The Where 2.0 Conference starts tomorrow with workshops all day. In the evening we will have our kick-off event in the Ballroom at the San Jose Marriott. As always we start off with a series of Ignite talks. This year in the middle of Ignite we are going to host the NAVTEQ LBS Challenge Awards.
The Ignite talks look great this year and touch on major issues in the mobile, mapping and local industries. Patrick Meier will be talking about Ushahidi’s work in Haiti. Paul Ramsey will inform us why our data sucks. Jonathan Stark will address the problems with App Stores. It should be a fun night. The complete list of talks is after the jump
Ignite Where kicks off at 7:00 p.m. and NAVTEQ’s seven year old Global LBS Challenge developer competition takes the main stage live at 8:00 p.m. All twelve finalists will make a one minute pitch of their location-based applications, giving the audience a taste of what it takes to make it to the Challenge finals. They are competing for prizes valued at $10 million. The audience will provide input via SMS.
Where 2.0 is in San Jose from 3/30-4/1. There are still seats available, but they are filling up.
App Store is For Suckers
Jonathan Stark (Jonathan Stark Consulting)
Submitting (pun intended) to the App Store is for suckers. The cheapest, easiest, fastest way for developers to get in on the mobile gold rush is to build killer web apps. Web apps can now – today – access location data, utilize client-side SQL databases, and even run offline. Web apps run on more than 100 mobile handsets with zero modification. We’ve moved on. Don’t get suckered.
Crowdsourcing the Impossible: Ushahidi-Haiti
Patrick Meier (Ushahidi)
How did hundreds of student volunteers around the world use Ushahidi to save hundreds of lives in Haiti? How did they process and map thousands of urgent life-and-death text messages from Haiti in near real-time? Patrick’s talk will answer these questions in 4 minutes and 58 seconds.
Has Google Really Patented Any LBA?
Nick Mikhailovsky (POIdo)
On March 1st 2010, Google was granted a broad patent for Location-Based Advertising. Does it mean Google now has it all? Of course, no! In this talk Nick Mikhailovsky will talk about POIdo, a location-based advertising platform that launches publicly in Russia on Mar 16th (they’re planning a US launch later this year).
Location Intelligence Down Under- Beards, Sandals and Theodolites?
Maurits van der Vlugt (NGIS)
The Spatial Information Community in Australia is somewhat schizophrenic. It sometimes seems full of ageing, sluggish and conservative blokes. But Australia has also given birth to world-leading innovations such as GML, ArcPad and the game-changing Google Maps. Maurits presents an outsiders view from the inside of the frustrating, quirky and exciting aspects of location intelligence in Australia.
Making Money at a Non-Profit
Sophia Parafina (OpenGeo)
Times are hard and your angel funder just told you that your non-profit open source org needs to feed itself. Great, but it also means change, in terms of process, organization, culture and people’s expectations. The talk is about achieving a balance between profitability and the open source mission.
Maps of My Life
Dylan Phillips (Microsoft Alumnus)
Maps have been a part of Dylan Phillips’ life for as long as he can remember. His father, an anthropologist, got an old National Geographic Relief Map, for his wall as a child. But these maps were static, constant, dead if you will. The USSR still lives on, in the map on his wall. He’s come to learn that maps, are not about geography, they are about people, and the human sense of space.
Mobile Design for Barns and Gas Stations: 12 Easy Rules for Location-Based Applications
Will Carter (Nodesnoop Labs)
Will Carter is a mobile developer, primarily for the iPhone, and mostly for game, or game like experiences that leverage location. In this talk, Will has created 12 easy steps for building location based applications, that, while slightly on the humorous side, are also rather insightful, and very much tuned into the way that he goes about developing interesting and fun stuff.
People Suck a Naming Places
Sylvain Carle (Praized Media)
The world of precise coordinates is easy to interact with using software. The problem is humans don’t use precise coordinates to represent places. They don’t even agree on place names. I will try to give an overview of the current existing services/APIs that you can use to find a precise coordinate with a place name. And then demonstrate why we are not there yet.
Presenting: Chickens + Lasers
Martin Isenburg (downtownfarm.net)
Martin Isenburg’s project hits the nerve of “zeitgeist”: pandora, michelle omaba, farmville, geospatial, michael pollen, green, no more tiger, cheap fun (because recession), growing food in cities, …
Where To Point…Oh!
Roland Shield (perchslayer)
In these troubled times, we need to get creative to get the economy moving. In addition, we need governments to provide the web-based information and services promised. In order to facilitate/catalyze this process, we as citizens need to do Public Information Requests as if there is no tomorrow. Unconvinced? Let Roland Shield show you how and why in 5 minutes or less.
Why Your Data Sucks
Paul Ramsey
Where is here? That place on a map is relative to a road line, which was digitized on a 5-years-ago satellite image, which was ground referenced to an existing road intersection, which was captured 35 years ago from an aerial photo, which was ground referenced to a control point, which was optically sighted relative to mountain-top control points, which were first occupied 150 years ago.
Your Head Isn’t a Spatial Database, But You Still Know the Way to San Jose
Drew Dara-Abrams (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Unlike our gadgets, humans can’t remember directions, distances, and other spatial information with such exactitude. You probably have more than a few memories of getting lost, don’t you? From experiments Drew has run himself and work done by his colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara, he will present a couple key findings about human spatial cognition.
Zoom In… Zoom Back
Mark Sherman (ZoomAtlas)
Have you ever wondered what happened to your childhood neighbor friend? Or, wanted to reconnect with friends from elementary school? At Ignite Where, the audience will Zoom through the ZoomAtlas map with Mark Sherman, CEO and founder of ZoomAtlas, as he takes them on an adventure through neighborhoods, cities, countryside and more to see how the ZoomAtlas map editor and wiki work…
Where2.0 where it matters
Andrew Turner (Fourtiusone)
an overview of how all the great technology is doing more than just helping us hook-up or find bars, but being used in Government, crisis response (crisiscommons/haiti), development, etc.