Posts tagged as "geotagged"

If It's Wednesday It Must Be Amsterdam ...

... and I'm here in the capital and largest city of the Netherlands for the first Location Business Summit with Walter Andrag and Bob Upham from Yahoo! Geo Technologies and Anil Patel and Chris Heilmann from YDN, the Yahoo! Developer Network. Another city, another hotel so this would be a good time for the obligatory through the window shot.

Through the Window #5 - Amsterdam

I'll be giving a talk on Hyperlocal or Hype (and Local)? later on this morning and will also be on a panel tomorrow morning, discussing how to try and monetize the growing geospatial web. This is the first Location Business Summit, so here's hoping it'll be geotastic.

Photo Credits: Foxgrrl and Kaptain Kobold on Flickr.

Placebook ... Facebook "Places" In The Wild

After much teasing and tantalising, one of the long rumoured Facebook location features is out in the wild in the form of place community pages. They vary in scale from a hamlet in Spain ...

... through to New York City.

It's clever though not particularly sophisticated at this stage; a simple exposure of Wikia's underlying geo metadata and it probably took very little effort to implement. Facebook appear to treat places as people, hence the exhortation to connect with the place.

Fighting GeoBabel on Two Fronts

The well known, highly opinionated and occasionally error prone Tech Crunch seems to think there's a location war going on.

A search for the keywords location and war on the site yields strident post titles including Just In Time For The Location Wars, Twitter Turns on Geolocation On Its Website, Location Isn't A War Between Two Sides, It's A Gold Rush For Everyone, What Did The Location War Look Like At SXSW? Like This and Google Escalates The Location War With Google Places.

And Tech Crunch are right, there is a location war going on, but it's not the war that Michael Arrington and crew are thinking of; this war is much more insidious. It's the war against GeoBabel and it's being fought right now on two fronts.

The 3 W's of Geo (and hyperlocal deities and a pachyderm)

Earlier this week, Jeremy Morley from the Centre for Geospatial Research at the University of Nottingham and Muki Haklay at University College London got in touch with me. The GIS Research UK Conference was in full swing, and OpenStreetMap founder Steve Coast had had to drop out of the conference due to ill health; would I think about stepping in for the closing keynote of the conference?

Hedging my bets and guessing that few, if any, of the audience had been in San Jose at Where 2.0 a couple of weeks back, I gladly accepted and reshuffled, added to and polished my Where 2.0 deck to yield Hyperlocal Deities, Pachyderms, the Letter W, the Number 3 (and some Geo).

Deliciousness: lost rivers, maps, dogs, fonts, alphabets, tees, bacon, lots of bacon, coffee & KitKats

Forgive me; it's been 5 conferences and 2 months since my last Deliciousness post and I offer this one up by way of atonement.

Where 2.0 - Hype (or Local?)

Sometimes writing a talk and putting together an accompanying slide deck is an education in itself. You set out with a point you want to make and in researching the evidence to back up your assertions you find out that the point you originally wanted to make isn't actually correct. You could give up at this point, which is not to be recommended as you're already on the conference schedule, or you could accept that your reasoning was flawed in the first place and make your talk instead centre on why you were wrong.

Thus it was with the researching and background behind my talk at Where 2.0 in San Jose on Wednesday. Originally entitled as a declaration, it soon became obvious that "Ubiquitous location, the new frontier and hyperlocal nirvana" was missing a very significant question mark.

Through The Window # 3

The view from the window has changed again. Last week I was deep in the Silicon Valley suburbia staying with good friends in Campbell, where the sunrises were gorgeous.

Through the window: Campbell sunrise

This week I'm deep in the heart of the city nicknamed The Capital of Silicon Valley, San Jose. The view from the window isn't nearly as appealing but it shows that the annual Geo industry extravaganza that is Where 2.0 is only a few days away.

Through the window: downtown San Jose