#Where 2.0 - Day 1 Wrap up

I attended several of the workshops and came away impressed with the willingness of instructors to take attendees through what was clearly a compressed time format.

I sat in on Mano Mark’s Google Maps API session and came away with a new appreciation of the simplicity of the API.

I attended Paul Ramsey’s OpenGeoStack workshop and diligently loaded PostgreSQL and PostGIS and hacked my way through a short application. Not that I knew what I was doing but it was clearly fun to try.

Next it was on to Aiden Chopra’s workshop on adding “3D to the Geoweb.” This was essentially a “Sketchup for Dummies” overview; I clearly fit the part. Now I’m a Sketchup neophyte. Adding textures to extruded building models is clearly fun but reminds of digitizing 3.0. I’d hate to have that job today.

I had a great conversation with Gary Gale, the director of geo technologies at Yahoo! Gale said that geo is on the right track now at Yahoo!; FireEagle clearly has a future; and upper management is taking strides to put more resources into defining geo as something for mobile location-based advertising at the company. I’ll provide the audio version of the interview shortly.


In the evening, Brady Forrest, the conference chair, hosted Ignite @ Where and this literally felt more like “open mic night at 2nd City.” Andrew Turner bolted on stage to wild applause. Given our enthusiasm for location technology and his experience with various efforts, he asked the very valid question of “How do you affect the single person on the ground.” I was not impressed by the other speakers. Most talks were five minutes of trying to sound funny with little substance. However, Paul Ramsey did have an entertaining way of explaining that mapping errors are compounded as more and more applications are built on top of base maps which they themselves may have been compiled from poor quality data.


See my post on the NAVTEQ LBS Challenge hosted by Jeff Mize and Marc Nadell. These apps that have not yet gone commercial were quite good. The eventual winner was, Cyprus Solutions with its VUE application for fleet asset tracking. The company will be successful when this app launches because of the implications for tracking goods coming in through ports for homeland security.

Patrick Meier of Ushahidi completed the day’s events with a nice overview of his efforts at Crisis Camps for Haitian earthquake relief efforts.