Thoughts on Where 2.0 2010
This year’s Where 2.0 was as interesting and engaging as ever. It is worth to point out that instead of traditional mapping companies like Microsoft, Google, ESRI and others, the center stage at Where 2.0 2010 was dominated by Foursquare, Gowalla, Twitter, Yelp and freshly-released SimpleGeo. However, Yahoo Geo did roll out concordance enhancements to GeoPlanet API, ESRI announced online GIS platform, NAVTEQ showed a cool new way to collect data, and Blaise Aguera gave a phenomenal presentation on Bing Maps.
Another curious fact was the shift in discussion topics. During the past two years there was a lot of talk about business models, monetization and mapping the world. This time around the focus shifted to the potential of the location space, ubiquity of location data, real time content and growth of local. I guess we are getting closer to starting to explore the potential of LBA, but for most companies it is not going to happen this year.
In case you missed it, here are few hightlights from the geo world:
- Michael Jones [Google] on The New Meaning of Mapping
- Jeffrey Johnson, John Crowley and Schuyler Erle on Haiti Crisis Mapping
- Mikel Maron on Mapping African Slums with OpenStreetMap
- Dennis Crowley on Adventures in Mobile Social 2.0: Twelve Months of foursquare
- Walter Scott [DigitalGlobe] – Seconds to Anywhere
- Othman Laraki [Twitter] on Geostreams
Check out Oreilly YouTube channel for the complete list of Where 2.0 talks.
The guy on the left is Martin Isenburg, the author of the famous Chickens and Lasers talk.
Finally, you can watch me talk about UMapper in interviews by GISCafe and Steve Coast.