O'Reilly Media Where 2.0 Conference

Do virtual worlds provide us the best tool to learn about the real world? While geo-location technologies let us create and play GPS-enabled adventures in the real world, they also allow us to simulate and model real physical geography within the virtual worlds of MMO's. Jeremy Irish, CEO of Groundspeak, and W. James Au describe how the latest geo-location applications are expanding the pathways between real and virtual geographies.

Geo is impacting many industries including automotive, retail, telecom and advertising. Emerging from these current technologies are applications for the GeoWeb, GeoMobile, GeoCar, and GeoVoice. These entrenched industries are wide-open for investments and this presentation provides some guidance and perspective for those looking to cash in. In this show, Dev Khare, partner at VC firm Venrock, discusses the current landscape on the GeoWeb from a VC perspective.

What do you get when you apply Moore's law to robotics and GPS? Chris Anderson, of Wired magazine, explains what you get in this Where 2.0 presentation. Cheap and ubiquitous location technologies combined with robotic toys have given birth to a thriving amateur Unmanned Aerial Vehicles community. Though these sophisticated spy toys, which are powered by open source software, are usually flying just for the fun of it, the federal regulators are trying to figure out what is even legal, in this brave new little world.

Five years from now, chances are you'll be dependent upon web-based GIS applications at home and in the office. And it's likely that those GIS applications will evolve from the work of John Hanke. In this session from the 2008 O'Reilly Where 2.0 conference, Hanke discusses the progress and tremendous growth of the Geoweb. In describing Google's response to this growth, Hanke introduces a new partnership with ESRI. The new initiative will allow developers to pull data from even more GIS servers.

In this session from the 2008 Where 2.0 conference, Sean Gorman discusses Finder!, the browser-based application for finding and sharing GeoData. Gorman gives a bit of history about GeoCommons, a product which brings geo-content to the web. He proposes a federation of the data of all the companies doing the same, with the goal of an ecosystem where users can combine GeoData with other web data to create semantic relationships and solve meaningful problems such as where to buy a house.

Have you ever asked yourself, "What's happening in my neighborhood?" If you think your local newspaper has the answers, think again. Adrian Holovaty, who created one of the earliest Web mashups, believes there is a better way to find the answers. In this presentation from the 2008 O'Reilly Where 2.0 Conference, Holovaty describes his new project, EveryBlock.com, which aims to collect hyper-local news and deliver it through a "news feed" for your neighborhood.

As the Geospatial Web evolves from two dimensions to 3-D we are seeing a host of rich new applications and uses appear. Six leaders in the field talk about the Geospatial web and 3-D applications, and how their individual organizations fit into the 3-D puzzle. Ranging from Tele-Atlas' creation of mapping data for GPS units through Microsoft's Virtual Earth on to Second-Life-like applications, this panel reports on developments at companies harnessing the explosive growth in available 3-D information.

MapQuest is one of the four leading map publishers on the Web. As part of its market research, the company conducted a customer survey on the Geo community with the aim of finding out what users truly want, as opposed to what they get. James Greiner, the company's Vice President and General Manager, summarizes the results of his survey into five simple principles whose usefulness cannot be exaggerated.

Quakr is building an on-line virtual world from user contributed photographs and metadata. Developer Peter Arbuthnott shares the inspirations for this project, and leads a whirlwind tour of its most compelling features. Given the converging advances in camera and geolocation technologies, and the interest people have in sharing their geo-coded photos on line, a fascinating 3D mashup is beginning to emerge.

Over the last year or two, the Geoweb has graduated from something that was off the side, to being at the centre of attention. In this presentation, John Hanke, Director, Google Earth & Google Maps, and Bernhard Seefeld, Geo Software Engineer at Google, open the lid on some of Google's new products in the Geo space, and advocate the need for open standards.