where2.0 - Tue 13th May (1.30pm - 3.30pm)

Ride the Fire Eagle: Open Location for All
Tom Coates (Yahoo! Brickhouse)

Fire Eagle is there to allow users to:
- share their location online
- control their data and privacy
- easily build location services

"Fire Eagle helps sites and services to respond to a users location"

Yahoo Internet Location Platform - if fire eagle is the lens, YILP is the language we use.

Lots and lots of examples, but basically Fire Eagle is a 'middle-man app' that can take input from all kinds of services/sites and distribute this location information to any number of other websites/services.

Lots and lots of existing examples and ideas for future services, including Wikinear - "Over 1 million geo-tagged articles in wikipedia", Wikinear shows you the five nearest geo-tagged entries near you.

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The Business Case for Simulation, Gaming & Virtual Worlds
Denis Browne (SAP Labs, LLC)

There's a doll's house on stage... and a guy on a laptop... and a simulation of the house on the projector screen. The point being that there is 2-way communication between the latop/model and the real-world device - the doll's house in this case.

The system isn't restricted to a doll's house though - it can control large metropolitan areas. The aim being to control our natural resources better and make the world a better place - hooray.

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Next up is a panel discussing on monetizing maps & mashups...

First off is an argument about whether hyper-local is worth anything or not... smaller market... but more focussed... but less of an audience... but more relevant... and so on.

Steve Coast (OpenStreetMap) asks the question "when will Google turn on adsense for their maps".

...and then lots of discussion which seems to indicate that nobody really knows how, or when, new advertising models can be built on these developing location-based services.

iPhone does appear to be a breakthrough technology in terms of a mobile device encouraging greater take-up of location services. How advertising may work on these services appears to be anyone's guess at this stage.

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Now 3 different talks on new hardware gadgets.

Peter Semmelhack (Bug Labs) begins with 10 minutes on 'Building a Programmable GPS Device with BUG'.

Peter asks the question "Can hardware match the progress we see in software, web services and APIs?". Hardware mash-ups anyone?

Cue some complicated diagrams on-screen.

To conclude - "Software + Hardware mas-ups will release a new wave of innovation"


Johan Peeters (Geotate) - 'Enabling the GeoWeb by Mass Market Geotagging' - is on stage to talk about new ways of geo-tagging image content.

"What is a Geotag / Geotagging = Adding an (instant) notation of place and time to a 'real world' user generated or observed event/content".

GPS is too slow as a method for geo-tagging content - I couldn't agree more on this point.

Geotate provides a solution to this problem and is aiming to be included in digital cameras to allow automated geo-tagging of photographs.

It seems to avoid the start-up delay limitations of the existing GPS devices, thereby making it quicker and more practical to use.

Much more information on the Geotate products website.


Tom Churchill (Earthscape) - 'Augmented Reality Lets the DPD Know Where You Are'

Are there any reported fatalities due to Powerpoint overload? Nothing against Tom Churchill who is now talking about video monitors in police helicopters following criminals on the ground, but my eyes are starting to grow corners and become four-sided... and it hurts.

Lots of clever stuff based on the fact that you know where the helicopter is, and you know where the camera in the helicopter is pointing, so you can build a computer model of the area on the ground.

Then, factual information (road names etc) can be overlaid from the computer model over the video display from the live camera, making it easier to track the aforementioned criminals.

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Where is the "Where?" - Vincent Tao (Microsoft Corporation)

"What is where 1.0?" - Dr Tao tells us something but I blinked and missed it... we're running at a pace again. Now we're off onto Where 2.0.

"Location matters - One third of search queries are of local intent".

Apparently we are moving from W3 to W4. No, we're not biking around London districts, W4 means "what, when, where, who".

An interesting slide on how people look for local information. The categories mentioned are community, commerce, entertainment, communication, local search/mapping, search, portals.

71% of people are looking for local info on their PC, 21% are looking in print media... phones only come in at 7% (based on the number of queries).

Lots of Virtual Earth plug-ins mentioned for other MS products such as Outlook, Messenger, ...

Microsoft are aiming to make 500 world wide 3D city models available in Virtual Earth this year, alongside work to make Virtual Earth "more real and more precise".

They are also looking to use crowd sourcing to add further data to the mapping service - examples shown include stadium seating plans and tram line maps.

For the first time in public, a demonstration of how users can add their own photographic experience onto the Virtual Earth platform - looks nice but no real detail on how this would work in practise.

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... afternoon break. I wonder if caffeine has any useful properties for making my eyes return to their previous, more rounded state?