For the second consecutive year, GeoRabble crew member Maurits van der Vlugt attended O’ Reilly’s 7th Where 2.0 Conference in California. As he mentioned last year, this conference is a Geo-Geek Walhalla. This is where you meet all the big mobile and neo-geography players, and learn about the ‘next big thing’.
Every year, this event is where geo-innovators, big and small, launch there latest “cool stuff”. Highlights this year included:
- http://geoloqi.com/ If you’re now (rightly) more worried about privacy, Geoloci enables private & secure location sharing within your network, and more.
- http://www.localmind.com/ – A service that lets you find out what’s happening at a certain place, by asking people who are checked-in at that specific location.
- One that stood out was http://uscapeit.com/. Believe it or not: this app allows you to generate immersive, 3D panoramas, straight from your iPhone. In minutes. For free. For real. Try it!
At an enterprise level, the launch of Google Earth Builder (available Q3 2011) will be most disruptive to the GIS industry. Remember how for the last 10-15 odd years, the GIS community has been attempting to put geospatial data online, make it discoverable and have it displayed quickly and easily? Despite some good technology and in some cases (e.g. INSPIRE) lots of money, none of these attempts really took off (why not, is something worthy of another post, or even a book or two).
Google Earth Builder will solve that problem. It allows anyone to publish and share spatial data: points of interest, vectors and imagery. And everything is automatically indexed so it’s searchable (indeed: no ISO Metadata required!), automatically georeferenced, reprojected and (voila) displayed in Google Earth or Maps. Oh, and it sits on Google’s cloud: so no storage, scaling or performance headaches anymore.
Interesting little fact is that one of its first (beta) users is Australia’s own Ergon Energy.
Have a cool geo-app you’re passionate about? Share it with friends at GeoRabble!
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