What is Where 2.0?

Directions Magazine blogged Tim's keynote, and in it there's a great sentence that sums up the whole Where 2.0 premise:

Those “geeks” are building applications that show the power of geography but without the complex interfaces of the desktop software of the 90’s.

Yup, we're focusing on the grassroots developers, the people who consume Yahoo!, Google, Amazon, eBay, Salesforce.com, and Flickr APIs and produce cool and useful apps from them. We believe these grassroots developers want to build apps around the locations in all our data, but that their needs aren't being met by the existing geospatial offersings.

The speed of adoption of Google Maps, despite the less-than-easy way you incorporate it into your own apps, shows the pent-up demand for location-based services that normal programmers can use. The geospatial world's tools are useful, but are designed for people who want to go deep into geography. For the rest of us, it's a small part of our fun hacking or our business hacking. We want it to be easy, not feature-complete.

So at the Location Intelligence conference I spent my time asking the vendors "what do you do to get your products in the hands of the vast majority of programmers, the ones who do not consider themselves GIS programmers?" The answers varied from "harumph, why would we want to do that?" to "you can't talk about this yet, but ...". Some companies (and some surprising companies!) get it, and will be announcing some significant things at Where 2.0.

I spoke to a map data company executive about open data, and his thoughts raised my eyebrows. I spoke to a mapping portal executive about their huge API plans. I heard one GIS company executive ask Tim, "this is great, can you come speak to the rest of my company?" These folks get open source (they've seen PostgreSQL's ubiquity in the GIS world), and they've seen the possibilities in open data and open services. They've also seen the possibilities of thinking outside the GIS niche--the Location Intelligence conference was packed with insiders trying to sell deeper into the enterprise. There was no fun, few startups, no announcements, no ... zing.

At Where 2.0 we want to gather the "geeks" (I love those quotes in the Directions blog) and the geospatial companies and have them talk. We want to show cool projects that point to what we'll all be building once we have the tools and the data. We're trying to avoid speculative unbuilt projects, and focus on what's real now--there was a LBS bubble around 2001, and we don't want to be tarred by that brush. We're also focusing more on the research and academic projects, the home-brew hackery that's indicative of what we everyday hackers can build, rather than the built-in-a-big-company products. We feel that often hackers implement user needs before big companies can, and we want to bring the hackers and the industry together to build those applications showing the power of geography.