Where? There!

Part of the problem with being gone every other week is that communication is almost completely on hold while I'm on the road, so I spend the week back in the office doing nothing but talking to people. It seems like I've spent all this week on the phone. A lot of calls I've been making around the Where 2.0 conference are finally paying off, and there's been a round of confirmations and interest. Yay, more interesting people!

Balaji Prasad, the EDS Chief Technologist for automotive telematics, will be speaking on the state of the telematics industry. We like to talk about hacking the mobile phone, but we forget about the other computer we travel with--the one in our car. They're beginning to be used for much more than directions, and Balaji will give us an update on the car as computer.

I had a great talk with Michael Frumin, the man behind Fundrace.org. He'll be one of the initial speakers, whose apps we can point to and say "this is interesting because ...". In Fundrace's case, it's the amazing utility of a geo interface over a text interface.

This increase in utility has side-effects, though. I've heard again and again that location provokes strange reactions from people when mapped and geocoded, in ways that locations in unstructured text do not. The difference between political contributions being available in a .tar.gz file and a mapped searchable web interface is considerable--the interface makes it personal, makes it local. And people find that far more alarming. So we'll explore this in the privacy panel on Thursday (more information on this panel will be available as the last of the speakers confirm).

I also spent about an hour today talking with Schuyler Erle (and by proxy with Jo Walsh as he called out questions to her and relayed her answers--a wonderfully low-tech counterpoint to the Skype service that connected Schuyler and me). We talked about the problems of mapping London, and he passed on a great story about Dan Brickley. Dan had offered his own money to buy satellite images of his hometown Bristol from which to derive street maps, only to learn that there are no satellite images of Bristol. Apparently it's always too cloudy. How I laughed, until I looked out the window at the snow on the ground here in Colorado on April 29.

The upshot was that Schuyler will be part of the panel, "What is a Sustainable Business for Data?" Schuyler's long been part of the open map movement, and he'll be a good advocate for the hacker there. It'll be interesting to hear how the people who sell their street data for large sums attempt to embrace the grassroots developers without big budgets. In some ways, it almost seems like they're passing on the responsibility of working with grassroots hackers to the Telcontars and MapPoints of the world, the service providers. Those guys have to figure out how to offer free services, without giving the data away. But ultimately, services aren't as useful as the real data. Will they be useful enough? It'll be an interesting panel.

And, finally, the brochure that we all sweated blood on has finally arrived. Behold, The Magnificence! Many thanks to the conferences team who pulled together the information while simultaneously busting nuts on the OSCON registration site and the MySQL conference. Admire a copy of the brochure in your letterbox soon.