The Yahoo! Geo Technologies Blog

The Web 2.0 Mapping and Social Networks group has a flourishing monthly series of meetups in and around Silicon Valley, covering topics on current and future web related geospatial and social networking technologies and applications and members of the Geo Technologies group frequently attend the meetups. Inspired by the success of the US meetup, on Wednesday November 27th, the first meetup of the London Geo/Mobile Developers Meetup group was held at Google’s UK headquarters in Victoria.

I was one of the speakers for the event and presented a deck on Yahoo! Fire Eagle, our source and application agnostic location switchboard platform. I covered an introduction to the Geo Technologies Group at Yahoo! and an overview of what Fire Eagle is. The deck then dug slightly deeper into apps that can update your location in Fire Eagle and apps that can use your location from Fire Eagle. The presentation then ended with a discussion on the challenges and issues surrounding user privacy and the way in which we address these issues within Fire Eagle. The deck is available for download from this blog, either as a PowerPoint show, a PDF document with accompanying slide notes or as a QuickTime movie.

Co-presenting with me on the night was Nick Black from CloudMade.com and Andrew Grill, the mobile advertising evangelist.

Nick spoke about the “5 things you can’t do with web-based maps” and talked about OpenStreetMap and the relationship between OSM and CloudMade. He gave an excellent demonstration about how mapping information can be embedded in a heavily branded site without the effect of a maps provider’s brand diluting or jarring with the look and feel of the hosting site. Two stand out examples of this are MSNBC’s hurricane tracker, which embeds Microsoft Virtual Earth maps and the Archaeological Finds Storymap for the official London 2012 Olympics site.

Andrew rounded off the evening with a discussion on what can and more importantly what can’t be done when attempting to monetize LBMS (location based mobile services) including deconstructing and destroying the long lived “Starbucks texts you with a free coffee when you’re outside their store” myth. Andrew’s approach to location is refreshingly upfront and honest and he tackled some of the sacred cows of the often complex relationship that advertisers, mobile networks and the location space have.

The evening was a great success, made possible by the generosity of our hosts and by the tireless work put in by Chris Osbourne our organiser. The next London meetup is already being discussed for the New Year; watch out for more information on this blog.

Other write-ups of the event are on the #geomob blog, Google’s UK Developers blog and Andrew Grill’s London Calling blog.

Gary Gale, Yahoo! Geo Technologies

Tags: AndrewGrill, ChrisOsborne, CloudMade, FireEagle, geomob, Google, LBMS, NickBlack, OpenStreetMap, OSM, WebMapSocial

This entry was posted on Friday, November 28th, 2008 at 2:09 pm and is filed under Geo Technologies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.