This morning (April 3, 2012) there was a flurry of activity and a few announcements made at the popular Where2.0 conference – you know, the cool, geeky event attracting geeks from all walks of life who are interested in social, location, mobile, and other related technologies – but mostly location!
A few of the key items that were dropped on us today:
David Blackman at foursquare has released a new "coarse city" geocoder – Two Fishes. The open source resource is based on geonames data (http://www.geonames.org/) and flickr public domain SHP file dataset. Check it out at http://www.github.com/foursquare/twofishes
See also this article by @jonBruner
Public Lab, a group of guys interested in open technology have boasted an innovative grassroots mapping KickStarter project. You can check out more details and even contribute, see http://grassrootsmapping.org/
Stratocam is a very slick effort to help users locate and nominate the best of the best of the coolest imagery found online in google maps.See http://www.stratocam.com and find an awesome image online and then nominate it for inclusion. Way fun!
MapBox is building on the awesome MapBox Streets with the announcement of free custom styling for MapBox Streets. Keep tabs on developments of MapBox at http://mapbox.com/blog/announcing-mapbox-streets/. See also the video of this presentation online at http://whereconf.com/where2012/public/content/video
Bern Szukalski of Esri was touting "GIS without the box", an open platform not just for GIS developers. Mobile developers can take advantage of the open APIs, SDKs for building native apps on all mobile platforms (Bern was quick to point out that this stuff isn’t simply for "GIS" folks) – all of this for free for non-commercial use and a good getting started place is http://www.arcgisonline.com. More information for developers can be found in the online resource center, http://resources.arcgis.com/content/arcgis-online-maps-tasks/about
Some of my @gletham Tweets from the event:
- via the Urban Airship blog – Think Global, Message Local: Introducing Urban Airship Segments #whereconf – http://urbanairship.com/blog/2012/04/03/think-global-message-local-introducing-urban-airship-segments/
- Loved the When To *Not* Use Maps presentation by Noah Iliinsky @noahi of Complex Diagrams – great advice #whereconf
- a map is not always the best way to represent your data.. people can get lost in spatialness & not see the relationships! @noahi
- facebook has one of the most modest booths at #whereconf but perhaps the biggest hearts says @jw … #awww
- Wow, facebook now has over 200 Million users tagging locations on a monthly basis via @jw
- via @jw of facebook (think Gowalla) Instead of just checking in, location is now a tag for anything that is to be shared #whereconf
- Submit your fabulous and awesome Satellite images to Stratocam… WOW! via #whereconf
- ohhh, a Geeky Dev contest via #whereconf – Cartifact Map Innovation Award, best map innovation 2012 $10K prize
- Esri in the cloud – GIS Without the Box according to @bernszukalski and is free and open for all not just GIS folks #whereconf
- Custom styles for MapBox streets announced at #whereconf – this is slick stuff! #OSM #opendata
See all the tweets from Where2.0 on hashtag #Whereconf and checkout the online presentations on this O’reilly Page,