Where Day 3 – Google Developer Day

Google Developer Day 2007
May 31 2007
San Jose Convention Center

Keynoter Jeff Huber VP Engineering presented Google’s First Worldwide conference. Live ten city worldwide broadcast to 1500 local and 5000 Googlers world wide. In 2002 Google first published APIs based on Google maps stimulated by the revolutionary Paul Rodimacher – Housing Maps.

Ads, Standards, Mashups, Open Source.
Mashups are the model to compose and create applications today. Amazon S3 for storage. AdSense for commercialization. Ajax is for rich browser experiences. places suggested are: moviemaps.google.com , coolphotoeditor.google.com, syncingservice.google.com , jogplanner.google.com , apartmentfinder.google.com
http://Picasa.com – picnik syncs up pictures.
GData APIs used ini Google apps - Apps Provisioining, Base, Calendar, Code Search, Noteok, Spreadhseets, Blogger
Spanning Sync – for Mac
Honda used cars site

* announce
Google Mashup Editor – Paul McDonald
Server/Hosting/Ajax skills/Authentication/Atom & RSS with right caching/ Test,Deploy,Distribute
Experimental product -Cal State Parks + Maps + Commercial products. Uses new tags, gmlist, gmtmap – Feed from Google Base for products.

igoogle home page gadgets – 100,000 created.
PacMan v2.4 – 6 million page views for author last week
expedia fair updater
Can put gadgets in Blogger blog.
Embed in web pages / (served by Google)

*announce
Google Mapplets – Thai Tran
Google Gadgets and Maps APIS combined.
Orbitz – IFRAME with Mini web page. Puts their results on Google Map.
What is powerful is you can create multiple apps on the same page.
WeatherBug runs Flash.
maps.google.com/preview

GoogleWEb Toolkit launched last year – one Javascript language that work across browsers. Limits of AJAX – only for being online.

*announce
Gears – Othman Laraki – Offline access for web apps.  Gears is a work in progress going out to the community.  [Picture of laptops in airline seats] Needed tool to go off network. It is a special Browser extension – Mac/Linux/Win  Firefox/IE/Safari. Uses a Javascript API.
Needs GoogleReader – consumes up to 2000 feeds – http://reader.google.com  Green gear icon at top to synchronize.

Kevin Lynch – Adobe.
Apollo installs apps on desktop – windows/mac/linux, Flex Open Source.
Live drag and drop of data. Syncing APIs with Gears. Local storage and sync of data.

Where Day 2

The day opens late, so I am reading about Microsoft’s Surface Tabletop PC in the Tribune. OK here we go.

Tim Foresman presents the  Intelligent Design of the Earth Operating System to take off on his own Al Gore-like flights of enviro-projection based on his work heading NASA’s digital earth. DEX – Digital Earth Exchange. Many good quotes from Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, Buckminister Fuller 1963 for the Earth huggers.

ESRI Bernard Szukalski talks about providing content and capabilities. Spatial tools and GIS models are now published as WMS or KML services. With ARC GIS Server, the ESRI planet dials through GIS map content. Then slices a line to compute terrain altitude profiles. Then over to Google Earth, Maps and MS Virtual Earth – all the same data, but the ESRI servers do all the application computation and return the results as plume graphics. The AdobeFlex2 API shows very dynamic data set and time set grouping over maps, also now being used MapQuest.

David Colleen of Planet 9 demos one of 70 city models, here San Fran in hi-rez streets, buildings and interiors. www.web3d.org X3D-earth open source. They own the original name Virtual Earth. Announcing the Raygun multiworld model, kind of a 1st gen Metaverse, Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash 1992.

Yahoo Maps, Jeremy Kreitler talks of geospatial data, paraphrased as data that knows what to do when it meets a map. Y!Local 3 million ratings and reviews over 2 years and using API and GeoRSS. Flickr has 20 million geotagged photos used by 28 million users. Provide Geocoder API. Y!Pipes simple mashup tool.

Steve Coast, OpenStreetMap is a free Wiki map of the world – open and editable. 7,000 users creating a map of the world. European mostly. Open tagging for street names. Corporate campus are typically unmapped.

Swivel - Viznu & Tao.
Liberate data on the Internet. Users go to Google and upload PDF data that Swivel scans and normalizes and creates graphs. Showed Swivel G with exports data in KML to Google earth.

Send to Car – Dash Navigation – Draw maps with your tires.
Mark Williamson, Eric Klein, Senior Director, Product Marketing,
Dash provides, they claim, the first connected navigation device in the US. Wifi + GPRS + GPS in motion. Uses geolocated data into the car. 230 million cars in US 7% have GPS. Portable Navigation Devices (PND) 4 million today. Realtime traffic is the killer app as Mapquest points out. The Dash box has a realtime traffic model for all major cities. When you drive, your stats are being uploaded. But a community of drivers around you will let you know if things are bad. Community-based traffic probes enhance the value of the community. We think this will enrich base map data. Dash drivers provide new data. We know in minutes that a new road has opened up. Anonmyous data about all roads you are driving on. Now for send to Car – In car search to change consumer behavior using Yahoo Local platform.Nearby / Other City / Nearby Destination. Searches for WiFi, iPOD, Gas Prices. Possible consumer ads, combining community pictures, rate them.

Where Day 1

This is the third year of Where 2.0, O’Reilly’s two day fest of 800 people pushing the edge of the location world. Here neogeography, OpenStreetMap, GeoSensor networks etc. are brought to stage by Brady Forrest the writer of Radar. Certainly this rivals the When Sacrificial Convention of 2000BC when sundials were once the revolutionary device.

Schuyler Erle, (SKYler) of MetaCarta talks while hammering big type word slides (he just shared the automapper picture above). His project is mapping Mumbai, concluding the need to build new maps from the ground up, rather than scan convert maps and loosing all the reference and nuance of the map. “Maps are a bounding box for a story.” Schulyer riffs the great lines. The beauty project is BUILDING A MAP of the WORLD. Pure ontological chaos as people try to teach the Internet robot how it should see the world.

Rich Skrenta of Co-founder of Topix shows how news companies are building out automatic geo tag systems.

The Evolution of the Geoweb, interesting title.  John Hanke, Director, Google Earth  (ex Keyhole) announces Google Street View (link unknown, example here) that have immersive street views. Pick up the man-cursor and see his photographic viers. But I am sitting next to Everyscape’s Mok Oh shaking his head – because his company uses a progressive moving map experience that transcends all this. (Somewhat like Microsoft Photosynth, but smarter.) It is becoming clear that pictures are locations.

John talks about the mainstreaming of GEO and doing two things: building the basemap and adding geotainment – all the moving stuff on top of it - mapping user annotations, images, and  sound. Later in the conference Google Earth, Microsoft Live Maps talk about how they are mapping the planet, then structures, then skins. This reminds me of Donald Ryan’s study of the evolution of architecture in Stuart Brand’s How Buildings Learn.

Jeeps and Pounds

GPS and LBS systems are being built into laptops and if this horizontal trend continues, user interfaces will need redesign. Time and Location are invisibly important parts of the interface and context of people manifesting itself as presence. Numerous conferences like Where 2.0 or the obscure geek SIGs in San Diego clamor for innovation and commodization for these services.