Where2.0 am I ?

This past week at Lat 37.329304, Lon -121.89051, I got the opportunity to attend my first Tim O'Reilly's Where2.0 Conference.

'Now in its sixth year, the Where 2.0 Conference is where the grassroots and leading edge developers building location-aware technology intersect with the businesses and entrepreneurs seeking out location apps, platforms, and hardware to gain a competitive edge. In the O'Reilly conference tradition, Where 2.0 presents leading trends rather than chasing them.

At Where 2.0, you'll find source mapping tools, reality mining, open standards for data and location web services, and sensors for obtaining location data.

We'll learn how the established geo industry is reacting to the first businesses making money from their grassroots geospatial projects. There's no better place to meet the people behind the mashups, the people behind the platforms, and the people looking ahead to the future of geospatial. Join us at Where 2.0 to debate and discuss what's viable now, and what's lurking just below the radar.

Where 2.0 2010 encompasses a full day of workshops followed by two days of plenary sessions featuring a unique combination of high profile keynotes with big players, lightning talks, panel discussions, demos, product launches, Q&A time, and much more. The most innovative and interesting people in this space are featured on stage, and they stay around to debate and discuss with other conference-goers off stage.' -Where2.0 Conference Website.

I had a blast at this conference for geo-geeks and learned a lot about various mapping technologies, location based services, trends, and digital city technologies. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, MapQuest, ESRI, and other big players were there. Check out the full schedule to get a synopsis of all the great sessions.

It was nice to see plenty of sessions over the 3 days of Where about augmented reality. I attended Where2.0 as I was invited to present on a panel about Truly Open Augmented Reality. Moderated by Mike Liebhold from Institute For The Future, the panel consisted of Shailesh Nalawadi, Product Manager Google Goggles, Carl Reed, Chief Technology Officer of the Open Geospatial Consortium, Sophia Parafina Director of Operation for OpenGeo, and me.

My actual presentation at the event was shorter due to the time constraint, but I feel it important to share the extended version of the presentation to understand how 3D for AR plays into the ecosystem of the open geo-web.

Although I have done better presentations (sorry group), I am happy about the outcome from after the talk. Seems another big AR company wants to support the standards.

Highlights:

- Microsoft's Blaise Agüera y Arcas demonstrates some of the work being done with Bing Maps.

Blaise recently presented Bing's Virtual Earth with some mixed reality capabilities at TED 2010.

- Google Earth's Michael Jones presents, "The New Meaning of Mapping."

- C3 is a Swedish based company that provides realistic 3D solutions for the online mapping industry. Their solutions enable a richer map display and takes 3D digital mapping into the next level. They offer new immersive 3D user experiences and state of the art in automatic 3D generation based on a combination of different image sources.



-EveryScape creates photo-realistic explorable experiences of cities & towns, streets & sidewalks, and building exteriors & interiors

- Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley presentation on, "Adventures in Mobile Social 2.0: Twelve Months of Foursquare."



-SimpleGeo is a ready-to-use location platform to store, scale, and discover geodata.

-Social Animal specializes in interactive and engaging cinema-quality 360 experiences for commercial and creative applications.

I really recommend a visit to the Where2.0 Conference site to browse all the presentations and panels. The event was super informative, the staff were among the best I have ever dealt with, and it is truly a must attend event for those interested in the future of mapping, digital cities, mirror worlds, and other cutting-edge geospatial technologies.