So today I’m at Where 2.0. I had been skeptical about this conference, as after having only gone to a few tech conferences before, it seems like they are, crudely put, one big circle jerk. (IE, all the same people talking about all the same things.)
But given that I’m starting to go a little stir crazy with nothing but my cat to keep me company as I write all day on my couch, I figured that the conference would be cool.
A few notes:
David Rumsey, the opening speaker, is awesome. He showed off all kinds of neat things, including taking historical maps and laying them on top of a 3D map — so like taking a 19th century map of San Francisco and then putting it on that 3D map which showed all the hills and such and you could fly around it. Pretty crazy. Then he did a demo of Google Earth where he put older maps (again with the 3D data) on top of a map of the world. So he did it with Yosemite and with India. Really rad.
I was thinking this reminds me of my first experience of playing with 3D Atlas that came with my Performa 6115 in the mid 1990s. I loved those early “multimedia” flythroughs.
Udi Manber gave a cool talk about the new A9 search where you get a map of the place you’re looking at and then photos of either side of the street too. They got in an incident when they were at the State Department and got asked a bunch of questions by the usual security suspects. He played a funny video where more and more people kept showing up. The guy (A9’s employee, Josh) was kinda freaked out when they started asking him stuff — they said “Is there any tape in that camera?” and his immediate answer was “No” (it had a hard drive), but he was too scared to say anything else. That got a laugh.
Maps are cool.
Backchannel IRC:
irc.freenode.net
#where2.0
