The iPhone: Tricorder Version 1.0?

The iPhone, in addition to revolutionizing how people thought about mobile phone user interfaces, also was one of the first devices to offer a suite of sensors measuring everything from the visual environment to position to acceleration, all in a package that could fit in your shirt pocket.

On December 3rd, O'Reilly will be offering a one-day online edition of the Where 2.0 conference, focusing on the iPhone sensors, and what you can do with them. Alasdair Allan (the University of Exeter and Babilim Light Industries) and Jeffrey Powers (Occipital) will be among the speakers, and I recently spoke with each of them about how the iPhone has evolved as a sensing platform and the new and interesting things being done with the device.

Occipital is probably best known for Red Laser, the iPhone scanning application that lets you point the camera at a UPC code and get shopping information about the product. With recent iPhone OS releases, applications can now overlay data on top of a real time camera display, which has led to the new augmented reality applications. But according to Powers, the ability to process the camera data is still not fully supported, which has left Red Laser in a bit of a limbo state. "What happened with the most recent update is that the APIs for changing the way the camera screen looks were opened up pretty much completely. So you can customize it to make it look any way you want. You can also programmatically engage photo capture, which is something you couldn't do before either. You could only send the UI up and the user would have to use the normal built-in iPhone UI to capture. So you can do this programmatic data capturing, and you can process those images that come in. But as it turns out, at the same time, shortly after 3.1, the method that a lot of people were using to get the raw data while it was streaming in became a blacklisted function for the review team. So we've actually had a lot of trouble as of late getting technology updates through the App Store because the function we're using is now on a blacklist. Whereas it wasn't on a blacklist for the last year."

Powers is hopeful that the next release of the OS will bring official support for the API calls that Red Laser uses, based on the fact that the App Store screeners aren't taking down existing apps that use the banned APIs. Issues with the iPhone camera sensors pose more of a problem for him. "In terms of science, it's definitely a really bad sensor, especially if you look at the older iPhone sensor, because it has what's called a rolling shutter. A rolling shutter means that as you press capture or rather as the camera is capturing video frames or as you capture a frame, the camera then begins to take an image. And it takes a finite number of milliseconds, maybe 50 or so, before it is actually exposed to the entire frame and stored that off into a sensor. Because it's doing something that's more like a serial data transfer instead of this all at once parallel capture of the entire frame, what that causes is weird tearing and odd effects like that. For photography, as long as it's not too dramatic, it's not a huge deal. For vision processing, it's a huge deal because it breaks a lot of assumptions that we typically make about the camera. That has gotten better in the 3GS camera, but it's still not perfect. It is getting better, especially when the camera's turned on the video mode."

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A Computing Future from Microsoft: Large and Cheap Displays

Chris Pratley, the head of Microsoft's Office Labs, gave the PICNIC audience a peek into the future they envision when planning their products. What is that future? It was encapsulated in the above video that they made a year ago. Some of the technologies (Augmented Reality and realtime language translation for example) have already come to the fruition (and they are going to need to make a new video soon before it all happens).

An initial viewing of the video shows that Chris and his team (and Microsoft in general) are concerned with screens of all sizes - from 10-foot wallscreen to 2-inch boarding passes. In all of these displays they imagine that the screen is also the interface. How will the current interfaces scale? For larger ones there is a concern for how to keep the controls near the user. For smaller ones there is no room for controls. The screens will be maneuvered by making the back touch sensitive (called Nanotouch). One of the key Microsoft researchers in this area is Patrick Baudisch.

These interfaces are possible now. I have played with Nanotouch devices at MSR -- some no larger than a 50 cent piece. And not only are the larger displays possible, they will potentially be cheap. The picture below is a new MSR project that shows one method for creating large scale screens cheaply. It uses a pico projector that is the size of the phone and a specially cut piece of plexiglass. The image below shows a display that is only ~2 feet tall, but you can imagine this working at 10 feet. Chris stated that the size of the display is bounded by the projector's brightness and that pico projector brightness is doubling every 9 months. In the future cameras can be added to allow for gestures on the interface.

Where 2.0 2010 CFP is Now Open

The CFP for the sixth annual Where 2.0 is now open. The three-day conference about location, mapping and geodata will be held from 3/30 to 4/1 in San Jose, CA. This year our focus will be on location-enabled platforms, mobile apps, user-generated geodata, sensors, and augmented reality. Here is more about the conference below,

Mobile: The iPhone, Android, and Symbian mobile OS’s are continually advancing the state of the art. By creating a wide-spread platform that allows for third-party development and geolocation they are bringing along the whole industry. The phone is going to become the primary I/O device for geodata in the near future. What new applications are you building for it? How are the social aapps effecting society and our notions of privacy?
Realtime Mapping: Mobile phones are being used to generate maps and other geodata. Sensors across the world are capturing more data every second. Reality mining systems are being used to release this data to users in realtime. Who is making the most of this deluge? How can they handle these new data sets?
Temporal Information: Realtime data requires the element of time to be added. This is uncharted design territory. How should time come to the Web?
Rich Analysis: Web mapping is moving past just allowing the display of data (aka red-dot fever). There are now many tools online that help people analyze data and could, in time, challenge traditional GIS systems. How is the Web different? Will end-users take up richer tools?
Geolocated Web: Every updated browser can now geolocate it’s user. Websites are now going to start using this information. What should they do with the information? What new services can be created?
Mobile Advertising vs. Services: Will people pay for their mobile apps directly or through ads? Which makes for a better product, a better user experience and a more stable revenue stream?
Augmented Reality: The combination of a camera, a GPS and a compass on a mobile phone is going to let us layer information on top of the world. What do you want to see? How will you edit the layers?
3D: Photosynth-like apps are becoming more commonplace. Google’s 3D Warehouse is filled with models. It’s safe to say that 3D is here. But do we need it? What are its limits?
Open Data: Governments are treasure troves of data. Increasingly they are releasing it online for free. How does open data effect the web? How can this data be widely available and yet maintain its creators? How is this critical information being put to use?
Crisis Mapping: The tools of neogeography are being used to spread the word of humanitarian and natural disasters. What are some of the best (and worst) examples?
Open-Source: The backbone of any independant mapping site is open source software. What are the newest tools that can be used to handle the location-enabled web?
Workshops
Where 2.0 will have a full day of workshops where participants can dig deep into a range of issues and leave the conference armed with new tools and skills. Workshops are one hour and fifteen minutes in length and will be held on Tuesday, March 30, 2010. Topics we’d like to explore include, but are not exclusive to:
Geo Support in Web Application Frameworks: As people design their own mapping applications, there has been a need for built-in geo support. We’re looking for workshops that teach about Mapstraction, Modest Maps, Open Layers, GeoDjango, GeoRuby, MapCruncher, and other tools.
GeoStack: As locations apps are brought in-house, companies need their own geostack. What are the best tools?
Mapping APIs: The location space would not have gotten as far as it has today without all of the innovation in the mapping API space. How can you test the limits of these free resources?
GeoTargeting: Knowing users’ locations has never been more important. Identifying it accurately can be difficult and expensive. What are the best methods?
Privacy Implications: As you are collecting user data, keeping track of your users, or collecting geodata, are you aware of the relevant laws? What would you teach others?
GeoBrowsers: Google Earth and NASA WorldWind are both amazing geobrowsers. How can you get the most out of them?
Data Management: Geo applications work with massive amounts of data. What are the tools, tips, and tricks that can be used to manage it?
Protocols and Formats: GeoRSS, GML, KML, EXIF, Microformats, Geo OpenSearch. Which formats are on the way in and which ones are on the way out? These are just some of the technologies and transformations we’ve noticed and represent just the starting point for the program. While we’d like you to tap into the theme as your inspiration in writing your proposal, feel free to wander. What are you working on that will change the world, or at least the world you’re in? What project is bringing you pleasure, or teasing your brain? Surprise and delight us; shake us out of our assumptions. We’re angling for shorter talks with longer breaks so you’ll have more time for one-on-one interactions.

IN adition to plenary talks and workshops we will also have opportunities for startups to launch, Ignitte talks and opportunities to experiment with RFIDs. The CFP closes 10/13/09. Submit a talk now.

Yahoo! Placemaker - Open Location, Open Data and Supporting Web Services

Today at Where 2.0 Tyler Bell, the Head of Yahoo's Geo Technologies Group, launched Placemaker (this link should be live at posting). Placemaker is a webservice that takes in text and returns the locations found within via either XML or enhanced GeoRSS. The locations Placemaker returns come in the form of WOEIDs (Radar post). You might be cautious about relying on Yahoo's ID system for your locations. To alleviate your fears Yahoo! is announcing the release of GeoPlanet Data, all of the WOEIDs available as a free download under Creative Commons in June. Woot!

Placemaker's geoparsing API will return WOEIDs and place names for all of the locations detected in the submitted text. This text can be structured or unstructured. If their are multiple locations detected the it will return a common ancestor called the Doc Scope. For example if San Francisco and Los Angeles are in the text then the Doc Scope will be "California". If San Francisco and Sacramento were in unstructured text then the Doc Scope would return the colloquial term "Northern California". There are no explicit limits on the API as long as your usage is "nice" -- if it's not you may find yourself shut off for a while.

Placemaker is an updated version of the geoparsing engine currently available through Yahoo! Pipes. This release rightfully makes geoparsing a stand-alone API. If you want to learn more about Placemaker Yahoo has posted the following instructions:

1. Read the online documentation at developer.yahoo.com/geo/placemaker/guide
2. Get an Application Id at developer.yahoo.com/wsregapp
3. POST your content to wherein.yahooapis.com/v1/document

The WOEIDs will be made available under the CC-Attribute license. It will ultimately include over 5 million entities in multiple languages. Relationships between the entities will be included.

Up till now Geonames IDs have been used as place IDS by many apps. All of Geonames' data is freely available for download. It was tough for Yahoo to compete with this open data solution. Today's release and announcement really ups the game. By making the data freely available developers will no longer have much fear about using the data. WOEIDs were first released as a webservice a year ago. At that point in time I expect the free release of the WOEID data to greatly increased the uptake of these supporting webservices and make Yahoo an integral part of mapping mashups.

Yahoo! has more info over on their Geo Technologies Blog.

Come to Ignite Where & Launchpad

Every year we kick-off Where 2.0 with a combination Launchpad and Ignite event. This year is no different. So far we've got 11 geo-oriented Ignite talks paired with 5 product demos spread across two sets. We'll be starting the show at 7PM and will conclude by 9PM on May 19th at the Fairmount in San Jose. Bar opens at 6:30.

RSVP @ Facebook. RSVP @ Upcoming.

First Set (Starts 7:00)

Demo: Andrew Weinreich - Xtify
Xtify is a location-based services platform offered to website developers. Xtify is able to abstract location without the involvement of wireless carriers.

Demo: Brian Trussel - Glympse: Socializing LBS
The next generation personal location-based service products should be much more like sharing a phone call and a lot less like forming a baseball team. Sharing location is impulsive, like text messaging and it needs to be instant, simple and clean.

Demo: Noam Bardin - Waze
Waze drivers are building the first dynamic driving map reflecting the roads right now. Driving with waze mobile client lets users passively and actively share real time data and receive the optimal route to their destination. This level of dynamic information can only be achieved by drivers participating and sharing real driving data. Waze is all over Israel and will be coming to the US (currently Android only).

David Troy - Election 2008: Mapping Voter Experiences with Twitter Vote Report
With irregularities in the election process widely reported in 2000 and 2004, the 2008 election represented one of the first opportunities to use technologies like Twitter, SMS, and cell phones to document and map the election process. Twitter Vote Report was the result of work by activists and technologists, and created a permanent document of the 2008 election.

Sam Hiatt - Implementing Web Services for NASA's Terrestrial Observation and Prediction System
The ecological monitoring and forecasting lab at NASA Ames Research Center produces daily global estimates of parameters related to ecosystem condition. Implementing web services has increased accessibility and greatly improved the usefulness of our data products. We present the TOPS data gateway and show how it is being used by the US National Parks Service to assist resource management.

David Felcan - A Crime Early Warning System: Using Spatial Statistics to Detect Changing Geographic Patterns in Crime
Large quantities of spatial data can be as much a burden as a boon without the tools to properly tease out important details. For police, HunchLab enables early detection of changes in crime patterns, pulls information automatically out of millions of incident records, and provides the means of detecting and stopping crime spikes earlier than they would be found through more conventional means.

Adam DuVander - How Open Should Mapping APIs Be?
Google Maps is innovative, but also proprietary. Yahoo, Microsoft, and Mapquest also have equally closed platforms, while the open source JavaScript library Mapstraction ties them together with a single interface. This panel will discuss whether there should be a standard for interoperable mapping APIs, or whether there's more benefit and innovation to remaining proprietary.

Michelle Bowman - Here There Be Lions: The Cartography of the Future
A new breed of maps is emerging that are revealing breakthroughs in our understanding of biology, neuroscience, ecology and the physical world. We’re now able to map not just physical geographies, but genomes, neural pathways, emotions, social networks - even the global movement of ideas. These new maps tell powerful stories about the changes that will shape society over the next twenty years.

Second Set (Starts 8:15)

Demo: Tom Link - Product Launch: SpatialKey
SpatialKey is a next generation Information Visualization, Analysis and Reporting System. It is designed to help organizations quickly assess location based information critical to their organizational goals, decision making processes and reporting requirements.

Demo: Ahmed Lacevic & He Huang - Demographic Data Mining Using Social Explorer
We present a very powerful new tool for mining current and historical demographic data online. We will show a quick and easy way to find the data, visualize change over time using beautiful thematic maps, create slide-shows with a click of a button, exploring everything from income to rent affordability to slavery in 1790.

Peter Batty - Social Networking Based on Future Location
This presentation talks about the challenges in building a fine-grained model of a person's future location, and about the range of powerful applications that can be built off such a model. Many applications focus on the current location of a person and their friends - future location is harder to handle but arguably more useful.

Ariel Waldman - Space Hacks
From creating remote-sensing cubesats to analyzing aerogel: how the public is hacking into space exploration.

Tim Waters - MapWarper, An Open Source Online Map Rectifier
Utilising open source tools, a website is presented enabling a user to upload an image and rectify it. Maps can be rectified by the crowd. Rectified maps can used as WMS or packaged and downloaded as tiles. Metadata regarding provenance and licensing is captured. All maps are searchable, resulting in a library of user submitted maps. The application is free and open source.

Ian White - Got Smarts
The coming wave of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) has been underway in the world of public infrastructure for over 10 years. Few are aware of the vast implications--fuel efficiency gains, lessened congestion, on-time trains, decreased accident rates/fatalities, the list goes on...But few outside the public sector are aware of what this means and how it will affect the morning commute.

Martin Flynn - OpenGTS - Open Source GPS Tracking System
OpenGTS (Open Source GPS Tracking System) was first made available in January of 2007 and is now in use in at least 33 different countries around the world for tracking vehicles, trucks, delivery vans, ships, people, phones, etc. This session will be an overview of the features and capabilities of the OpenGTS System available on SourceForge.

Eric Gundersen - Washington, DC's Government Push for Open Data and Map Mashups
This session will provide an overview of the Washington, D.C. government's recent decision to open up many of its public data streams for easy public use and the contest they sponsored to highlight the usefulness of this data.

Where Week 2009

Where Week, five days when geohackers across the world descend on Silicon Valley, is coming up. WhereCamp, the unconference put on by Where 2.0 attendees has been scheduled. This year it will happen at SocialText in Palo Alto on Friday May 22nd and Saturday May 23rd 2009. There will be unconference sessions during the day and a hackfest in the evening. Here's how the organizers describe it:

WhereCamp2009 is the unconference for hackers, mappers, thinkers, artists and anybody who wants to know their place. Hot on the heels of Where 2.0 we bring together up to 300 enthusiasts for two days of in depth discussion and hacking. Last year we did this at Google - thanks Google! And the year before at Yahoo - thanks Yahoo! This year we're doing it at SocialText in Palo Alto on Friday May 22nd and Saturday May 23rd 2009.

We are self-organized in true bar-camp style. Bring your projects, work and ideas to get feedback from a group of the worlds most passionate social cartographers. Topics are whatever you want them to be. Over the last two years we've seen presentations ranging from emergency crisis response such as the work Ushahidi is doing, to local food such as Serve Your Country Food to psycho-geography to visualization, to mobile mapping to re-factoring urban landscapes.

The expectation is simply that you participate. It's your event and we'll all get out of it what you put into it.

It's free to attend, but you can reserve a spot early (and help fund Wherecamp) by buying a ticket. I'll be there with a purchased pass in hand.

The three days right before Where Camp is Where 2.0. The two events work really well together. There's always a buzz happening after the conference and WhereCamp provides us the opportunity to dissect the news and tech. Radar readers can get a 20% discount if they register with whr09rdr.

Jack Dangermond Interview 2 of 3: Sharing Government GIS Data

Jack Dangermond is the founder and CEO of ESRI. ESRI's software is used by every level of government around the world. You can see ESRI's influence in online mapping tools from Microsoft, Google, Yahoo! and FortiusOne. I had the opportunity to interview him over the phone on April 20, 2009. In this portion of the interview we discuss the history of GIS and online mapping.

Jack will be speaking at Where 2.0 on May 20th in San Jose. You can use whr09rdr for 20% off at registration.

Brady Forrest: Thank you. I want to look back in history a bit. Last summer you made an announcement at Where 2.0 with John Hankey that would enable ESRI customers to publish to the web more easily. I was wondering what type of uptake you'd seen in that.

Jack Dangermond: We've had a lot of people that are putting their datasets out in the form of KML and loading it up onto Google Earth. I would've guessed that more would've happened than actually happened, but technologically now there's no limit to doing it. And I don't know why it hasn't been as popular as we would've wanted. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Brady Forrest: Fear of making data more available, either from a keeping my job standpoint or for a fear about terrorism. And just poor awareness of doing it. Why they would do it. What would be the positive benefits for them? As Ian White has pointed out before, people are paid to maintain that data. And if it doesn't go through them personally and it's just off the web, they're not as important as they were before or they don't perceive themselves to be as important.

Jack Dangermond: I actually haven't seen any of that. From the very earliest days, GIS was all about sharing data. And so USGS shared their topographic basemaps. And they became the basis for state and local government GIS's. And the ability to share planning data within engineering departments within agencies certainly wasn't restricted. In the early days, we're talking about 1995, '96, '97, we came out with a product called ArcIMS which was one of the first commercial versions of web mapping. And we sold over 50,000 copies of that server. So people were serving up parcel data, serving up land use maps, serving up demographic maps all over the web. And that's a pretty remarkable result of that. So contrary to that notion that GIS people don't share their data -- in fact, I'm absolutely certain that that's not the case.

Okay. There are a couple of agencies here and there that have been restrictive about sharing their property data. And the reason why they've done that is for commercial reasons and almost Machiavellian reasons like they get revenue for selling their property data and, therefore, they don’t want to make it available openly.

And there's even been some court cases on that in California. And that's sort of slowly working its way out. Today, I think there's only two counties left in the state of California, and it's probably been replicated across the country where people don't openly share their data on any kind of request. The three big reasons --

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Where 2.0 Preview - Building the SENSEable City

Much of the information we have about how cities work (or don't) comes through direct, intentional observation and study--but could we learn as much or more by mining the data that citizens generate in their day-to-day lives, through cell phone traffic and internet usage? That's one of the questions that Andrea Vaccari, a research associate at the MIT SENSEable City Lab, is trying to answer. Andrea will be speaking on the research that the SENSEable City Project is doing at the O'Reilly Where 2.0 Conference in May.

James Turner: So why don't you start a little bit by talking about what the charter of the SENSEable City Lab is?

Andrea Vaccari: Sure. The SENSEable City Lab is a recent initiative; a new initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology which focuses on studying how digital technologies are evolutionizing the way we live in cities. And, therefore, how we can leverage these technologies; how we can make use of it through understanding how cities are using it; how we can design better cities. And then we can create cities that are more sustainable, more livable and automatically more efficient.

JT: A lot of data that governments gather about cities -- the example I think of is the little things they put across the roads to find out traffic going over a road, but that's almost like just a point source data. Can you compare that to the kind of data that you're able to extract through the records you can get access to?

AV: Sure. The problem with past data in all aspects of the urban planning and social studies is that the data is usually punctual, so it refers to very specific points in space and also in time. And that's because the methods that were used to gather this information were very expensive. They required either to deploy infrastructures or to employ people to count manually cars, people, vehicles. And, therefore, it was impossible to have a real-time flow of information. What we are trying to do is to leverage the pervasive systems that enhance our cities today. And I'm referring to telecommunication networks, wireless networks, transportation systems or any other sort of digital system that interacts on a daily basis -- on a real-time basis -- with the citizens. What happens is that with these systems, interactions between the user and the system creates logs of their activity. And these logs can be used to understand the urban dynamics, to understand how people move in living cities and how cities themselves evolve in time.

JT: Now, you showed me some of the examples of the datasets that you've been playing with, and it seems like largely it's cell phone data and wifi data and then secondarily, things that are more voluntary like Flickr uploads.

AV: Yes.

JT: Wifi data you can pretty much get to a hotspot. And as Google has demonstrated with cell phone data, you can get fairly good positioning. But what kind of resolution do you get out of say cell phone data?

AV: Sure. The resolutions that we get for the cell phone is aggregated at the antenna level. So we don't get information about the individuals because we strongly respect privacy. And what we basically know is how many calls, how many text messages, how much traffic is served by each antenna in a city. And, of course, we know the position of the antenna and we can estimate the coverage of these antennas. So we can fairly understand what are the dynamics going on in the area of coverage. But, again, we don't get information about individuals.

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Where 2.0 Preview - Tyler Bell on Yahoo's Open Location Project

Location can be a vague concept to pin down. To a surveyor, location means latitude and longitude accurate to a few millimeters, while to a cab driver, a street address would be much more useful. If you're German, I can tell you that I live in the United States. To a Californian, I live in New Hampshire. And to someone from Manchester, I live in Derry. Unfortunately, the way that location is currently stored and presented online is both non-uniform and frequently at a level of precision inappropriate for the end-user. That's part of what Open Location is trying to fix. Tyler Bell, who took his doctorate from Oxford to Yahoo, is currently the product lead for the Yahoo Geo Technology Group. At O'Reilly's Where 2.0 Conference, he'll be discussing Open Location.

James Turner: So first off, can you describe what the Geo Technologies Group does?

Tyler Bell: The Geo Technologies Group at Yahoo oversees all technologies that relate to geography and geographic information. So it's largely self-evident. But this is what I mean by that: it's really we own and oversee the maps and mapping technologies. So the visualizations and placements of geographically informed data. We also own user location technologies. So here, we're dealing with different methods of detecting user location, managing user location, and ensuring that users receive geo-relevant results whenever they log onto Yahoo or use a Yahoo service. And then lastly, we have something which is slightly more esoteric. It's called the Geoinformatics Group. And that's the organization which uses geography to inform data. And we do this without ever showing a map. So it's really how we add value and power to information wholly based upon where things are and where our users are.

JT: That's like returning relevant search information to what you know about the user's location.

TB: That's correct. That's the end product of search groups consuming the geo technologies services on the back-end. But what we also need to do is actually organize the geographic information. So instead of searches, they're the specialists at Yahoo about matching user intent to the results that are returned; it's our job on the Geoinformatics Group, for example, to say that when a user queries against Springfield or they're searching for Springfield, which of the countless Springfields in the United States, in the world do you mean? So we need to be able to recognize that this is a place. We need to identify all of the places of a particular place name. And then we need to be able to do a so-called geo-geo disambiguation to ensure that when you mean Springfield, when you mean Campbell, when you give us a city name, which is otherwise nonspecific, we are very likely to return the most direct and accurate results.

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Becoming Location Aware: Where 2.0 Early Registration Ending 4/13

Despite the downturn the geolocation space is still active. This year's Where 2.0 conference will be highlighting the companies, technologies and people that make the industry go. Where 2.0 is happening in San Jose at the Fairmount Hotel from 5/19-21(the first day is workshops; the next two are all mainstage talks). Early registration ends this Tuesday, 4/13. You can get an extra 25% off for being a Radar reader with this code: whr09rdr.

The schedule for the show is almost full. The hottest topic this year is location-aware apps, services and data. It's been almost a full-year since the iPhone enabled third-party apps to use our location; we're going to hear from startups, researchers and the platform providers.

Two of our keynoters will dive into what can and should be done with location data. MIT Professor Sandy Pentland, the fellow responsible for coining the term Reality Mining and author of Honest Signals, will discuss his research on mining company communication patterns and his location data ownership initiatives. Microsoft Researcher Eric Horvitz has been gathering location data from volunteers for over 5 years. Using this data he has created virtual assistants, life stream recorders and other forward looking applications for our historical location data.

Many of the location-aware startups are operating in the mobile space. Mobile social networks are facing an increasingly crowded market -- one that was just entered by Google's Latitude and still waiting entries from both Facebook and Nokia. We'll hear from the founders of Foursquare and Brightkite as well as Pelago (Radar post) how they are going to grow in this market.

Your location data is going to become increasingly valuable. Startup Sense Networks will discuss their business of of extracting insights from large amounts of location data. I am sure Nokia's Michael Halbherr will touch on the wealth of data they have from acquisitions like NAVTEQ and Plazes and how they will be supplemented through Nokia's devices. Perry Evans will discuss the nascent ad market for location-based services.

Even though the iPhone has made finding a user's popular that doesn't mean it's become easy or even possible on other devices. There will be two developer workshops dedicated to the topic -- one for finding users on the web and another for native mobile applications.

The day after Where 2.0 ends there will be the third edition of WhereCamp where the conversation will continue.

Where 2.0 Preview - Pelago's Jeff Holden on Creating Stories Out of Your Life

Tools like Twitter and Facebook have let people share in near real-time what they are doing. Now with a new generation of location-aware mobile devices, you can tell your friends or the entire world where you're doing it. Jeff Holden's company, Pelago, is one of many trying to come up with a killer application that blends location, images, text, and social networking to create a new kind of group awareness. Before starting Pelago, Jeff had a long career as the Senior Vice President of Consumer Websites for Amazon and before that, the Director of Supply Chain Optimization Systems. He'll be speaking at O'Reilly's Where 2.0 Conference on "Footstreams: Clickstreams for the Physical World."

James Turner: Pelago's first product is Whrrl. Can you start by describing what Whrrl is and what the experience to date has been?

Jeff Holden: Yeah. Sure. So Whrrl actually, there's a little complexity there because we just launched Whrrl V. 2.0, which is the prize we're focused on. And Whrrl V. 2.0 is a real-time storytelling product for people's daily lives.

JT: When you say storytelling, I've seen a lot of people talk about storytelling with these new social network things. What concretely does that mean to you?

JH: The most important aspect of what we mean by that is the organization of the content as the story unit. So the unit of content inside Whrrl is the story. And a story for us is something that has a beginning and an end. It can have multiple people involved in the story who can all share and contribute to a single story together. It has a location associated with it. And then people basically inject into those containers, those story containers, photos and text. As they're doing that, that's actually being shared out to any number of friends that they choose. And those friends can then jump in and actually comment on the story which then becomes part of the story as well. And so that's what we mean by it is we're focused on this -- I think some people use that term generically. We're using it very specifically to refer to the core unit of content in Whrrl.

JT: From a practical standpoint, apart from people who are chronic Twitterers and would just use it every moment of their life, what would you see a typical story being?

JH: What we're seeing right now is a lot of the families are using the product to share stories. And, in fact, just this morning Alison Sweeney, she's the host of the Biggest Loser and she was on Days of Our Lives for years. She's a really famous soap opera actress. She just started using Whrrl today. And she visited the set of Days of Our Lives with her family. And so it's actually entitled, "Family Visits Days." And we feature that story because it's such a cool -- and she did it publically. And it's a really cute story about her kids and the visit with the cast of Days of Our Lives. So we're seeing a lot of that kind of thing. We're seeing people at a more general level are viewing kind of very, very funny things like Melissa Pierce, who's a really very successful video blogger and just general blogger; she's done a number of very, very funny stories. She did one called "Lonely Bear" about this gummy bear lost in the world. And through a sequence of photos and text updates, she told the story of Lonely Bear and kind of left it dangling and was going to have a follow-up segment. And is actually going to be collaborating with people to build the next story.

So people are using it in different ways. And it's really kind of unleashing a lot of creativity.

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DIY City Releases DIY Traffic

DIY City is a new tech movement aimed at empowering geeks to remake their cities. The site has forums where people can propose projects and then discuss the potential solutions. Since its launch in late 2008 many local chapters have sprung up (start one for you city!).

Today DIY City is launching its first project, DIY Traffic. It uses Twitter to send and receive traffic updates from subscribers. So far there are three cities that have gone live. You can check out San Francisco, Chicago, and Portland to see the app in action or to participate.

The app is very simple but potentially quite useful, especially in a city that doesn't have traffic maps or if you travel on side streets. DIY Traffic will accept traffic updates, let you send out an alert and let you query for the conditions on a specific street. To set up the service for your own city just grab a twitter account, a server and follow the instructions.

I find it impressive that DIY City was able to go from a challenge issued in October and to a released app in under five months. Given that the group has just formed and doesn't have a set structure it says a lot for the level of interest techies have in doing civic work.

John Geraci will be speaking at Where 2.0 about DIY City and how geeks may be their city's best hope.

GeoData Explorations: Open Street Map's Growth

Open Street Map (OSM), the open data mapping project, has grown a lot over the past year. It now has almost 80,000 users and 800 million data points.

OSM's data is still freely available, but commercial services around it have sprung up. Cloudmade is a startup that recently moved from the UK to San Francisco to be closer to investors and try to build up their US data. GeoFabrik is a German startup with similar plans (just focused on Germany). Flickr has been making use of it lately to supplement Yahoo's Mapping data (specifically Black Rock City, Beijing, Kabul and Baghdad).

The above image is Planet - A Year Of Edits On OpenStreetMap. It was generated on November 23rd, 2008 by Peter Ito. Most of the growth occurred in Europe (where the project originated) and the United States (where the founder has moved). The US community has really picked up the pace and has started replacing the US government's free TIGER data set. You can see images of the data edits in the US for October and November and an animation of the world's edits.

This cartogram shows the distribution of POIs (Points of Interest) in the OSM data set. The UK and Germany have a disproportionate amount of data compared to their land mass (but obviously not compared to their OSM users). This image was released on 11/7 on the Cloudmade blog.

If you're not familiar with cartograms go explore Worldmapper, it's an amazing site filled with them. Or make your own with the same software.

The above graph shows the number of registered (and presumably contributing) OSM users and the number of uploaded track points. The user growth is similar to the early Wikipedia years, but it's uncertain whether OSM will be able to match Wikipedia's amazing growth. Uploading GPS tracks or editing geo data is a higher user barrier than editing an article. The user's have to register and use complicated tools (though Potlatch, the online editor, attempts to even the playing field).

If you want to see the people behind the map all of their names are available in this short animation. You can see other OSM stats in their wiki.

This is the latest GeoData Explorations post, also see GeoData Explorations: Google's Ever-Expanding Geo Investment. If you have geodata to share (for a future post) let me know in the comments.

Where 2.0 2009 CFP Is Open

The fifth Where 2.0 Call For Participation is now open. This year we're going to focus on location-ware technologies and their implications. The iPhone and Android have paved the way for a new breed of app and Where 2.0 will be focused on it.
If you want to join us on stage submit your talk by December 2, 2008.

Where 2.0 will be held in San Jose, CA from May 19-21, 2009. You can watch all of Where 2.0 2008 online -- for free.

Some of the topics on the radar for Where 2.0 are:

Location-Aware: We will be exploring the implications of our new location-enabled lives, particularly around mobile phones and transponders. What feature is worth sharing your location?

Reality Mining: With the increase in location data come more macro views of our lives. If you want to know where to go in San Francisco, for example, City Sense will show you which parts of the city are hopping. What does this type of information mean for consumers and the enterprise?

Augmented Reality: The location-enabled phone will become a viewfinder for our world. Your phone will be able to tell you what you are looking at. It will also let you leave notes for the next person. What are other cool projects in the works?

Immersive and 3D Imagery: There's an imagery battle happening and consumers are winning. Our world is being documented to an unprecedented degree. While two device manufacturers acquired the mapping data companies, the internet giants have invested in cameras, planes, and satellites. Where will this take the location industry?

Mapping Tables: It's difficult to collaborate in person with an online slippy map; a paper spread out on a table or tacked to a wall is still better. Digital mapping tables are attempting to beat back paper once and for all. By providing everyone the same view and editing capabilities plus the ability to turn on and off layers, will they be able to do it?

Government 2.0: Governments are treasure troves of data. Increasingly they are releasing it online for free. ESRI's release of ArcGIS has also aided the battle by providing municipalities with this ability. This data is aiding both the citizen and Government agencies. How is this critical information being put to use?

Crowdsourcing: Pioneered by OSM, the rest of the mapping industry is catching up. Let's examine where they are taking it.

Disease Awareness: Our increasingly connected world allows diseases to spread in record time. These same networks alert us to outbreaks. We're going to examine new geocentric approaches to epidemiology.

Cartography: Each map has a distinctive look and feel. What are the trends in design and user experience?

Workshops
Back by popular demand, Where 2.0 will have a full day of workshops where participants can dig deep into a range of issues and leave the conference armed with new tools and skills. Workshops are one hour and fifteen minutes in length and will be held on Tuesday, May 19. Topics we'd like to explore include, but are not exclusive to:

Geo Support in Web Application Frameworks: As people design their own mapping applications, there has been a need for built-in geo support. We're looking for workshops that teach about Mapstraction, Modest Maps, Open Layers, GeoDjango, GeoRuby, MapCruncher, and other tools.

Mapping APIs: The location space would not have gotten as far as it has today without all of the innovation in the mapping API space. How can you test the limits of these free resources?

GeoTargeting: Knowing users' locations has never been more important. Identifying it accurately can be difficult and expensive. What are the best methods?

Privacy Implications: As you are collecting user data, keeping track of your users, or collecting geodata, are you aware of the relevant laws? What would you teach others?

GeoBrowsers: Google Earth and NASA WorldWind are both amazing geobrowsers. How can you get the most out of them?

Data Management: Geo applications work with massive amounts of data. What are the tools, tips, and tricks that can be used to manage it?

Protocols and Formats: GeoRSS, GML, KML, EXIF, Microformats, Geo OpenSearch. Which formats are on the way in and which ones are on the way out?

These are just some of the technologies and transformations we've noticed and represent just the starting point for the program. While we'd like you to tap into the theme as your inspiration in writing your proposal, feel free to wander. What are you working on that will change the world, or at least the world you're in? What project is bringing you pleasure, or teasing your brain? Surprise and delight us; shake us out of our assumptions. We're angling for shorter talks with longer breaks so you'll have more time for one-on-one interactions.

Over 300 iPhone Apps Use Location Look-Ups

According to Skyhook Wireless over 300 iPhone apps are location-aware as of October 3rd. According to Mobclix there are over 4,000 apps in circulation. If these numbers are correct this puts the location-aware percentage at under 10% -- far, far less than I would have suspected based on my own experience. There were 5.5 location-aware apps released per day in September. The location-aware apps 61% are paid (less than the 76% found in iPhone apps as a whole according to Mobclix).

The Social Networking, Local Search and Navigation Categories represent over 50% of the apps. Social Networking includes Twitter clients and friend finders like Whrrl and Pelago. Once Apple adds background location updating (I hope -- Radar post) I expect the Sports category to bloom with pedometers, life-trackers and faux-GPSs.

Skyhook knows this because all of those apps use their service to determine a location. They've been tracking the apps as they've come out. Skyhook cannot publicly reveal the number of look-ups from location apps, but it's a lot. Right now the look-ups are evenly split between using the iPhone's GPS, WiFI (Skyhook's WPS), and Hybrid (Skyhook's XPS product can use Wifi, celltowers and GPS for a faster, more accurate lookup).

Skyhook has been making this data available for a while. You can find more on their site. All slides courtesy of Skyhook and posted with permission (regardless of what the Confidential footer may say).

I'll be discussing location-aware apps with Skyhook Wireless CEO TEd Morgan (along with Greg Skibiski (Sense Networks), April Allderdice (MicroEnergy Credits), and Rich Miner (Google) ) at the Web 2.0 Summit. If you have any questions for them let me know in the comments.

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DisasterTech from Where2.0

I was honored to speak with Mikel Maron at Where2.0 about innovation in Disaster Technology, a topic that is extremely important to me. Here is the video:

This talk covers the ongoing efforts of: World Shelters, the UN Joint Logistics Centre, Humanitarian.info, InSTEDD, and Humanlink.

You can read about the development of SMS GeoChat, the Sahana effort for Burma/Myanmar (Radar post), and the Mesh4x KML sync engine on Eduardo Jezierski's blog and on Jon Thompson's Aid Worker Daily.

Where 2.0: Satellites and The Public Interest

Lisa Parks (Professor of Media Studies at U.C. Santa Barbara) has devoted years studying the societal and cultural implications of satellite technology. She very briefly described her research into the use of satellite technology during the War in Bosnia (1992-1995), Rwanda (1996), and more recently the use of satellite images to justify the invasion of Iraq.

In terms of conveying current events, she noted that the USHMM's use of Google Earth to educate the public about the crisis in Darfur, signaled a change in the role of satellite images. The satellite images functioned like wall paper, with the detailed images and zoom-in capabilities of Google Earth overriding those images.

She closed by appealing to the technologists and web developers in the audience. Satellites are everywhere and impact a lot of what we do, yet we know very little about them. When embedding satellite images in web applications, developers should consider exposing important satellite meta-data to users: source of the images, sensing technique used, orbital address and owner of the satellite, etc. She also reiterated the need for a map displaying the thousands of satellites orbiting the earth.

It is difficult to do justice to her moving presentation in a short blog post. For more detail, check out her book on this important topic. Kudos to Brady and the rest of the program committee for having Lisa speak at Where 2.0.

Where 2.0: Eye-Fi and Dash Navigation Apps

Eye-Fi: If you have a digital camera with a SD card slot, Eye-Fi has a plug-in that automatically geotags (location stamping) pictures taken with your camera. Using technology from Skyhook Wireless, locations are identified by triangulating distances between Wi-Fi hotspots. The Wi-Fi aware card also automatically uploads your photos to your PC and to the web. Eye-Fi integrates with the Wi-Fi networkWayport which means users can automatically upload their photos from 10,000 hotspots in the U.S.

Dash Navigation API: Brady previously blogged about both the Dash device and API. This morning they highlighted new third-party applications from Coldwell Banker (real estate app for home buyers), Funambol (calendar app that interfaces seamlessly with Outlook and web-based calendars), BakTrax Radio (remembers last 3 songs played on car's AM/FM radio) and Trapster (alerts drivers of the presence of live speed traps and red light sensors). The audience especially loved Trapster!

Where 2.0: EveryScape Crowdsources Streetview

EveryScape currently provides streetviews for only a few cities, but with their ambitious Ambassadors program, aims to rapidly expand using paid volunteers. [See Brady's previous post for details on EveryScape's technology.] Actually, EveryScape goes beyond streetviews and exposes interior views of businesses willing to pay for the service.

With the Ambassadors program, EveryScape will compensate teams (driver, photographer/navigator) willing to help them expand to cities all over the world. The task entails flying to their U.S. offices to get trained on how to mount and work the still cameras used to create streetviews, and driving streets of assigned cities over several weeks. Brady previously posted on how EveryScape technology was used to capture streetviews of portions of Beijing. It will be interesting to see if the Ambassadors program leads to similar surprising examples of geodata being liberated.

The list of areas/cities they are targeting is extensive. By relying on affordable, commercially available still cameras, EveryScape can cost-effectively equip and train the teams that qualify for the program. Ambassadors are compensated for each mile they capture and have rights to capture the local business data in those same areas.

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.