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  • ESRI
  • Google
  • Nokia
  • Yahoo! Inc.
  • AND Automotive Navigation Data
  • earthmine
  • First American Spatial Solutions
  • NAVTEQ
  • Waze
  • Google
  • NAVTEQ

Sponsorship Opportunities

For information on exhibition and sponsorship opportunities at the conference, contact Yvonne Romaine at [email protected]

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Download the Media & Promotional Partner Brochure (PDF) for information on trade opportunities with O'Reilly conferences or contact mediapartners@ oreilly.com

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For media-related inquiries, contact Maureen Jennings at [email protected]

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Schedule: General sessions

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Location: Regency Ballroom
Brady Forrest (O'Reilly Media, Inc.)
Opening remarks by Program Chair, Brady Forrest. Read more.
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Location: Regency Ballroom
Alex "Sandy" Pentland (MIT and Sense Networks)
You can't manage what you can't measure...and unfortunately 80% of your businesses' highest-value communication is face-to-face, so you usually don't even know it is happening. But things have changed, and now you *can* see the entire pattern of communication in your company, and the result can be dramatic increases in productivity and creative output. Read more.
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Location: Regency Ballroom
Sean Maday (United States Air Force)
Every hardware and software solution being developed to catalog, warehouse, and display geospatially relevant information likely has a pertinent military or intelligence application. From location aware cell phone applications to geostacking and immersive imagery, the defense and intelligence communities may be viable secondary and tertiary markets for established corporate and consumer products. Read more.
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Location: Regency Ballroom
Steven Lee (Google, Inc.), Lior Ron (Google, Inc. )
As geo-location tools like Google Latitude and map-creation programs like Google Map Maker become more prevalent on desktop and mobile devices, people are no longer just consumers of location information. Rather, they have the opportunity to become local mapping experts, contributing information about places and about themselves that make online maps better for everyone. Read more.
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Location: Regency Ballroom
Michael Halbherr (Nokia), Christof Hellmis (Nokia gate5 GmbH)
The largest manufacturer of phones owns the largest geodata provider and has been busy building geo-aware web apps on Ovi. Michael will share their latest thinking. Read more.
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Location: Regency Ballroom
Denice Ross (Greater New Orleans Community Data Center), James Fee (RSP Architects)
With federal statistics unable to track New Orleans' repopulation post-Katrina, a local nonprofit identified an alternative source of data - households actively receiving mail - and delivered it in an easy-to-use geovisualization tool. The result is timely, small-area geospatial information being used to support decision-making at all levels. Read more.
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Location: Regency Ballroom
Tyler Bell (Yahoo! Inc.)
Open Location is an convenient term that aptly describes an emerging trend apparent in the geo sector: the increasing availability and openness of the core data and tools used to represent, analyze, and visualize geo- and geo-informed data. This talk provides an overview, highlights why it acts as a healthy crucible for the industry, and details contributions from the Yahoo! Geo Technologies team Read more.
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Location: Regency Ballroom
Brandon Martin-Anderson (Urban Mapping)
This session will look at different ways that mapmakers have attempted to squeeze all sorts of four-dimensional data onto maps, from the oscillations of transit systems to the shifting landscape of relative distances within a city throughout the day, from the movements of armies in battle to the dance of a collegiate housing shuffle. Read more.
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Location: Imperial Ballroom / Gold Room
Markku Rossi (Nokia)
This event held during the lunch is sponsored by Nokia, 12:30PM - 1:30PM in the GOLD Room. Get to know how to develop and leverage amazing contextual experiences with Nokia's latest Ovi developer offering. The session will be led by a member of the Ovi Maps development team and will include hands on examples in code. Read more.
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Location: Regency Ballroom
Danny Sullivan (Search Engine Land)
As local search continues to grow, so do issues on how we represent the real work virtually. Should Google allow individuals to block their homes from Street View? How do you balance listing brick-and-mortar stores along with virtual outlets? Do we need a master control panel to clear location tracking from all our apps – and what they’ve stored on their servers? Read more.
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Location: Regency Ballroom
Mark Law (MapQuest)
MapQuest has moved beyond maps and directions into a location-centric user experience with an emphasis on a hyperlocal strategy. Learn actual stats and behaviors of users, best practices for building a local network and how local data supplements a mapping experience. See the value of hyperlocal content strategy within the .com to mobile experience. Read more.
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Location: Regency Ballroom
Jeff Holden (Pelago, Inc.)
People vote with their feet and there is substantial information contained in human activity in the real world. Previously, that data was inaccessible, but thanks to LBS we can capture, in digital form, the places people go. This data set is the real-world analog of a clickstream on the Web; call it a “footstream.” Tapping the footstream will completely alter the mobile experience as we know it. Read more.
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Location: Regency Ballroom
Anthony Fassero (earthmine, inc)
Wild Style City transforms the urban environment into a canvas that anyone can modify with a palette of interactive geo-tagging tools. It is a virtual world built on top of 3D street level imagery and annotated by users, creating a unique artistic sub-culture based on real urban environments. Read more.
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Location: Regency Ballroom
John Zelek (University of Waterloo)
Sensory substitution is the replacement of one’s sensory input (vision, hearing, touch, taste or smell) by another, while preserving some of the key functions of the original sense. We have developed navigation devices for people with visual and cognitive impairments. The wearable tactile devices convey gps global information as well as local map information sensed by a camera. Read more.
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Location: Regency Ballroom
Greg Skibiski (Sense Networks)
As we move to and from places in a city, we generate ambient strands of data that can be collected by positioning technologies, like GPS and Wifi, and analyzed with advanced machine learning. Using 3D rendering from Skyrails, people's collective movements within the city ultimately creates a unique links between places. These links create a city's unique DNA just waiting to be decoded. Read more.
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Location: Regency Ballroom
GIS helps businesses and organizations leverage authoritative data and easily deliver it to decision makers in ways that are intuitive and fit into their existing decision making processes. GIS is used for asset/data management, planning and analysis, business operations, and situational awareness. Read more.
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Location: Regency Ballroom
Danny Sullivan (Search Engine Land), Tyler Bell (Yahoo! Inc.), Michael Halbherr (Nokia), Marc Prioleau (CloudMade), Mark Law (MapQuest)
All of our beautiful geodata has to be paid for somehow. The convential wisdom is that on main way will be through search. Search expert Danny Sullivan will share his thinking on the latest advances across all of the search engines. Read more.
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Location: Regency Ballroom
Matthew Ericson (New York Times)
One of the most enduring symbols of the past several presidential elections has been the red-state, blue-state map of America. Each election night, millions of eyeballs have been tuned to news Web sites and television networks, waiting for the map to start filling in. Read more.
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Location: Regency Ballroom
Bruce Hall (Velodyne Acoustics, Inc.), Rick Yoder (Velodyne Lidar)
Velodyne’s Lidar sensor approaches Lidar imaging in a whole new way. Unlike traditional single laser sensors that provide a trickle of data, the Velodyne sensor uses 64 lasers to provide a comparable flood. This session gives a brief background of Velodyne and shows its new sensor, called the HDL-64E, in action. Read more.
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Location: Regency Ballroom
Alec Berntson (Microsoft Corporation)
When you create a location-aware application, ever notice how much of your time and effort is spent focusing on where your application gets its location data? Windows 7 makes it easy to enable any application to answer the question, “Where am I?”. This presentation will show you how Windows 7 will enable the next big wave of location-aware applications. Read more.
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Location: Regency Ballroom
Raven Zachary (raven.me), Mok Oh (EveryScape Inc.), Will Carter (Nodesnoop Labs), Ori Inbar (Ogmento), Anthony Fassero (earthmine, inc)
Mobile devices with location-based services and always-on data services are making it easier to bridge the virtual and physical worlds into a single, shared space. What was once a distant vision of augmented reality is starting to take shape on a new class of smartphones, including the Apple iPhone and Google Android. This session covers today's offerings that merge physical and virtual spaces. Read more.
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Location: Regency Ballroom
John Geraci (DIYcity)
Our cities today are outdated models of inefficiency, consisting of centralized, top-down and non-participatory services and infrastructures. The results are spiraling city deficits, ballooning bureaucracy, and an inability to pay for basic services, paired with problems of wasted resources, scarcity and redundancies. Read more.
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Location: Regency Ballroom
Eric Horvitz (Microsoft Research)
Location is central in the lives of people, and will play an increasingly important role in context-sensitive services that consider the preferences, goals, and activities of people. I will discuss the promise of machine learning and reasoning about location to deliver such services, touching on several directions and opportunities. Read more.
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Location: Regency Ballroom
Brady Forrest (O'Reilly Media, Inc.)
Opening remarks by Program Chair, Brady Forrest. Read more.
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Location: Regency Ballroom
Dan Gillmor (Arizona State University's Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication)
Journalists have always known the importance of location; hence datelines on stories. But journalism has been relatively slow to understand the potential of new tools - for media creation and consumption - that expand the information ecosystem. Read more.
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Location: Regency Ballroom
Steve Coast (OpenStreetMap)
Ever present location awareness (GeoContext) is nearly with us, but it's going to be so much deeper. Today your phone will dial down the ringtone if it knows you're at work, but what will tomorrows high-fidelity ubiquitous location bring us? Today we cannot imagine a text box without spell check or apps without online features, what will we expect from tomorrows location aware - dependent - cloud? Read more.
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Location: Regency Ballroom
Rebecca Moore (Google)
Indians in the Amazon rainforest are now using Google Earth to protect their lands from illegal logging, to plan for their future and to share their rich history and culture with the world. How will the Geoweb change and evolve as indigenous peoples begin to participate? Read more.
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Location: Regency Ballroom
Michal Migurski (Stamen Design)
There's a gold mine of historical information to be found in old maps, from long-gone railroads, records of land ownership, to past practices in cartography and design. See how this material can be discovered, digitized, and referenced to modern maps to create dynamic, layered, comparative modern browsers of historical geography using the city of Oakland, CA as an example. Read more.
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Location: Regency Ballroom
Natasha Leger (LBx Journal)
Location-based (x) (LBx) is the recognition that all products and services are connected to location, whether they have to do with supply chain, transportation costs, distribution, inventory, asset management, proximity to the customer, or the performance of the product or service in various marketing. What is the (x) variable to you? Read more.
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Location: Regency Ballroom
Alex Oliver (Igloo Studios)
The AEC industry suffers from a relative lack of location-based technology development that is accessible to the everyday builder or architect. We all know it is commonplace in the Tech industry to have consumer focused websites displaying geo-tagged photos, location-based tweets, and GPS enabled map-mashups, all that make life easier, more efficient, or just plain fun Read more.
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Location: Regency Ballroom
Andrew Turner (FortiusOne), Rachel Weidinger (TechSoup Global), Marnie Webb (TechSoup Global), Hillary Hartley (NIC Inc.)
In a sustainable world, with stronger ties to locality, what role should the geospatial web play? This panel will scan the bleeding edge of location-based tech projects, critiques them on social and sustainable factors, and pushes them to do more to help people connect locally. We'll promote the best ones, and publish ideas and to-do requests for all. Read more.
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Location: Regency Ballroom
Perry Evans (Local Matters, Inc.)
Highly targeted advertising and promotion is an intuitively logical and appealing business model for location based services/apps. So why, after more than a decade of chasing this long tail of valuable advertising inventory is the evidence is always anecdotal and spotty, and not statistically significant or scaled? Read more.
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Location: Regency Ballroom
Bruce Daniel (Cartifact)
An exploration of how purely visual maps have been part of describing "Where" from earliest times through today's online and mobile mapping platforms. Read more.
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Location: Regency Ballroom
Aaron Cope (Flickr)
If all of Flickr's 100+ million geotagged photos were plotted on a map would there be enough data to generate a mostly accurate contour of that place? Not a perfect representation, perhaps, but something more fine-grained than a bounding box. It turns out there is. Read more.
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Location: Regency Ballroom
Mat Honan (Wired magazine), Nihal Mehta (Buzzd), Dennis Crowley (foursquare), Martin May (Brightkite), Jeff Holden (Pelago, Inc.)
An exploration of the evolution of location-based social networking and how location-based applications will impact the way everyday users interact with the friends and find nearby venues and events. Includes several founders of past and current location-based social networks, including Brightkite, Buzzd, Dodgeball and Moximity. Read more.
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Location: Regency Ballroom
Jeffrey Martin (360 Cities), David Martin (360 Cities)
360Cities.net promotes geo-mapped, immersive imagery produced by skilled VR photographers from around the world. At present with 120 cities and cca 10,000 images, the network utilizes advances in hardware and software to leverage the rise of awareness of the geoweb to support this growth, and increasingly to automate the process of publishing panoramic photography from around the world. Read more.
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Location: Regency Ballroom
Ted Morgan (Skyhook Wireless)
There has been an explosion of location based applications on mobile devices in the past year thanks to the opening of app stores and more advanced devices. Morgan will report on the growth and variety of location applications available today as well as how often they are being used and where. Read more.
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Location: Regency Ballroom
Andrew Turner (FortiusOne)
The GeoWeb has been growing to allow users to easily find, and store, geospatial data. However, enterprise and small business are beginning to raise questions on the terms of use and privacy of these services - but want to make use of these compelling visualization and analysis tools. Read more.
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Location: Regency Ballroom
John Frank (MetaCarta, Inc.), John Seratt (MetaCarta)
The US has just launched the largest public works project ever. How can you watch it unfolding across the nation? Look at the shovel-ready projects near you, and understand the nearby news and Web content that MetaCarta automatically associates with places. Read more.
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Location: Regency Ballroom
Mari Maeda (DARPA), Samuel Earp (Multisensor Sciences)
This talk describes a highly successful map-based application that is used by soldiers in Iraq for collecting and sharing information on people, places and events. The system, called TIGR - Tactical Ground Reporting System - was developed by DARPA, Pentagon's R&D agency to meet an information gap unique to counter-insurgency warfare. An overview of developmental challenges will be reviewed. Read more.
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Location: Regency Ballroom
Jubal Harpster (CH2M HILL)
This presentation will decribe The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation recently awarded a grant to the Consultative Group on Agricultural Research (CGIAR), in partnership with CH2M HILL and ITC, to develop a geospatial technology program to aid farmers in sub-Saharan Africa. Read more.
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Location: Regency Ballroom
Chris Spurgeon (spurgeonworld.com)
As the moon and planets went from being objects of wonder in the sky to actual destinations, space scientists have been forced to devise increasingly complex coordinate and mapping systems for the heavens. History of science and technology junkie Chris Spurgeon gives a fun-filled overview of some of the techniques we use to find our way in space. Read more.