• ESRI
  • NAVTEQ
  • Veriplace
  • AT&T Interactive
  • DigitalGlobe
  • Google
  • Yahoo! Inc.
  • ZoomAtlas
  • Digital Map Products
  • Pitney Bowes Business Insight
  • NAVTEQ

Sponsorship Opportunities

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

Media Partner Opportunities

For media partnerships, contact mediapartners@ oreilly.com or download the Media & Promotional Partner Brochure (PDF)

Press and Media

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

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Speaker Slides & Videos

We will be working to add these, please check back during the conference

Dennis Crowley (foursquare)
Location-based services mashed-up with social networks are nothing new - we've been checking-in and finding our friends across a variety of services since 2005. What is new is what users expect to get in return. This talk will review some of the things we've learned through a year's worth of foursquare.com and our efforts to turn life into a game.
Jonathan Stark (Jonathan Stark Consulting)
Submitting (pun intended) to the App Store is for suckers. The cheapest, easiest, fastest way for developers to get in on the mobile gold rush is to build killer web apps. Web apps can now - today - access location data, utilize client-side SQL databases, and even run offline. Web apps run on more than 100 mobile handsets with zero modification. We've moved on. Don't get suckered.
Ian White (Urban Mapping, Inc), Steve Coast (OpenStreetMap), Timothy Trainor (U.S. Census Bureau), Peter ter Haar (Ordnance Survey), Di-Ann Eisnor (Platial) Moderated by: Ian White
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Base Map 2_0 Presentation [PPTX]
Over the past 20 years, a highly accurate and attribute-laden base map has been developed at enormous cost. While commercial map providers offer the gold standard, the game is changing-'good enough' is beginning to enter the equation. Come join us at this sure to be highly engaging panel that will dive into uncharted territory to find the answers and surface the controversy.
Dave Fetterman (Facebook)
Until recently there was a delta between the Web experience and content available to users based how they accessed the Web, from their desktop or a mobile device. n combination with the explosion of innovative mobile devices and operating systems, the social graph provides a platform that meets this need and delivers new ways for individuals to stay connected to their network.
Stephen Hood (BlockChalk)
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Bringing Geo Home To Roost Presentation [PDF]
Geolocal services are finally making inroads among users thanks to social motivators like the "checkin". But what lies ahead? What will it take to grow beyond the early adopters and truly reach the masses? Stephen Hood, co-founder of BlockChalk, will explore some directions in which geo might evolve to become more relevant and attractive to mainstream users.
Derek Smith (SimpleGeo), Martin Lechner (Mobilizy)
Having a compass and camera built into smart phones opens up possibilities for augmented reality (AR). Programmers now know more than just location; by also knowing which direction the phone is facing, you can overlay objects on users’ view of the world. This workshop will look at AR development on the iPhone and Android platforms.
Mansour Raad (ESRI), Duane Nickull (Adobe Systems)
Having access to online maps is a start, but often you may need to include functionality that goes beyond simply displaying a map with points. The session will provide a fast-paced introduction to the essentials of how to create rich map-based Web applications using Adobe Flex with online services.
John Zelek (University of Waterloo)
A smart mobile device (e.g., iphone) contains a camera, GPS, accelerometers that all can be used to define location including the camera. We exploit the camera to perform Visual SLAM (Simultaneous Localization & Mapping), object recognition and the computation of depth. The camera performs triangulation on landmarks to obtain geo position which is useful when the GPS data is not available.
Chris Vein (City and County of San Francisco), Tim O'Reilly (O'Reilly Media, Inc.)
San Francisco has led the way in releasing public data sets and working with citizens to generate more. Under CIO Chris Vein the city launched DataSF. Working with Stamen Design, SF has also started collecting data from its citizens via programs like Cycle Tracks. Chris and Tim will discuss how cities and application developers will benefit from open data and the future of programs like these.
Content is at the core of any location-based service. But the challenge is capturing the data, much of which is either unstructured or doesn't exist online-yet. For the past 5 years Yelp has been growing its base of reviews to a massive repository of more than 8M reviews about local businesses. Its recent mobile app launches suggest that the company is in the sweet spot for LBS on mobile devices.
Kim Balassiano (USEPA)
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is on a mission to bring environmental awareness and information to the public. Come learn about the MyEnvironment platform and see why serving up information about land, air, and water quality is such a complex thing.
Zubin Wadia (CiviGuard, Inc.)
What if a smartphone could save your life? When a crisis occurs, where you are is just as important as what happened. This session focuses on how CiviGuard empowers emergency management agencies to redefine the government-to-civilian relationship during a crisis.
Jonathan Stark (Jonathan Stark Consulting), Brian LeRoux (Nitobi Inc.)
Winner of the LaunchPad competition at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, PhoneGap is an open source initiative for bringing native device capabilities to mobile browsers. In this session, you’ll learn how to use PhoneGap to easily build apps for iPhone, Android, Pre and Blackberry.
Patrick Meier (Ushahidi)
How did hundreds of student volunteers around the world use Ushahidi to save hundreds of lives in Haiti? How did they process and map thousands of urgent life-and-death text messages from Haiti in near real-time? Patrick's talk will answer these questions in 4 minutes and 58 seconds.
Andrew Turner (GeoIQ), Adam DuVander (ProgrammableWeb)
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Data and Formats for Your Maps Presentation [PDF]
Having leading-edge features and capabilities is great, but if you can’t get data into your system or users can't take their data out, then it’s a dead end. This workshop will cover popular formats (KML, GeoRSS/GeoJSON, GML, GPX, Shape Files), services (Google My Maps, GeoCommons, Map Warper), and interfaces that are emergent and upcoming in the Where2.0 space.
Beth Kolko (University of Washington)
Crowd-sourced mapping holds promise for areas of the world where governments and businesses either can’t or won’t produce detailed maps of cities, countries, and commerce. This talk will address the ecosystem of hardware and software, usage patterns, design constraints, and government policy issues that impact the ability and desire of users to contribute content that can help fill in blank maps.
Danny Moon (UpNext), Raj Advani (UpNext)
Currently, most mobile applications utilize web optimized tile-based mapping systems. But it there a better solution that takes into account the unique issues facing mobile devices such as loss of connectivity, screen size and touch interfaces. This session will examine new mapping platforms that are optimized for mobile devices.
Matt Galligan (SimpleGeo)
Cloud services have emerged as the quickest and easiest way to include lots of groundbreaking new features to apps. From location to social to data-swapping, learn about the exciting things going on in cloud infrastructure that can improve your app.
Haris Kurtagic (SL-King), Geoff Zeiss (Autodesk, Inc.)
We present an open source project (www.geoREST.org) whose objective is web-searchable open government geodata and show how governments can easily publish their geospatial data in a web-searchable format such as HTML, JSON, and KML. GeoREST is also an open API that allows developers to embed open geodata access in their applications.
Othman Laraki (Twitter)
1 Presentation File:
Geostreams Presentation [PDF]
Twitter recently added location to its platform. Now users can update their locations with their tweets creating a new class of geodata for Twitter API developers. Othman will discuss the geo aspects of the platform.
Jay Webster (Quova)
Geotargeting advertising isn’t an expensive or complicated process; companies are making money using location now. Kerry Langstaff will explain how companies like Examiner, Continental Airlines, BBC and MLB increased conversion rates on Web content by geotargeting ads with location. The workshop will provide practical knowledge for those interested in leveraging location to improve profitability.
Mano Marks (Google, Inc. )
Building a map for a mobile environment is a challenging undertaking. You have to balance native APIs, browsers, bandwidth, and latency. This talk will be an overview of developing Google Maps applications on various mobile platforms, including Android, iPhone, and browser options. Participants who choose to follow along will have a working basic map at the end of the session.
Mano Marks (Google, Inc. ), Ossama Alami (Google)
The Google Maps Data API allows you to programmatically upload your data to Google’s geo cloud storage. A Google Data API< the Maps Data API allows you to interact with it directly from your application. Since being released last year, we’ve added some great new functionality. And you're going to learn how to use it! Bring your laptop and your gmail account, and be ready to code.
Ted Morgan (Skyhook Wireless)
As the first generation of location-based apps are maturing, we are witnessing new uses of location from new categories of apps. Music, book, and news apps are beginning to include location features to bring social networks into their user experience and to increase the lifetime of their users. We will review some of these examples and discuss what this growth means.
Jeffrey Johnson (Open Solutions Group), John Crowley (Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and STAR-TIDES), Schuyler Erle (SimpleGeo)
After the earthquake in Haiti, a community of crisis mappers started to prove what can be done when gifted minds channel their energies into a collective effort. This session will highlight the efforts of many individuals and will testify to the lessons derived from their efforts.
Raffi Krikorian (Twitter)
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Handling Real-time Geostreams Presentation [PDF]
Twitter has launched a Geotagging API - we really wanted to enable users to not only talk about "What's happening?" but also "What's happening right here?" This talk will delve into how Twitter handles their geocontent including tool suggestions.
On March 1st 2010, Google was granted a broad patent for Location-Based Advertising. Does it mean Google now has it all? Of course, no! In this talk Nick Mikhailovsky will talk about POIdo, a location-based advertising platform that launches publicly in Russia on Mar 16th (they're planning a US launch later this year).
Martin Isenburg (downtownfarm.net)
Martin Isenburg's project hits the nerve of "zeitgeist": pandora, michelle omaba, farmville, geospatial, michael pollen, green, no more tiger, cheap fun (because recession), growing food in cities, ...
Eric Singley (Yelp)
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Less is More for Mobile Presentation [PPT]
The evolution of the local mobile experience is accelerating at a rate that has many jonesing for the next big thing. Eric Singley, Yelp's product manager for mobile and consumer facing web products, jumps into some of the design and engineering challenges Yelp has tackled as mobile rapidly redefines what local search is all about.
Matthew Forrest (Social Animal), Eric Soboleski (Social Animal)
Social Animal creates HD 360 degree video with their SA9 camera system which provides high resolution video without the typical warping or distortion. Social Animal's patent pending SA9 camera system and video village will be on display along with an example of a recent 360 video mapping project.
Tim O'Reilly (O'Reilly Media, Inc.), Michael Arrington (TechCrunch)
The mobile and location industry is being flooded with new players and technologies. Mike and Tim will debate who should win and why they will.
The Spatial Information Community in Australia is somewhat schizophrenic. It sometimes seems full of ageing, sluggish and conservative blokes. But Australia has also given birth to world-leading innovations such as GML, ArcPad and the game-changing Google Maps. Maurits presents an outsiders view from the inside of the frustrating, quirky and exciting aspects of location intelligence in Australia.
Kati London (Area/Code)
It’s been ten years since the first geo-cache was placed. Since then, locative games have continued to change how we play, where we go, and what we think when we get there. As locative games mature and evolve, they are creating increasingly complex and engaging imaginary spaces in the real world.
Sophia Parafina (Ugotrade)
Times are hard and your angel funder just told you that your non-profit open source org needs to feed itself. Great, but it also means change, in terms of process, organization, culture and people's expectations. The talk is about achieving a balance between profitability and the open source mission.
Adam DuVander (ProgrammableWeb)
You can easily add maps to your site using APIs from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, or MapQuest. However, there are equally good options from the little guys. Learn about your many mapping options and go further with fun services for geocoding, reverse geocoding, and driving directions.
Jon Voss (LookBackMaps), Barbara Hui (UCLA/UCHRI)
Old stuff can be sexy too! An overview of various efforts to geotag publicly available historical photos, organize them in a useful fashion, and keep them free and accessible to machines and humans. Includes demonstration of web and mobile applications bringing history to life on the map. We consider noncommercial models to promote mapping within historical and cultural preservation.
Dylan Phillips (Microsoft Alumnus)
Maps have been a part of Dylan Phillips' life for as long as he can remember. His father, an anthropologist, got an old National Geographic Relief Map, for his wall as a child. But these maps were static, constant, dead if you will. The USSR still lives on, in the map on his wall. He's come to learn that maps, are not about geography, they are about people, and the human sense of space.
Will Carter (Nodesnoop Labs)
Mobzombies is a location-based iPhone game that pits you against hordes of 8-bit zombies. Mobzombies uses the Foursquare API to generate zombie hordes at specific venues like parks, bars, or museums. The difficulty and size of each horde also corresponds to foursquare checkin data, creating a strong link between the game world and the real world.
Josh Williams (Gowalla)
Visions of virtual goods, digital collectibles and pixelated tchotchkes are inspiring people to check in with their phone, sharing not only their location, but also their souvenirs, with friends. This discussion will explore the incentives, social bragging rights, collectibility and other gamelike rewards that are motivating the masses to go out and discover the world around them.
Jason Grigsby (Cloud Four)
Awesome. You've got your location-aware iPhone app development plans ready to go. You're ready to start building your killer app when someone asks, "Hey, will it work on Droid?" Maybe you should look at web technology, but there are disadvantages there as well? What makes the most sense depends on what you are trying to accomplish and what device characteristics you need.
Adam DuVander (ProgrammableWeb), Don Park (donpark.org)
The Geomena Project is creating a structured wiki database of access points that anyone can edit and use. Now that every browser can geolocate its user, let's keep the data that makes it happen updated and available to all.
In this session, Michael Halbherr, Vice President, Social Location at Nokia, will discuss bridging the virtual and real world into a seamless and user-centric matrix of people, places, and live services.
Martin Lefebure (Parrot)
Gaming has moved quickly from off the couch to entirely new settings in recent years. Consumers are no longer are confined to where they can play and have a whole new world of possibilities when they can use real-world surroundings in a video game. Martin Lefebure will provide an overview of the development of the product, the technology and the possibilities for developers in this space.
Sylvain Carle (Needium (formerly Praized))
The world of precise coordinates is easy to interact with using software. The problem is humans don't use precise coordinates to represent places. They don't even agree on place names. I will try to give an overview of the current existing services/APIs that you can use to find a precise coordinate with a place name. And then demonstrate why we are not there yet.
Walter Scott (DigitalGlobe)
In today’s always-on environment, speed and accuracy of information are more critical than ever before. DigitalGlobe’s founder and CTO, Dr. Walter Scott, will demonstrate how the current state-of-the-art in satellite imagery technology are filling that need, and changing the way we live and work by helping people create meaning out of what has proven to be so much more than mere pixels.
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.
Peter Skomoroch (LinkedIn), Kevin Weil (Twitter, Inc.), Sean Gorman (FortiusOne)
1 Presentation File:
Spatial Workshop Presentation [PDF]
This workshop will focus on uncovering patterns and generating actionable insights from large datasets using spatial . We will explore combining open government data with other location based information sources like Twitter. Participants will be guided through examples that use Hadoop and Amazon EC2 for scalable processing of location data.
Deborah Estrin (Computer Science Department, UCLA)
Mobile smartphones can be easily programmed to automatically record GPS coordinates and accelerometer readings, creating geocoded, time-stamped, activity logs of our every day lives. In this talk Deborah will describe promising applications and suggest that it’s time to consider the technical and legal structures needed for individuals to retain control over their telling traces.
Mark L. DeMulder (United States Geological Survey)
The National Map, one of the cornerstones of the United States Geological Survey’s National Geospatial Program, is a collaborative effort between the U.S. Geological Survey and other federal, state, and local partners to improve and deliver geospatial information for the nation. This presentation will describe its current status and provide an overview of the National Map products and services.
When mapping first arrived on the web, it was all about driving directions. In the era of the mashup, we saw map tiles being used as canvas for a variety of websites devoted to data visualization and interaction. At Bing, we've been evolving to meet and accelerate the trajectory of these shifts, in the process enabling a broad sweep of new applications written by anyone, using data from anywhere.
Michael Jones (Google)
Online maps, location-based services, local advertising, GPS technology, web mashups, personal navigation devices, and mobile telephones have extended the meaning of the word 'map' in new and important ways. Further changes now underway promise to eclipse even today's maps in impact. Michael will offer Google's view on both the surprises and opportunities that await us all.
Tish Shute (Ugotrade), Jeremy Hight (Mission College, CA), Joe Lamantia (Blend Consulting), Sophia Parafina (Ugotrade), anselm hook (Meedan)
This panel will discuss shared augmented realities, considering some of the essential possibilities and challenges inherent in this new class of social augmented experiences. The format is presentation and discussion of a small set of scenarios (defined in advance, with audience input) describing likely future forms of shared augmented realities at differing scales of social engagement.
Bess Ho (BayAreaParty)
One-Girl-Shop UI Architect & Developer is going to explain how GEO works in both iPhone & Android via her eyes in building her iPhone Apps based on Star Trek theme "Sound Tricorder" & Doctor Tricorder".
Mike Liebhold (Institute for the Future), Shailesh Nalawadi (Google), Carl Reed (OGC), Damon Hernandez (Web3D), Sophia Parafina (Ugotrade)
1 Presentation File:
Truly Open Augmented Reality Presentation [PPTX]
Convene and lead a panel on requirements and specifications for an open software stack for augmented reality, based on the assumption that AR is both a discrete medium, and it is the intersection of many media, including web, CAD, mapping, games, virtual worlds...
Vanessa Fox (Nine By Blue)
How do search engines sort out what content to show for searchers in each country? How can you make sure you're effectively leveraging your global presence in search? Learn about how search engines operate globally, how searchers are different across the world, and how to ensure you're architecting your site and marketing it in a way that ensure you can connect with an international audience.
Tasso Roumeliotis (Wavemarket)
Mr. Roumeliotis presents Veriplace, the leading cloud Location Aggregation Platform, which, by offering remote access to 100's of millions of smart phones and feature phones across Tier 1 carriers, enables an ecosystem of network-based location-enhanced services. SMS, IVR, web, and WAP, services-even Facebook widgets, can be location enabled with this cloud web service, the next generation of LBS.
Scott Hotes (WaveMarket, Inc.)
Location is rapidly becoming ubiquitous. Making that happen means accessing location from carriers, mobile devices and consumer services, and doing it in a generalized, secure way that scales. We describe how this location ecosystem is developing, and the opportunities it provides for innovative application developers.
Tyler Malin (Social Animal)
Can HD interactive 360 video create more engaging mapping experiences? Social Animal creates HD 360 degree video with their SA9 camera system which provides high resolution video without the typical warping or distortion. This video is distributed in an interactive flash player that allows the viewer to control the video and click on objects in the map for additional information.
Marc Naddell (NAVTEQ)
App stores have changed the way developers get to market. Now the challenge becomes how does one get discovered and make money? Solutions that can effectively employ premium Location content, Traffic, and Location-Based Advertising have an advantage over the thousands that don’t.
Andrew Turner (GeoIQ)
"Where 2.0 where it matters" as an overview of how all the great technology is doing more than just helping us hook-up or find bars, but being used in Government, crisis response (crisiscommons/haiti), development, etc.
Roland Shield (perchslayer)
In these troubled times, we need to get creative to get the economy moving. In addition, we need governments to provide the web-based information and services promised. In order to facilitate/catalyze this process, we as citizens need to do Public Information Requests as if there is no tomorrow. Unconvinced? Let Roland Shield show you how and why in 5 minutes or less.
Robert Acker (Harman International)
Current Web and mobile-based search paradigms can’t be safely used while driving a car. However, knowledge of the driver's location and heading, the underlying road grid, standard contexts, preset preferences, and his or her behavioral patterns can all be used to translate content from Web publishers into a viable and safe driving search experience.
Paul Ramsey (OpenGeo)
Where is here? That place on a map is relative to a road line, which was digitized on a 5-years-ago satellite image, which was ground referenced to an existing road intersection, which was captured 35 years ago from an aerial photo, which was ground referenced to a control point, which was optically sighted relative to mountain-top control points, which were first occupied 150 years ago.
Drew Dara-Abrams (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Unlike our gadgets, humans can’t remember directions, distances, and other spatial information with such exactitude. You probably have more than a few memories of getting lost, don’t you? From experiments Drew has run himself and work done by his colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara, he will present a couple key findings about human spatial cognition.
Elad Gil (Twitter), Othman Laraki (Twitter)
One category of requests we've been seeing is for the ability to perform complex reasoning over large datasets. For example, can you tell where the cougars and Yuppies live based on census data? Traditional methods of storing and querying data don't scale here. We will discuss how to design a system to make this possible.
Mark Sherman (ZoomAtlas)
Have you ever wondered what happened to your childhood neighbor friend? Or, wanted to reconnect with friends from elementary school? At Ignite Where, the audience will Zoom through the ZoomAtlas map with Mark Sherman, CEO and founder of ZoomAtlas, as he takes them on an adventure through neighborhoods, cities, countryside and more to see how the ZoomAtlas map editor and wiki work…