Where 2.0 Launchpad

At Where 2.0 Ignite and Launchpad, 18 presentations where held over 2 hours, 6 launches and 12 Ignite talks, covering various aspect of the geo world. As a quick overview it gives a good sense of the energy that is showing here at Where 2.0.

  1. Geocommons, created by Fortiusone, is a tool for giving consumers access to data. There is a lot of data out there, mostly in hard to reach places, with around 98% of it free. GeoCommons aim is to take this data and allow people to create maps based on it. To encourage sharing the data has to be me available under a Creative Commons Attribution license. You can layer multiple datasets together to create custom reports, without any programming skill.

    It is quite fascinating to be able to play around with various data sets, create custom reports and then export it to Google Earth. Here is an example of Tornado Alleys.

  2. National Geographic Metalens is a new service and API to integrate maps, media and data. It then allows you to do spatial filtering and temporal tags. It has built in security features to handle privacy and data access. They have over a century of media, content and cartography.

    It is encouraging to see a brand like National Geographic take steps to interact with the geo community As custodians of vast amount of data, and an authoritative source, they have the potential to increase the amount of good data available. The most intriguing term was ‘temporal tags’ , that describes what I think is an important feature of all large datasets. Enabling an ability to select data at specific times.

  3. Fatdoor is a new location based social network site with a twist. With over a 100 million pre populated profiles, it builds a social network of people living around you. The goal here is to allow you to get to know and interact with your neighbours. Every piece of data, restaurants or people, exist as a wiki style editable content. So you can edit notes about your neighbours.

    I find this a bit frightening, what if I don’t like people living around me, or they don’t like me. How does my privacy get affected by this?

  4. Swivel launched a new tool called Swivel G. It allows you to take Swivel datasets and plot them over geographical maps. It also supports exporting to Google Earth. Swivel is the OECD official data partner, so you can take their data and overlay it to create your maps.

    Again, the ability to create maps of data sets is fascinating, and can lead to lots of lost time. The availability of the trusted OECD data, makes geopolitical comparisons quite easy. Here is a map of electricity usage across the globe from the CIA Factbook.

  5. dopplr is a new innovative tool for people that travel a lot. By inputing your trips into dopplr, it will show you where you are going, and who else is going to be there. It enables serendipity when you are out travelling.

    I’ve been using dopplr since ETech and I really like it. I travel quite a lot and the ability to see where my friends are is invaluable. It allows me to meet people I would otherwise miss.

  6. UpNext showed a 3d cityscape of New York. It allows you to zoom around the space and select what kind of data it show. It pulled in restaurants, nightlife, shopping as well as a mashup from upcoming.org. You can click on any building to find out what is in it, as well as tag buildings.

    The demo looked really neat with a quite usable 3d interface. From my point of view, the question is if consumers will prefer the 3d ability to zoom around, or prefer more traditional 2d maps.

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