Where 2.0 Video: Google/ESRI Keynote

Here's the first video from Where 2.0, the Google Keynote with a surprise appearance from ESRI. I can't wait to share some of the other talks we've had so far.

Since Google first presented a snapshot of the geoweb at last year's Where 2.0, it has considerably evolved: more Geo data is published on the web, KML was accepted as an OGC standard and is adopted by a growing number of tools. Join John Hanke, Director of Google Earth & Maps to hear the latest on the evolution of the Geoweb and Google’s effort to organize it and make it universally accessible and useful. John will also demonstrate the latest in Google geo development with Jack Dangemond of ESRI.

Where 2.0: Google is Opening the GeoIndex

Today, John Hanke, Director of Geo for Google and co-founder of Keyhole, increased the relevance of Google's geoindex by opening it to all developers. In an upcoming release this data will be available via Google's search APIs. We've been able to access their geoindex via search in Google Maps (it's the community data sets). Live Maps also exposes its geoindex to consumers.

The geoindex is growing. The image to the right shows all of the points in Google's version of the geoindex as of May, 2007 (image courtesy of Google). As of May 2008 there has been over 300% growth in places of annotations. It is mostly KML with some GeoRSS. This segment of the talk included a random Google fact. Did you know that 8 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute? I sure didn't. Wow.

It was just over a year ago that Google released MyMaps, a platform for creating mashups and geodata on Google's platform. It was a move heralded by some as screwing Platial and other mashup sites. Instead I believe it is going to help them by creating more demand for geocontent and more methods for it to be shared (Radar post).

They've also added the ability to search the geoindex from Google Maps on Mobile (GMM in Googler parlance)
Platial is also moving to mobile (Radar post). It will be interesting to see if these two products parallel aspects of each other as much as the browser-based ones do.

John Hanke invited Jack Dangermond on stage. Jack is the founder and CEO of ESRI; he is the godfather of GIS and by extension neogeography. Jack and John are the only people who have spoken at every Where 2.0. The upcoming release of ArcGIS Server 9.3, ESRI's flagship product, will now publish in KML and GeoRSS. Every install will be able to output to a streaming KML file. There's always been a dark web of geodata. Now this is being exposed and we can expect the geoindex to grow because of it.

Where 2.0 Keynotes: EveryBlock, Nokia, FortiusOne

Highlights from today's keynotes:

• Everyblock (Adrian Holovaty): EveryBlock is an "experiment" that attempts to redefine the boundaries of journalism. Adrian devoted his talk to sharing some of the lessons they learned while building the EveryBlock site:
  1. Instead of depending solely on user-generated data, take advantage of existing data: In EveryBlock's case, they rely heavily on data published by local municipalities.
  2. The more local you get, the more effort it takes, but your application becomes more valuable: Privacy is a concern, but they get around that by geocoding only down to the block level.
  3. Move beyond points: News and events impact neighborhoods, blocks, streets, etc. Highlight polygons and lines, not just single points.
  4. Roll your own maps: Web designers resist having to use templates from software providers (e.g. blogging templates from Wordpress), why should maps be treated differently? Adrian regards their ability to customize the various details (font, texture, colors, data) that control the appearance of maps on their site, as one of their competitive advantages. The good news is that their code will be open source at some point.
• PC and Mobile Maps Coming Together (Michael Halbherr): Nokia's Ovi is a site that extends their maps from devices to PC's, complementing existing mobile services. By installing a plug-in, users can do 2D and 3D rendering on either their mobile device or desktop, essentially unifying Google Maps and Google Earth. Tim frequently talks about Software Above the Level of a Single Device - Nokia may have a product that fulfills that vision.
• FortiusOne (Sean Gorman): In-Q-Tel funded FortiusOne's platform allows non-technical users to easily create data-rich maps. Users upload their lat/long encoded data, merge it with FortiusOne's geocoded data, and visually display correlations that would otherwise require programming skills. Their secret sauce is a set of tools called the GeoCommons suite of products that our resident geo expert Brady Forrest wrote about last year.

Geocommons launched at last year's Where 2.0 conference and quickly grew to a database with over 1.6B features. Sean and his team struggled to get their applications to run efficiently on traditional databases, before they decided to build a lightweight object database on their own.

Moving forward, FortiusOne hopes to build algorithms to help users overcome the growing federation of mapping and geodata. Mashups of geodata require semantic intelligence that go beyond tags. They hope that by observing how users combine data from various sources, they can build tools that intelligently bring the various datasets together.

And yes, his famous dissertation did get published.

Yahoo! Internet Location Platform: One Location ID To Rule Them All

Today Yahoo launched a preview of the Yahoo! Internet Location Platform. It essentially creates an ID (a Where On Earth ID aka WOEID)for each place on earth and provides the API calls to geocode to and from that ID. It's very similar to Geonames IDs.

It's based on the dataset acquired with the acquisition of Whereonearth Limited. The company was created primarily for use on the backend of One its most visible uses was in the creation of the Places feature on Flickr (Radar posts 1 & 2).

Here are some details and examples from the overview page:

The API is accessed via HTTP GET; the following examples can be cut-and-paste into a web browser to view the results (note that these links do not work properly with IE6):
Find the WOEID of a significant landmark:
http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/places.q('sydney%20opera%20house')
Resolve a WOEID to a place:
http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/place/2507854
Find the WOEID of a specific place:
http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/places.q('northfield%20mn%20usa')
Obtain a range of WOEIDs that match a given place, ordered by the most likely:
http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/places.q('springfield');start=0;count=5
Find the parent of a given WOEID (and return a detailed record):
http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/place/638242/parent?select=long
Return the Placename for a given WOEID in a specific language (where it exists):
http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/places.q('usa')?lang=fr
To obtain the representation of a place in JSON format:
http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/place/2487956?format=json
To obtain a list of geographies that neighbor a specific WOEID:
http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/place/12795711/neighbors

Rate Limits
Currently, users of the Internet Location Platform are limited to 50k queries per day.

And some more details from their guide:

Coverage
The Yahoo! Internet Location Platform contains about six million places. Coverage varies from country-to-country but globally includes several hundred thousand unique administrative areas with half a million variant names; several thousand historical administrative areas; over two million unique settlements and suburbs, and two-and-a-half million unique postcode points covering about 150 countries, plus a significant number of points of interest, Colloquial Regions, Area Codes, Time Zones, and Islands.
Note: Natural features and water geographies are not included in the current release.

Hierarchy
All geographic entities in the Yahoo! Internet Location Platform exist within a hierarchy. The hierarchy acts as a simple topological model that allows developers to query the geographic context of every place represented by a WOEID, and obtain its parents, children, and neighbors. For example, a list of states in a particular country can be obtained by querying the Yahoo! Internet Location Platform for the children of that country; in a similar manner, the surrounding postcodes of particular postcode can be obtained via a neighbors query.

Language
The Yahoo! Internet Location Platform is UTF-8 compliant and supports location names in multiple languages including English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Dutch as well as local double-byte character set data in Japan, Hong Kong, Korea and Taiwan.

Exposing a data set of this magnitude is significant so of course there is a lot more coverage out there for the curious. Dan Catt, one of the resident geo-experts at Flickr and a speaker at Where 2.0, dives into more detail and draws comparisons to the Flickr API. ReadWriteWeb also has an excellent analysis.

The Yahoo! Internet Location Platform offers a great boon to developers by potentially providing a common id for all locations across all apps. These IDs are also backed by one of the best geocoders available. Will developers want to rely on these IDs? It'll be interesting to hear developer's thoughts at Where 2.0 this week.

Live-Streaming Where 2.0

If you can't make it to Where 2.0 you can watch it live-ish via two different video streams. For tonight's Ignite and Launchpad event you can watch via UStream.TV. This stream will get audio directly from the soundboard.

Seero, a geo-broadcasting portal that is focused on events is going to be live-streaming the entire event. You can watch it on their site or via the embed below. They will also be doing interviews throughout the day.

Just in case you don't have time to watch the stream we will be releasing video clips of Where over the next couple of days.

Ignite Where and Launchpad

Tonight we are opening the Where 2.0 Conference with Ignite Where and Launchpad. It's going to be a mixture of 5-minute demo and presentations. The event is open to all-comers (as will the cash-bar). The schedule for the evening is below (full descriptions are after the jump).

First Set: Starting at 7PM
Ignite: Building Personalized Slices of the GeoWeb - Andrew Turner (Mapufacture)
Ignite: Health In the Real World - Steven Hammond
Launchpad The Future of Location-Based Gaming - Georg Broxtermann (Orbster GmbH)
Launchpad: Introducing Whrrl: Real-Time Personalization for the Real World - Blake Scholl (pelago)
Launchpad: Ipoki: a GPS-based Social Network - Alberto Andres, Diego Fernández Domínguez (Ipoki)
Launchpad: TurfTag Launch - Zachary Holmquist (TurfTag)
Launchpad: On the Shoulders of Giants: Bridging the Divide Between Science and Advocacy - Josh Knaer (Rhiza Labs)

Second Set: starting at 8:15
Ignite: Mapping Now: Dynamic Realtime Maps and Other Pictures. - Eric Rodenbeck (Stamen)
Ignite: Who Is in Your Neighborhood? Defining Neighborhood Boundaries & Identifying Localized - Bernt Wahl (UC Berkeley)
Launchpad: The REST is Up to You: A Deeper GeoStack for Better Apps - Jaron Waldman (Placebase)
Launchpad: How to Make a Geographic Wiki - Frank San Miguel (Concharto)
Launchpad: Why Trust Top-Down Data? Building Services on Better Maps. - Nick Black (Cloud Made)
Launchpad: Focation.com: Info at Their Location - Nguyen Le (Focation.com)
Launchpad: Open Space - Ordnance Survey on the web - Ian Holt (Ordnance Survey)

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Platial Goes Local & Very Soon Mobile

Platial, the community mapping portal, has been redesigned to highlight their content. In making the decision to redesign the team realized two things. First, that with all of their content (over 150MM points from their community maps and the recently acquired Frappr -- Radar post) they had the makings for map-oriented local guides. Secondly, the vast majority (>98%) of their traffic comes from browsers, people who don't contribute to the site, so why not make sure they can find what they need?
Their announcement post does a a great job of detailing their new features, but i will go through some of the new portions that I find particularly striking.
All Map - The new Platial is all about the MAP. When you load the page it's completely filled with the area of your interest and their are small command windows hanging off of it. And of course you can still get to the content sources.
Search Results - Continuing the all-map trend, search results are displayed on the map. You are also given a list view in one of the command windows.
Slideshow - After running your search you can hit play on the map and in a Twittervision-style it will show you all of your search results. It's great to see the slideshow feature gaining more traction, hopefully Platial will enable a real-time edit viewer like Google did (Radar post).

Iconic Filters - At the top of the map there are now a series of icons that denote the most common searches (based on user tags and actions). Just click one to search for that on your map. Di-Ann Eisner, Platial CEO, explained more in an email to me, "What makes local content interesting? Well, definitely food/drink, shopping and standard city guide stuff BUT based on watching our users for 2 years we also saw that it was local history, parks, architecture, green, activism, punk, kid-friendly and more- so that's how we've categorized and are building out our content. "

This redesign sets up Platial for a mobile play. Having a local guide on my phone that come complete with iconic search that displays the results on a map of my current area will be very handy. Platial is not keeping their mobile ambitions a secret and the mobile apps will be coming.

Disaster Technology for Myanmar/Burma aid workers

There is an ongoing crisis in Myanmar (Burma) in the aftermath of cyclone Nargis. The ruling military junta is finally allowing humanitarian organizations into the region after denying access for almost a week. The situation is grim, and you can help by donating to organizations like: Doctors without Borders, Direct Relief, and UNICEF.

There has been some incredible discussion on the humanitarian tech and Geo lists in the past 24 hours around adapting/improving existing collaboration services to work with the tools in the field. Mikel Maron and I will be speaking about this at Where2.0 next week, and it looks like some exciting work will be happening there and at WhereCamp.

Eduardo Jezierski from InSTEDD is currently working to localize the Sahana Disaster Management System

Jonathan Thompson's organization, Humanlink, has been working on adapting technology for aid workers for some time. You can follow recent developments on the Aid Worker Daily blog.

Update: Paul Currion posted a big list of other projects now underway to the humanitarian.info blog:

• A Sahana instance is being set up for the use of anybody who needs it, with the support of INSTEDD and possible uptake by NetHope members.
• Direct Relief International have done up a KMZ file of health facilities in-country, based on the WHO 2002 Global Health Atlas.
• OCHA are prepping a HIC to support the existing Myanmar Information Management Unit, who have already put out some W3 maps.
• UNOSAT have also got their sat on with a KMZ file of the cyclone path and the usual satellite mapping.
• Ditto ITHACA, who have released a series of satellite maps showing the impact of Nargis.
• ReliefWeb’s info stream on Cyclone Nargis is of course like drinking water from a hose, with their map filter probably most useful.
• The WorldWideHelp blog roars into action with all the news that’s fit to blog.
• A couple of the mailing list discussions that I’m on are talking about ways in which we might leverage cellphone and/or satellite phone communications if they become available, particularly for tracking relief and relief personnel.
• Digital Globe and Geo-Eye have hopped the NASA satellite for an updating KML layer on the cyclone.
• Microsoft apparently have a team on standby to deploy the refugee tracking software that was developed for Kosovo (no reference yet).
• Telecoms sans Frontieres are also on standby out of Bangkok, waiting for access to free up.
• Also Infoworld points out that - with regards to early warning - IT didn’t fail Myanmar, people did.

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Tomtom-Tele Atlas Deal To Go Through; Nokia-NAVTEQ Next

Last summer GPS manufacturer Tomtom successfully fought off rival Garmin to acquire mapping data provider Tele Atlas (alternately some would say that Garmin successfully raised the cost of purchasing Tele Atlas)(Radar post). Now according to Bloomberg the deal has gotten approval from the EU, but not without wrangling.

The commission staff had said that it wanted TomTom to address worries that the pricing for maps might become prohibitive after the takeover. The commission's solution was to create a new map supplier by compelling TomTom to sell rights to its database.

The Dutch company instead promised in December in a letter that the relationship between Tele Atlas and its customers ``will remain exactly the same.''

And why wouldn't Tomtom promise this? In my opinion the whole point of the merger was to create a new revenue stream for Tomtom by selling mapping data to its competitors (and other customers such as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft). I am sure that another major goal behind the merger is to cut costs and improve the process of collecting mapping data by taking advantage of all of its car navigation systems (like the Dash does).

The next major deal waiting to go through in the geo space is Nokia's acquisition of mapping data provider NAVTEQ (which Nokia is doing for similar reasons). Will the EU make the same demands of Nokia?

Nokia, NAVTEQ, and Tele Atlas will all be speaking at Where 2.0 next week at the SFO Marriott.

Where Week in the Bay Area (May 10th- 17th)

Where 2.0 starts next week on May 12th, but that's not evening the beginning of the geo-related activities that some people are calling "Where Week". Here are the events that I am aware of so far.

Saturday, May 10th: Make your own map of San Francisco at an OSM Mapping party. Details TBD. No GPS required. More info.

Sunday, May 11th: Fly UAVs with Chris Anderson and the folks from PictEarth at an "airfield available at the former Alameda Naval Air Station nearly Oakland (right across the Bay Bridge from San Francisco) and could fly on the afternoons of Sunday, May 11th or Monday, May 12." Post-flight drinks are on Chris. More Info.

Monday, May 12th: Where 2.0 starts this morning with workshops. That evening Where Ignite & Launchpad will be at the SFO Marriott and is open to the public (as are the bars). It will feature a mix of 14 launching companies and short-form presentations. More Info.

Tuesday - Wednesday, May 13th & 14th: Where 2.0 keynotes start each morning at 9AM. The first morning kicks off with Adrian Holovaty of Everyblock and John Hanke of Google. Throughout the following days we'll hear from Microsoft, Yahoo, Loopt, Tele Atlas and NAVTEQ, The conference ends with a talk on mapping activists from Erik Hersman.

Thursday, May 15th: Also today there will be meetings on the Burning Earth project. Contact bman.deletethis at burningman.com for details. Finally, there is also a Data Sharing Summit this day at the Computer History Museum. Any discussion about user data eventually turns to location. More info.

Friday, May 16th: Rest. Make your own map of Sunnyvale at an OSM Mapping party. It starts at Yahoo! No GPS required. More info.

Saturday - Sunday, May 17th & 18th: The second WhereCamp, an independent unconference, will be held at the Googleplex both days. Last years was a great time to talk about the impact of all of the Where 2.0's announcements. More info.

If there anymore geo-hacker events leave them in the comments.

Brady: Sorry for the re-posting. We recently upgraded to MT4 and have been having problems posting from clients; re-posting through the web interface.

Brady: The second OSM party is Friday, not Thursday.

Virtual Earth V2 vs. V1

I'm at Microsoft Research's Location Summit (last year I was a speaker, this year an attendee). They've got a variety of speakers from MSR, academia and MS product groups.

Steve Stanzel of the 3D Imagery Group (3DI) just spoke about Virtual Earth V2. They've had 3D data since November 2006 (Radar post). There are now nearly 300 cities are in 3D. Recently 4 cities were launched as V2 cities.

What's the difference between a V1 and a V2 city? As I see it and understand it there are two main differences. The first is an improvement in texture quality (which makes the building look more real). In V1 the textures came from aerial imagery (the top-down view). Now they have added oblique imagery (the 45 degree, Birds-Eye view that shows the sides of buildings). The building geometry is still 2.5D, but the new textures make the buildings seem a lot more real.

The second difference is a large increase in buildings and entities in the city. The first edition of Virtual Earth featured the taller buildings in the city, ignoring most of the one and two story houses. In V2 they increased the number of buildings in a city from around 6,000 to upwards of 150,00. Most of those increases came in the suburbs. They also added some great detail work in the form of trees. In Denver they've rendered 300,000 trees in their exact locations. The trees come from a set of standard models. A model is placed in a specific spot based on the height and diameter of the real tree (wow).

The work that the Virtual Earth Team has done is very impressive. Much of it is built on the technology attained with the acquisition of Vexcel and Geotango. Vincent Tao, the founder of GeoTango and now a Director with the Virtual Earth team, will be speaking at Where 2.0 on May 13th.

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Radar Roundup: Ubiquitous computing (ubicomp)

• The Street as Platform (Dan Hill): amazing essay by Dan Hill (yet another genius formerly at the BBC) about the invisible cloud of data in a city street. "We can’t see how the street is immersed in a twitching, pulsing cloud of data. [...] This is a new kind of data, collective and individual, aggregated and discrete, open and closed, constantly logging impossibly detailed patterns of behaviour. The behaviour of the street."
• Service Design Notes: Tools, not Services (Chris Heathcote): frustrated by the limited functionality in his Nike+ because the service is intentionally feebly aimed at feeble "typical" consumers, Chris dashed off a quick rant about the trap of designing services. Users want tools, not services. And by building tools, you can build a service people want. The last two paragraphs are gold: "Tools will be bent and misused - which means you sell even more. And you don't have design in the usefulness - just find the useful functionality and package it up in an open-enough way to show possibilities."
• A Very Long Conversation with Dopplr's Matt Jones (SecondVerse): a long interview, mostly about design stuff, with Matt Jones. The bit that resonated with me was "Mother Box is not in the Box", which I translate as "you buy products that are front-ends to services", which is a short hop away from "these days a device needs a network to be useful". If you think of ubicomp as "it's about sensors, outputs, and computation", you can't forget the network that connects them all--and what life is like when that network disappears.
• Review of Everyware by Adam Greenfield (heyblog): a very detailed review of "Everyware" by Adam Greenfield. Matt Jones recommended Everyware to me as the first stop in a quick catchup of ubiquitous computing. "Everyware strikes a good balance between the impenetrable proceedings of the UBICOMP conferences and design writing. Adam expects the reader to get references to “Ctrl-Zing something away, “elevator pitches”, and “user experience” and something about how people behave with mobile phones".
• Being Human (Microsoft Research): subtitled "Human-Computer Interaction in the Year 2020". Love the "Transformations in Interaction" section: "The End of Interface Stability; The Growth of Techno-Dependence; The Growth of Hyper-Connectivity; The End of the Ephemeral; The Growth of Creative Engagement".
• William Gibson - The Rolling Stone 40th Anniversary Interview: "One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real, the virtual from the real. In the future, that will become literally impossible. The distinction between cyberspace and that which isn't cyberspace is going to be unimaginable. When I wrote Neuromancer in 1984, cyberspace already existed for some people, but they didn't spend all their time there. So cyberspace was there, and we were here. Now cyberspace is here for a lot of us, and there has become any state of relative nonconnectivity. There is where they don't have Wi-Fi. In a world of superubiquitous computing, you're not gonna know when you're on or when you're off. You're always going to be on, in some sort of blended-reality state. You only think about it when something goes wrong and it goes off. And then it's a drag." I linked to it from the first Radar Roundup but I know you skipped it, so I had to quote it all here. You made me do it.

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