This year’s ESRIUC is shaping up to be very exciting indeed… all one needs to do is hit the event homepage and some first impression will no doubt be… Wow! Case in point, here’s just a few reasons/things that will make this UC one to remember:

10!
ArcGIS 10, ArcPad 10 and other new portfolio releases have just been rolled out, and this is huge, no, an un-precedented release as far as re-engineering of the technology goes. I have no doubt I could easily spend 3 full days at the conference learning and hearing about release 10

The Cloud
if you don’t think Geo technologies are migrating to the cloud then you better think again! With major rollouts of ArcGIS.com, ArcGIS online, and ArcGIS Server, the launch of many cloud-based GIS apps and services, and even supporting  technologies/services being rolled out by Amazon, Google, Skygone, WeoGeo, Latitude Geographics, and others, the Cloud is surely going to be a hot, no, a huge topic of conversation at this user conference. Be sure to search “cloud” in the agenda and add a couple of relevant sessions to your planner.

Mobile
Related to cloud technologies, the pervasiveness of mobile computing and mobile accessible web services is here. Just in time for the conference, Esri has released the ArcGIS mobile iPhone client. So what you might think.. well, once you have a chance to author and save your data and projects and then access them via the iPhone you may soon change your mind. Users can connect their Global Esri account to the app and then search, save, and view map layers anytime and anyplace. A new release of ArcPad at R10 will also be exciting to see and hear about as well.

Mobile Devices
Building on the previous topic, most if not all of the major mobile hardware vendors will be introducing and showing off new devices and there’s some amazing stuff to see. A few of the names that you have to check out on the exhibition hall floor include Javad GNSS, Ashtech, Trimble, Juniper Systems, Geospatial experts, Wacom, and Blackberry users will want to have a visit with TDC group at the Blackberry booth to have a look at Freeance Mobile 5.0 – think Map digitizing for ArcGIS 10  and send the data back to ESRI’s geodatabase in ArcGIS Server 10. WOW!

Jack
There’s no doubt  that any time you get a chance to sit down and listen to Jack Dangermond share his vision that its gonna be good. Monday morning at the plenary session we get to listen to Jack for a couple of hours. This is our chance to hear directly from the founder, President, and CEO as he looks back at the past year, tells us in detail all about the development of release 10, and shares with us his vision for the future of GIS and geospatial technologies. This year I expect we’ll hear lots about Open government, Open spaces, the web, the cloud, mobile, the environment, and sharing. If you can only spend one day at the conference due to time restrictions then Monday is the day to be there.

Some random yet useful UC related stuff!

• The ESRIuc facebook Page
• Open discussion about the Gulf Oil Spill at the EsriUC
• ArcGIS for Developers (an intro)
• WhereCampSoCal - stick around San Diego for the week-end and take in this un-conference
• Unofficial LinkedIn Group
• ESRIUC on foursquare
• GISuser ESRIUC Coverage