PlanetEye

May 12th, 2008

Where 2.0

Juan Gonzalez

Vice President, Technology

For the next three days, companies working in the location industry are getting together in Burlingame, Ca. for the O’Reilly Where 2.0 Conference.

The location industry includes everyone creating, aggregating, analyzing, mapping and searching geographic data. While maps are perhaps the ultimate graphic interface for the Web, most users will only get to know a handful of them. But the ecosystem of companies required to make them happen is vast.

To create a valuable online travel planning service, PlanetEye has contributed to the field by advancing geocoding techniques, aggregating unstructured geodata, fast retrieval and analysis and a superb set of tools for visualizing the data.

In the process, we have discovered that this space has learned important lessons about openness, creating platforms instead of products, services instead of Web sites and, ultimately, fostering a new generation of tools that will propel location-aware services to the forefront of consumers’ minds.

While the full conference schedule is available online, here are some of the talks I’ll be attending:

• Advanced Rails GIS Hacks
• EverBlock: A News Feed for Your Block
• Ride the Fire Eagle: Open Location for All
• Bringing Spatial Analysis to your Mashups
• Going Places on Flickr: The Significance of Geographical Information in Photos

Of course, you can expect many of these to influence how PlanetEye evolves to integrate the latest technologies in the field.

Tags: where20, where20Conf08

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