A Conference for those who Run Developer Programs

This is actually the fourth year for Evans Data Corporations ‘s Developer Relations Conference. Evans is a “global market research firm.” This year’s (outdated?) theme: “Web 2.0 Dynamics and Your Developer Relations Program.”

But, it does show that getting and keeping good third party developers, especially in these times when new APIs coming out daily, is a bottom line topic. I saw only one specifically geo company in the agenda (so far): “an open forum on Web 2.0 moderated by Navteq” (sic). Nokia’s on the agenda, too, along with Google, Microsoft, IBM and many others.

Press release

via GIS User

Southern Tornadoes: No User Gen Maps (Yet?)

Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land went looking, but turned up none. He did turn up some maps of locations hit, with images and some videos, however.

Holovaty on the “geo” in EveryBlock

EveryBlock is Adrian Holovaty’s Knight Foundation funded foray into hyperlocal news - where “news” is about as broad a term as you’d like it to be. He’s interviewed by the Online Journalism Review (yes, I’m a bit of a media geek - maybe someday I can actually study journalism?) and drops these geo tidbits:

Fourth, we’re detecting geography in narratives—“blobs,” so to speak—and making it easy for people to find relevant news articles and government documents that refer to specific places near them. Some examples are New York City news articles, San Francisco zoning agenda items and Chicago city press releases. Another (geeky) way to phrase this is that we’re harvesting geographic metadata from unstructured text.

...

On the map side, we’ve made our own maps, deciding against Google’s or Yahoo’s map offerings for a number of reasons; that took a sophisticated combination of design, coding and data chops. At the technical level, we’ve developed an array of technology just to get all of this data into an elegant, unified system. It’s beautiful. And we’ve even done a fair amount of manual labor, from hand-drawing neighborhood boundaries to hand-tagging newspaper articles to train our geoparsing algorithms.

...
We’re obligated under the terms of our Knight grant to release the site’s code under an open-source license at the end of the grant period.

Two things:

- I learned that underlying the mapping code is OpenLayers
- This really isn’t so much about hyperlocal news, but rather fusion, a word we play with a lot in geo. This is the first time I’ve thought about it in this context.

Nokia Should Acquire Yahoo!

Stephen Wellman at InformationWeek offers five reasons, which I paraphrase:

- Nokia wants to be a Web company and Yahoo already is
- Updating Yahoo! mobile offerings could make Nokia king of mobile location services
- Yahoo could help Nokia brand in the U.S.
- Yahoo would give it a desktop ad biz (it already has a mobile one)
- Nokia can’t let Google or Microsoft gain any Internet marketshare if it wants to be a serious player

Nokia to File Paper with EU on NAVTEQ Within Two Weeks

A report from Nokia says Form CO on its planned acquisition of NAVTEQ will be filed within two weeks. The European Commission then has 25 days to review it.

- Reuters