desired area (if available) to help you locate your intended destination. Furthermore, you can save photos and even add comments – think community mapping! Dash can partner with content partners to provide access to their data – via std. data formats like GeoRSS and KML or make it available via 2-way API - Note: Dash currently has 2000 units being tested all over the country right now. For more about dash see http://www.dash.net/

a couple of fun quotes from where

I have to share a couple of fun quotes from Where 2.0... just on stage... "Where is free and easy... like Paris Hilton!" and from last night at the Loki beer bash from a guy whol walked up to me... "Hey, are you James Fee?" I don't know what made him ask that??? later

create your tiny Google Street Side url and a mapplet reminder

A reminder if you plan on working with the cool, new Google maps street side maps... if you plan on sharing cool locations with others then try taking advantage of tinyurl (see www.tinyurl.com). As an example, I was walking the streets of New York and want to share this location with my friends http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=new+york+time+square&ie=UTF8&view=map&ll=40.757534,-73.985447&spn=0.002401,0.005193&z=18&om=0&layer=c&cbll=40.75657,-73.98614&cbp=1,231.601237942122,0.5,1
http://tinyurl.com/2vcpza - notice its a little long and won't work well within a webpage. A simple soultion is to grab a "tinyurl". So now I have http://tinyurl.com/2vcpza or http://preview.tinyurl.com/2vcpza (with a preview). Lastly, if you haven't tested out mapplets yet - think mashups of mashups you can't access the functionality from the "regular" google maps home. Anyone can develop a mapplet... try creating a map that shows crime stats along with weather data and perhaps thro w in your own news from a GeoRSS enabled feed. To try mapplets jump to the preview site at http://maps.google.com/preview

Winding Down at Where - Where fair, plundr, CDT and Trulia Hindsight

Just winding down after taking in the Where fair followed up by a "social event" hosted by Sykhook Wireless - have you tried the Loki toolbar yet? Where fair featured displays from innovative minds that are in the preliminary stage but comfortable enough with their apps to show them off and get some feedback. We saw an application called Plundr - they use the Skyhook wireless WiFi positioning technology to locate places and then use th eplayers location in a treasure hunt style game (try it at plundr.playareacode.com) - they also have a version designed to run on the Nintendo DS. Also of interest at the fair, the Continental divide Trial Project conceived by Backpacker Magazine. Imagine 50 teams mapping and gathering data along 3100 miles of trail that takes them through Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks. The teams (volunteers) will be collecting GPS data, photos, videos, and will be podcasting as the project gets rolling this summer - Let me leave off by urging you to check out the truliahindsight service that i mentioned previously. This latest update to Trulia (the popular real estate mapping service) features some clever animations designed to convey some interesting patterms that emerge when displaying temporal datasets... the change and trends really jump out at you... Check out this Link from Trulia showing the construction of Levittown, New York. From the company... Watch the Trulia Hindsight map light up between 1947 and 1951, when builders Levitt and Sons, Inc. mass-produced 17,447 homes on what had once been potato farms on Long Island. Their most popular model, a ranch built on a concrete slab, measured 32' by 25' and sold for $7,990. All a prospective buyer needed was a $90 deposit and payments of $58 per month. another tip... have you tested Geocommons yet? Have you browsed the best places to get KFC in Uganda?? How about maps of the most dangerous tornado alleys in the US? Create an account, upload some data... enjoy! Let me leave you with some weblinks of interest to ponder and explore:

• http://mumbai.freemap.in/
• http://www.openstreetmap.org/
• http://www.twittervision.com
• http://www.topix.net
• http://www.twitter.com
  
• http://www.quakr.co.uk
• http://www.mapufacture.com/
• http://www.lggi.com/titan
• http://georss.org/geopress/
• http://www.eff.org
• http://www.cabspotting.org
• http://www.weogeo.com/
• http://outside.in/San_Jose

later (GL)

Explore Your Communities with outside.in

Wrapping up the sessions today at Where is Steven Johnson who’s sharing details of Outside.in – tagline: neighborhoods are the human scale. This clever resource provides local blog results and much more (think who’s blogging near me and what are they saying). Most people are typically interested with news and developers that are in their local area or neighborhood, although that may be tough to find… until now. Outside.in provides a solution and delivers some fun and relevant results. As an example, for news from San Jose see http://outside.in/San_Jose. For something fun, check out America's Top 10 Bloggiest Neighborhoods - Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, Shaw, DC, Downtown LA are the top 3 bloggiest neighborhoods! http://outside.in – have fun! Of note, you can find out more about the app in their blog at outside.in blog... ok, I'm outta here as its now "Miller Time"

Garmin announces plugin API and Garmin developer

Garmin has elected to use Where as the venue to announce a new API and a developer program - the objective is to help make GPS web development simple. The Garmin Communicator Plugin API is a browser plugin and JavaScript support code that allows developers to transfer location data – such as waypoints, track logs, maps and points of interest (POIs) – to and from a website and Garmin device. Additional information about these applications and the Garmin Developer website is also available at http://developer.garmin.com. Also available in Garmin Developer is a Content Toolkit, which lets developers compile secure POIs for Garmin GPS devices. Garmin Developer has been broken into 4 components: Device comms, Web services, Mobile services, LBS - FYI, the company is expected to sell some 9+million devices this year alone!

Mapquest, Jim Greiner provides usear research findings

Mapquest, Jim Greiner, Sr VP and GM took the stage to discuss some recent Mapquest research/survey findings. He asks...what benefits users? Research findings recently conducted regarding online map users. Success factors and Mapquest research survey findings - demonstrate value to users, give user the control, reinforce the foundation, don’t just provide data but help them make a decision, evolve with your users. Once users are shown a benefit of use then they will adopt the technology – only 18% of users are using advanced imagery but 47% plan on increasing usage. Interest in personalization increased from 49 – 68% once given examples of usage. Giving the user control – people want to save addresses or planned routes; people want point and click routing, 59% would share their custom maps only with their trusted network but less than 22% would post publicly (blogs)… only 23% want to add photos to a map. Don’t just give data – people want more info like is a road a toll road and if so, how much does it cost. Incident records like accidents and historical records are of interest to the user and help them to make decisions. Evolving with users – 41% want to send maps and routes to a mobile - of note: Greiner did not discuss the new API in his presentation

Google maps street view test drive

Have you test driven Google maps street view yet? Try searching on "san francisco, ca fisherman wharf" then zoom into Powel St. as an example. Click on a street that's outlined in blue then get a popu-up window where you can navigate down the street, viewing high-res,360 degree imagery.. what's what cool is as you move north, south, east or west down the street the address is updated. the you can pan side-to-side, zoom in, out etc... you can almost make out the car license tags!

mashing mashups with Google Mapplets

New today also… Google Mapplets from immersive Media – example, search Chicago for real estate information. Now using mapplets to mashup KML files using the Google Maps API. Mapplets enables third party developers to create mini applications that can be displayed on Google Maps, much like Google Gadgets are displayed on iGoogle. These Mapplets contain a variety of information, from housing listings to crime data, and tools like distance measurement

The geography of news and Topics.net

Rich Skrenta and The geography of news and how physical location matters - Topics.net is an innovative service aggregating news sources from 50k+ sources and blogs. Categorizing news down to the zipcode. Launched in 04, 10m unique monthly visitors, 332,500 local news pages. The software scans a story and figures out what I’ts about and where its about. Using their own algorithms The Approach… geographic entity recognition, disambiguation, supporting evidence threshold – this enables identification of content that is about a specific area, not just merely mentioning a geographic entity. Maps are provide to show comment activity - this as a heatmap and GeoRSS feeds are also available. As an example see news items about San Jose - http://www.topix.net/san-jose. Check out topix news at www.topix.net

Schuyler on Maximum City of Mumbai

Tuesday morning kicked off with Schuyler Erle, Metacarta and author of O’reilly books, Mapping hacks and Google Map Hacks. He went on describing the Maximum City of Mumbai, India (see here - Amazon). Looking at the problems plaguing the area and the many issues to be addressed. But... mapping is hard, or at least it was hard. People need access to data and tools to create and share their maps. We have Census data, NASA,USGS and access to terabytes of data, however, the data is tough to get, full of holes and inaccuracies, and tough to use. Contrast this with Europe where there’s tons of accurate data but people are required to pay for access to the data (think Ordnance Survey – similar to Canada). He suggests we look at publicgeodata.org. So... here in the US why is the situation such an embarrassment and accessing free, accurate data so difficult asks Shuyler? He recounts a story in Mumbai where there were an immense amount of mapping data for the city, however, these data were not tied to any projection or coordinate system – there was no ground control! The data were in AutoCAD format and then OSGeo came to the rescue – enter Mumbai freemap. See osgeo.org, Mumbai.freemap.in and the efforts of Open StreetMap - http://www.openstreetmap.org.

Where 2.0 tuesday kick-off

I'm looking forward to hearing more about the Mapquest API here today at Where.. should be good as looking through the attendee list it appears that every one of the Denver, CO based company employees are here in San Jose. Recall last night doppler, fatdoor, upstart, swivel, geocommons, and meta lens were announced and launched to the World. Looks like Brady is on stage so I'm gonna kick back and listen.. stay tuned... FYI, there's ome 44 mapping APIs on programmable web.. mapping APIs definitely dominate. This trend fueled by companies opening up their platforms and exposure to geodata (google, yahoo!, mapquest, microsoft, etc...)

Leica TITAN and launch of the Leica TITAN Network

Interesting to see Geospatial heavyweight Leica Geospation making a big announcement today at Where 2.0.. this from the ocompany... "Users and organizations need a central, safe environment to discover, share, visualize, and retrieve geospatial data, web services, and location-based information," said Mladen Stojic, Director of Enterprise and Visualization Products, Leica Geosystems Geospatial Imaging. "With a high performance 3D virtual globe, Leica TITAN provides this vibrant solution, with enhanced features, allowing interactive communication, collaboration, and sharing of information." See the Beta at http://www.lggi.com/titan

Waking up at where 2.0

Just waking up and getting going here.. coffee is almost done (right on!) A reminder, you can catch all my photos from Where on the GISuser flickr - see also this "official" flickr titled x180. I see Mapquest has officially announced their new API today, the official PR is over at GISuser - FYI, To learn more about MapQuest Advantage API 5.1, visit http://company.mapquest.com/mqbs/4.html or request an evaluation at http://company.mapquest.com/jsp/eval.jsp. The rapidfire sessions kick off at 9 today, I see tele Atlas is offering drive and ride trips in their familiar Orange data collection vans... I'll have to try and get a drive along - my tip for the day, be sure to check out geocommons WOW! PS - thanks to O'reilly for picking up on my coverage and giving the mention in their blog!

a geoblogger sighting at Where 2.0

Just had my first geoblogger sighting here at Where 2.0 as "Fantom Planet" (Daniel) just cruised by to say hi - you can always find me front and center! Funny, he asked why he didn't see me at the Intergraph show as he thought that I was always at that one. Ya, that's funny and indeed I did used to always attend the event (and cover the crap out of it too!)... but seems like the crew at Intergraph have lost my email address... too bad... if I had been there there may have been some material published and blogged from the show!

Where2.0 Blog

FYI... the Where2.0 blog location seems to be really tricky to find so here it is... http://www.oreillynet.com/conferences/blog/where_20/ - nothingn there yet but hopefully soon.. maybe they will pick up on this post too! FYI.. just noticed on the news that just north of here BART is offereing free WiFi on the trains (underground too)... cool!

Checking in from Where 2.0, San jose

Just got into San Jose, CA in preparation for the Ignite Where 2.0 session this evening... so far looks like most people are still in transit. Its nice to be here again although the town is pretty quiet today because of the holiday week end. Its hot as crap here today and i'd forgotten about some of the typical valley scenes... like the $15 4 minute cab ride from the airport, the Shark Tank... quiet as ever as the arena is now pretty much closed for the summer since the sharks are no longer playing... and the urine soaked streets as you walk a mere 2 blocks from the downtown area in search of the sub $100 a night hotel. Hey its not all that bad though... we have the Tech musuem and Where 2.0 getting ready to kick off. Only at Where 2.0 do you look into the exhibit hall floor and see Google setting up and a few feet away a booth from the University of Alaska! The pin board will start filling up soon as people mark Where they came from, bodies will gather around the 37" flat panel screen streaming a contstant update from Twittervision( http://twittervision.com/) I was watching it and up popped an image from this region by Sergey... The diverse mix of people here will be really cool, with GIs types, those in search of VC, mashers, programmers, and technology professionals from the traditional GIS space... I sate beside a guy from USA Today on the flight. He's with their graphics crew and in search of come cool ideas and looking to see who's doing what... what a great place to come and watch what people are up to. I'm posting photos at regular intervals so if you're interested in seeing what's happeneing here at where (dows that make sense?) be sure to drop in and have a looksee http://www.flickr.com/photos/gisuser - PS: my "m"key is sticking so bear with mmme!

Oh... I picked up the requisite Where 2.0 bag (shwag)... FYI, the contents included a bunch of cards from the likes of map24, Schmap, Garmin, and Very Spatial ... man, we gotta get some GISuser.com postcard done up! Imaging Notes also managed to get their publication inn the bag as did ESRI with their latest Map Book. there's also a who's who list with all the conntact info... sweet! So who's here.. well, I could tell ya but i'd have to kill you but there's reps here from Tele Atlasas, Navteq, Mapquest, Autodesk, Mapquest, Decarta, Lonely Planet, ESRI and many others. Gotta go grab some Chinese now before things get started at 7