PlanetEye

Thursday, May 15th, 2008

Thank you, Where 2.0

Juan Gonzalez: Vice President, Technology

Thank you to the O’Reilly’s team for inviting me to speak at Where 2.0. The execution of the conference was superb and every single detail was planned in advance.

While the line-up of fellow speakers was great, I believe at these events, there is just as much value in the networking that takes place. During the conference, there were plenty of opportunities to meet new people.

At PlanetEye, there has been a long tradition of research backing up everything we do, and we wanted to share a little bit of what we’ve learned from our journey building the site.

“Crawling the web for GeoData” was a quick summary of the many techniques that we have adopted at PlanetEye to create a valuable online travel planning service. As many people commented after the talk, the core technologies that we have developed are applicable in other spaces, and we are glad to be able to contribute to the geospatial community.

As I sit down to write these lines, my voice has faded almost completely, a sign of the many valuable conversations that took place. I’m looking forward to keep them going online.

Posted in GPS/Geotagging, PlanetEye
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Monday, 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:

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