Where Conference
On foursquare's first birthday, 200 people in a Chicago bar called founder Dennis Crowley via Skype to sing. They all earned their swarm patches that night. In a year, 750,000 users signed up, made 22 million check-ins, and convinced 1400 venues to offer foursquare specials. Mom-and-pop venues have had their very first peek at their own marketing analytics through foursquare. People use it to find the biggest party in town. Here, Dennis Crowley talks about the foursquare phenomenon, one year in.
We have phones that take pictures, connect to the Internet, and play music. Now, Nokia is creating a line of smart phones with navigation programs for both drivers and pedestrians. Michael Halbherr focuses on describing the special features of the navigation programs, as well as how Nokia plans to continue developing media and social communication functions for their products and widening their global market.
Twitter's new Director of Geolocation shows how automatically geo-tagging tweets creates self-generating groups that act in the real-world. Twitter geotaggers help responders with fires in Southern California, earthquakes in China, and elections in Iran. At the where2.0 conference in San Jose, Othman Laraki offers Twitter API developers 'frictionless' ways to express and consume this new class of geodata.
Mike Arrington and Tim O'Reilly engage in a spirited exchange. O'Reilly argues that companies competing against Google, Apple or Facebook should strike out into new territories. Quoting Sun Tzu, O'Reilly admires PayPal for carving out a new niche, while he gives Apple's iPhone group kudos for outflanking competitors. Arrington worries about a potential privacy disaster at Facebook.
An open API for all government functions would be a transformative achievement, and Tim O'Reilly and Chris Vein have been working to make it a reality. In this free-flowing Q and A format, Chris Vein shares his experience as CIO for San Fransisco, building IT as a platform for the 21st century city. Vein and O'Reilly discuss their front line experiences in government data with an audience of location-based developers.
Blaise Aguera y Arcas, Architect of Bing Maps, discusses its structure and "information ecology," of content, users, and apps. By extracting the semantic content of 2D images and mapping them in 3D, Bing Maps continually improves a rich infrastructure of surface data about the world on which apps and services can ride. When it began allowing users to bind sets of images, Bing Maps found myriad partners to infill data, extrapolated to 3D, about tourist sites around the world.
Journalists tell stories. In this Where 2.0 presentation, Matthew Ericson talks about how the New York Time's team of designers, cartographers, and developers worked as journalists to create interactive maps and charts that told stories about the 2008 presidential election.
Anthony Fassero talks about Wild Style City, a whimsical demo of 3D street-level imaging technology. As CEO of earthmine, Fassero focuses on developing accurate digital representation of environments which facilitate better human interaction. In this Where 2.0 Conference presentation, Fassero discusses some of the potential of 3D street-level imagery using Wild Style City as a fun example.
Greg Skibiski explains CitySense, a mobile app for the Blackberry and the iPhone that predicts movement over time by mapping observed behavioral similarities rather than just geography. In this presentation from the Where 2.0 Conference, Skibiski discusses how location data using SMS from carriers and various other sources is used to gain market insights and understand real world activity in aggregate, anonymously.
If you were pestered with a dozen or more phone calls a day from people in your locality asking what was on your menu for the day, or inquiring about the delivery of their order, and you were definitely not the local Thai Kitchen but just an innocent guy or gal, what would you do? Well, you'd listen to Danny Sullivan in this program. Danny discusses why local search is such a difficult task, and what some of the major obstacles are to implementing it correctly.
