Sebastopol, CA-Geospatial data at Google grew 300 percent in the past
year, Google Earth & Maps director John Hanke said in his keynote address
to more than 900 location pioneers at the O'Reilly Where 2.0 Conference
May 12-14 this year in Burlingame, CA.

Imagine what lies ahead.

Where 2.0 showcased geospatial's potential, presenting the leading trends
and the visionaries who will develop them, fund them, and build successful
businesses around them. 

Mapping and location data are driving some of the most intriguing new web
applications. While geohacker alpha geeks are building wickedly clever
mashups, established companies are integrating location data into all
manner of workaday applications. The location industry is growing into the
Web 2.0 era, and Where 2.0 tracked its most significant progress and
potential.

At the fourth annual Where 2.0 conference, participants chose among a full
day of tutorials followed by two days of plenary sessions featuring
presentations by the leaders in the field -- the hackers, designers,
entrepreneurs and mapmakers who are changing the way we find our way in
the world.

After the presentations, these industry leaders stayed around to debate
and discuss the issues, the challenges and the potential of this
fast-growing field. Conference chair Brady Forrest and his committee
arranged for conference-goers to hear from startups as well as industry
giants, through lightning talks, panel discussions, demonstrations, Q&A
time, and more.

"This year's Where 2.0 is centered on methods to bring metadata from
disparate databases around the country and the globe to a map-based
application near you," Don Jewell, Military & Government Editor of GPS
World, blogged from the conference. "You only need to click on the map, or
street or block or business or you could just enter GPS coordinates and
more data than you can imagine will be at your fingertips."

Among the nearly 60 presentations at the 2008 Where 2.0 were:

-Chris Anderson (Wired Magazine): "DIY Drones: An Open Source Hardware and
Software Approach to Making 'Minimum UAVs'"

-Chris Butler (Dash Navigation): "Your Car Gets an API"

-Dan Catt (Yahoo!, Inc.): "Going Places on Flickr: The Significance of
Geographical Information in Photos"

-Tom Churchill (Earthscape): "Augmented Reality Lets the DPD Know Where
You Are"

-Sean Gorman (FortiusOne): "From Data Chaos to Actionable Intelligence:
How the Convergence of the GeoWeb and Semantic Web Is Revolutionizing the
Way We Process Information"

-Adrian Holovaty (Everyblock): "A News Feed for Your Block"

-Jef Holove (Eye-Fi, Inc.): "Your Memories: Here, There, Everywhere"

-Dev Khare (Venrock): "Venture Capital: What's Hot and What's Not on the
Geoweb"

-Robert Kirkpatrick, Eduardo Jezierski (InSTEDD): "InSTEDD: Humanitarian
Collaboration Tales"

-Mok Oh (EveryScape, Inc.): "What About the Inside?"

-Lisa Parks (University of California-Santa Barbara): "Earth-Browsing:
Satellite Images, Global Events and Visual Literacy"

-Jesse Robbins (O'Reilly Radar) and Mikel Maron (Mapufacture): "Disaster
Tech: What Is Working and What Is Coming"

-Greg Sadetsky (Poly9 Group, Inc.): "Katamari Damacy"

-Chris Spurgeon (The Walt Disney Company): "History's Best Geo-hacks (Part
Deux)"

-Aimee Stewart (University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute): "Lifemapper
2.0: Using and Creating Geospatial Data and Open Source Tools for the
Biological Community"

Participants in the conference examined products from conference sponsors
and held in-depth discussions with their experts. Among the sponsors were
Autodesk, Google, DigitalGlobe, Earthscape, EveryScape.com, ESRI,
LightPole, MapJack, MapQuest, MetaCarta, Microsoft Virtual Earth, Nokia,
Poly9, Skyhook Wireless, TeleAtlas, Ulocate, Yahoo! Inc., and Zvents.

Several participants chose to announce major developments at the
conference:

-Google announced it is now integrating GIS geographic data in web-based
content that has latitude and longitude coordinates.

-Hanke also revealed that Google is opening its geoindex to all
developers. In an upcoming release this data will be available via
Google's search APIs.

-Sean Gorman, founder of FortiusOne, announced a new application for
GeoCommons called Finder! whose mission is to allow users to "Upload,
Organize, and Share your GeoData."

-Lior Ron, product manager of Google Maps, announced a plan to release a
Google News layer for both Google Earth and Google Maps. This will include
geospatial information for a wide range of news sources.
 
-Pushpin, a map-making service that lets users control how a map looks and
what data it displays, announced it is releasing a free version of the
API.

-LightPole, Inc. announced that it has co-developed with Six Apart
Services a plug-in that lets Movable Type bloggers geo-tag their entries,
add and manage related points of interest and publish feeds that can be
used to create LightPole channels.

-Mobile phone giant Nokia Corp. unveiled Maps on Ovi. People will be able
to mark up and save maps on Nokia's Ovi.com site, and the maps will be
uploaded automatically to a cell phone.

-Seero, which offers geospatially-aware video content in either Google
Maps or Google Earth, debuted a new service that lets users embed a video
with the geospatial context on web sites.

-Cell Bridge Communications Corp. and Poly9 Group Inc. launched GeoAlert
2.0, an advanced emergency broadcasting and mapping technology that lets
users monitor real-time emergencies and get instant alerts, including the
exact geographical coordinates of any emergency situation.

Mark your calendars:  The next O'Reilly Where 2.0 Conference will be May
19-21, 2009, in San Jose, CA. 

For complete information on the O'Reilly Where 2.0 Conference, visit:
http://conferences.oreilly.com/where

For speaker presentation files, go to:
http://en.oreilly.com/where2008/public/schedule/proceedings

For articles, blogs, photos, video, and other coverage of the event, go
to:
http://en.oreilly.com/where2008/public/content/news-coverage

For images from Where2.0 see http://www.flickr.com/photos/gisuser/sets/72157605067815981/show/