Where (2.0) the Who’s Who Announce What’s What
By Ki Mae Heussner
If the honchos gathered for the Where 2.0 conference this week have their way, navigationally-challenged people like me will never get lost again.
Thanks to the booming location-based services industry, 3D maps, Google mash-ups, geo-tagged photos and travel directions are exploding out of every kind of digital device.
You’d think at some point, innovation in the geospatial industry would plateau.
But no. Geo-industry engineers and activists continue to unveil pioneering programs, applications and tools.
In Burlingame, CA this week, for the fourth year, the Where 2.0 conference convened “grassroots and leading edge developers building location aware technology… with the businesses and entrepreneurs seeking out location apps, platforms and hardware to gain a competitive edge.”
Sponsored by industry heavyweights like Google, Nokia, Microsoft and Yahoo, the conference provided opportunities for the bigger companies to announce new developments and smaller geo start-ups to make their debuts.
Some of the highlights include:
- Nokia’s announcement to extend its mobile navigation system to the Web with Ovi.com, where users will be able to save map locations and routes and then synchronize the saved information with their phones. The application also allows users to save routes to their phones as they walk or drive around a location and then upload that to their Ovi maps.
- The launch of Concharto, an encyclopedic atlas of history and happenings that anyone can edit. Because the mark-ups are time-coded, it charts history better than other kinds of interactive maps.
- A presentation by John Hanke, director of Google Earth and Maps, revealing that there had been a 300 percent increase in geotagged annotations on Google’s mapping services in the past year. Increasingly, he said, the content is rich media, with links to photos and YouTube videos.
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