where2.0 - Tue 13th May (4.15pm - 6pm)

Heading towards the end of Day 1...

Mirror World: Using MMOs for Real World Mapping - Wagner James Au
(MMO = Massively Multiplayer Online Game)

Examples of Google Earth and Second Live mash-ups which merge the virtual world and the real world, including real-time weather data on the globe, real-time LA airport arrivals/departures, and a project Digital Urban, 3d-izing London.

"But, why immersive maps of real worlds?... maybe the metaverse will just become pocket-sized."

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Indexing Reality: Creating a Mine of Geospatial Information
Anthony Fassero (earthmine inc )

Images (photographs) contain a vast array of geo-spatial information... how do we get this out?

Earthmine is trying to find the missing link between information and places.

Lots more info on the website, including a demo.

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A NeoGeographical Approach to Aerial Image Acquisition and Processing
Jeffrey Johnson (Pict'Earth), David Riallant (Pict'Earth)

"Neogeography is about using external technologies to gain the big picture. this is not a new thing.

The Geoweb has two main sources of information. Large scale base maps and site specific annotations from user generated content/information... there is something missing in the middle - site specific base maps"

From the website:

Pict'Earth is a combination of advanced image aquisition products and services giving you the ability to produce high definition images over your areas of interest,

Using light aircraft and simple kit the aim is to provide high quality ariel imagery to your requirements... I think the simple kit being mentioned is the Nokia N95 (due to the fact it contains both 5MP camera and GPS built in) but I'm not 100% sure.

In summary, "Pict'Earth empowers users to create their own site specific base maps."

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What About the Inside?
Mok Oh (EveryScape, Inc.)

"Inside is important and valuable. How much time do you spend indoors?" - the correct answer here is "a lot".

"We are providing the means to paint the world... and it has to be both inside and outside"

Mok talks through the Boston demo which essentially allows a user to walk the streets of Boston, but also enter inside the Cheers bar and look around.

In conclusion "the 2.0 community need to start thinking about the inside".

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Navigating the Future: Mapping in The Long Tail
Patrick McDevitt (Tele Atlas)

We're back onto the subject of The Long Tail and we haven't even got to Chris Anderson yet.

The point here is based around the observation that maps, mapping and location have been around for a long time, yet map content and services have largely been the domain of just a few big players.

Using The Long Tail metaphor, companies like Tele Atlas and Navteq are at the 'hit-based' end, but other players are now exploring the niche end of the market.

"We're most excited about the green box... we think user-communities can do it better, faster, cheaper than we (Tele Atlas) can... "

Therefore pushing mapping services down the long tail.

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Bringing Spatial Analysis to your Mashups
Jeremy Bartley (ESRI)

Jeremy presents a longer demo of the new ArcGIS 9.3... i think... hmm, not really sure... what's next?

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Global Weather Visualization: Utilizing Sensor Networks to Monetize Realtime Data
Michael Ferrari (Weather Trends International)

OK, weather...I know a bit about weather...

The opening section explains how current weather models and forecasts are produced, and the problems with un-predictability.

"Our forecasts are based entirely on pattern recognition... ability to forecast 11 months out"

Lots and lots (and lots) of slides of weather data.

"What this is all leading to is a paradigm shift in Earth system biogeophysics."

"We're not at a point where we are going to prevent weather-related disasters from happening... but we can probably plan for it and react to it a bit better."

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DIY Drones: An Open Source Hardware and Software Approach to Making “Minimum UAVs”
Chris Anderson (Wired Magazine)

"The Minimum UAV Project - How cheap and simple can a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) be?"

Essentially some grown-ups playing at kids games using lego and cheap kit to produce a UAV - sounds fun!

"Turning the military industrial complex into a toy"

Made cheaper with use of mobile phones... strapped digital cameras to the bottom for image gathering... tested by flowing over the Google campus and taking images of people having breakfast.

Ardupilot - $130 open source autopilot
- GPS
- IR stabilisation
- can control camera

"This is low cost access to the sky... it's never been so easy."

However, interestingly, there are no clear guidelines or regulations over the use of these 'toys'. Only use of UAVs to date has been military or commercial - no history of open source, non-commerical development in this area.

"What's this good for?... We don't yet know... Our job is to make the technology cheap, easy and ubiquitous.. Then users will show us what it's for."


... and that's the end (and credit to Chris Anderson, it was a very enjoyable end) of the speaker sessions for day 1 of Where2.0 2008.

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?

where2.0 - Tue 13th May (11am - 12mid)

11:00am: Best Practices for Location-based Services: Privacy, User Control, Carrier Relations, Advertising, and More
by Sam Altman (Loopt - a social mapping tool to connect, share and explore in the real world)

"GPS is the number one requested feature on a phone in the US, more than a camera."

Location challenges today (what we want) can be summarised as:
- inexpensive
- low friction access
- relevant accuracy
- strong privacy
- availability and reliability

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Modeling Crowd Behavior - Paul Torrens (Arizona State University)

Why would you model crowds? Lots of reasons it seems, not least in understanding how to deal with emergencies and public health and safety concerns.

How does this happen. Lots of models and diagrams but essentially it comes down to having access to lots of raw data, either from existing systems or by running tests to gather the data specifically.

Geospatioal exoskeletons - now that's a phrase you don't hear every day!

"The real job here is to apply this to real world issues".

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Greg Sadetsky (Poly9 Group Inc.)

FreeEarth - a cross-browser, cross-platform 3D globe which does not require any download.

It's "Part of the Web" - I've heard that phrase somewhere before!

A joint venture with Cell Bridge Communications Corp is announced called GeoAlert. "It's a system to save lives".

mapmkr is launching this summer - Your data. Your maps. No software.

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Convergence of Architectural and Engineering Design and Location Technology: Implications for eGovernment
Geoff Zeiss (Autodesk, Inc.)

Well, I've learnt something unexpected today. In the UK there is a 'right to light' in building regulations which concerns how much shade is created when a new construction is built.




... and that's lunch, phew! That's a lot of speakers for one morning, and most were competing with each other for the most-words-spoken-per-minute count.

maps.google.com

where2.0 - Tue 13th May (9am - 10.15am)

Day one proper kicks off with brief opening remarks from Brady Forrest (O'Reilly Media, Inc.) - 'Where2.0 has now hit the mainstream'.

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Then Adrian Holovaty the creator of EveryBlock: A News Feed for Your Block.

It's all about finding news relevant to you because you live there - stories that a journalist would never devote the time and effort to covering.

'There's tonnes of stuff on the internet that's interesting to lots of people but they just don't know about it... EveryBlock works because it doesn't ask you for your data, it justs shows you what's out there'.

Holovaty states that 'The more local you get, the more effort it takes' but this is where the success lies.

There's also a lesson here about not simply mashing-up a map interface with local data. 'One question i like to ask myself is, would my site succeed without maps?'. Make the web page the object so that people can link to it, share it, it's permanent, accessible, and so on...

Not every news story is about a point, sometimes it's about a region, a polygon on a map. Simply using the central point of this area is not good enough. Or news articles that can be represented by a line (e.g. upgrade work on a particular street).

Some solutions to these problems include
- Limit the zoom level of the map
- Roll your own maps: You have no control over many aspects of off-the-shelf mapping applications (colours/fonts/styles/design/...).

Everyblock uses opensource tools such as mapnik, tilecache, and openlayers to allow the site to be designed as its' own service and not be forced to use the style/design of a map provider such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, ...

To cope with privacy issues, geo-coding only happens down to a block level and no names are ever used in crime data.

On the question of funding and what next? Currently funded by grants for two years and no idea of where the money will come from after that.

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Five minutes from Michael Halbherr on the future of Nokia Location Based Services.

It's all about cross-platform. "There is no mobile internet or PC-internet... just the one internet available on different devices".

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Next a talk titled 'From Data Chaos to Actionable Intelligence: How the Convergence of the GeoWeb and Semantic Web is Revolutionizing the Way We Process Information' by Sean Gorman (FortiusOne)

Once again the benefits of crowd-sourcing to deal with the data sets on the web. However, most crowd sourcing is dealing with the long tail. Need a different solution to deal with the other end of data.

So... Finder... I think they're officially launching this today although the guy's talking pretty quickly so keeping up is a task in itself!

From All Points Blog:

FortiusOne will officially launch of Finder!, the first application of FortiusOne’s GeoCommons Suite. Finder! aims to turn unorganized, unsearchable, and unusable data, thus inhibiting their ability into something useable, so that users can produce actionable geo-intelligence. And, apparently you can visualize the found useful data in a variety of products from ESRI, Google and Microsoft.

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John Hanke from Google on The State of the Geoweb.

The Google Geo Search API is launching today to provide better access to the vast array of content on the 'Geoweb'.

Then ESRI and how geospatial applications are growing on the web and lots of acronyms and techy stuff about servers, metadata, scripting, and so on.

I think it basically all means that everyone will be able to access this location tagged content in new and interesting (and accessible) ways on the web.

Full detail here on the new possibilities availble using ArcGIS9.3.

... and it's morning break, where's the coffee?

Watch where2.0 via live web stream

From O'Reilly Radar...

If you can't make it to Where 2.0 you can watch it live-ish via two different video streams. For tonight's Ignite and Launchpad event you can watch via UStream.TV. This stream will get audio directly from the soundboard.

Seero, a geo-broadcasting portal that is focused on events is going to be live-streaming the entire event. You can watch it on their site or via the embed on the O'Reilly site.