After the success of the first #geomob meetup last year, the second one took place on Thursday January 29th in the cafespace area of wallacespace in the heart of London’s Covent Garden.
Organised and overseen by founder Chris Osborne, this meetup was supported by and sponsored by Yahoo! Geo Technologies. A bigger venue meant more people were able to attend, and over eighty people showed up, plus one organiser, one sponsor and four presenters, who showed the depth and breadth of scope that geo, location and place covers. Chris Osborne started the evening off with an introduction, a review of the last #geomob meetup and some observations on how commentators are seeing 2009 at the year that geo, location and place go mainstream before handing the floor over to the guest speakers.
First up was Russell Middleton, a Customer Solutions Engineer for Google in London, who spoke on New Features for (Google) Geo Developers, the first of which a location detection addition to the current set of Desktop APIs which allows a default location to be discovered via a user’s current IP address.
Next, Russell covered the Google Web Toolkit, which allows developers to write AJAX web applications in Java which are then compiled to an AJAX front end code base expressed in JavaScript.
Russell finished up with an explantion and demonstration of the Static Maps API, the Google Earth API and plugin, the AJAX API playground and a KML Viewer widget.
Andrew Scott, Founder and CEO of Rummble.com, was next and he based his talk around a series of conclusions. The first of which is that location is coming of age, something that we’ve written and talked about in the past.
Prior to Rummble.com, Andrew was behind PlayTxt, which provided a wry example on the international pitfalls of brandingl where the name playtxt could be (mis)interpreted as Playtex, well known as a bra and apparel brand in the UK but better known as a sanitary product brand in the US.
Privacy controls and concerns are an opt highlighted protential pbarrier to the uptake of location based services but one of the main takeaways from PlayTxt was that location is not a barrier to uptake, with less than 5% of users enabling privacy options and that mobile deployment stimulates growth, with 1.8K messages/month being delivered via the PlayTxt website, but 28K messages/month being delivered via the PlayTxt mobile app.
The second conclusion was that location is (now) a commodity. When Rummble.com was founded, the main barrier to uptake of location services was not too little data but too much; too many hits on search engines to go through and find what you want, such as a local restaurant. On (WAP) driven mobile services, finding a local place to eat can take around 18 minutes, on the web is can take around 7 minutes but in real life you’d expect this to take 15-30 seconds, maximum. Which leads to another unofficial conclusion, which is if you want to know, ask another human.
The third and final conclusion is that the way to use location effectively is to crunch data and innovate. There’s a lot of data available, but innovative algorithms, display solutions and a trust based, not social, network can make location an integral part of a successful venture whilst not being the prime reason behind the venture.
Andrew’s write up of the night, It’s About The Data, Stupid is now up on the Rummble.com blog and his deck is up on SlideShare.
Next to take to the floor was Alfie Dennen, co-founder of Moblog, the mobile blogging platform, and a well known and respected blogging and technology commentator.
Alfie spoke on the various projects he’s been involved in, with an initial detour on the subject of John Harrison, inventor of the marine chronometer and in Alfie’s words, a genius. This segued neatly into Alfie’s StoppedClocks project where the public uploaded geocoded and geotagged photos of clocks on public buildings and campaigned for the clocks to be restored and restarted.
Alfie’s most recent project was Britglyph which involved people from across the UK building a nationwide geoglyph, where rocks are placed at locations across the country and people take photos of themselves in the locations and upload them to a, moblog powered, site. The image which Britglyph revealed was only visible via online mapping tools and was based on John Harrison’s marine chronometer. Such was the level of participatory enthusiasm that Britglyph participant was only able to get to his chosen destination, in the middle of a Scottish field, at midnight.
This was not your average #geomob presentation but the audience were hooked and Alfie’s talk title of The Internet of Places, or, How to Get a Man to Stand in a Field in Glasgow. At Midnight was fully explained.
Last to speak was Terry Jones, the inventor of FluidDB, which Terry describes as the database with the heart of a wiki. Terry’s talk, while not immediately geo relevent, soon had everyone alight with the possibilities of what such a system could encompass with location and place being key attributes of the system. Terry presented some fascinating comparisons, such as the fluid way that we innately work with data compased to the rigid way that computers constrain people to work with their data. Taking these ideas, where everything is an object or an attribute and implementing them as a hosted online database is the rationale behind FluidDB.
Terry was very upfront with the audience, warning them several times of the vaporware state of FluidDB; check out deck on SlideShare for more information and inspiration..
The evening rounded up with a summing up from myself, representing the Geo Technologies group, thanking Chris Osborne, all the presenters, Russell, Andrew, Alfie and Terry, Anna Jeffries and the team at wallacespace for their hard work and of course all of the people who turned up and joined in. There were some inspired speakers at this event which generated some great one liners, some of which are still being discussed on a range of social media platforms.
- Andrew: It’s about the data, stupid
- Andrew: If you want answers, ask a human being
- Alfie: The map is the interface, the world is the platform
- Alfie: Location is the DNA of user created media
- Terry: I’m trying to make the world writeable
- Terry: I rate something as 6 out of 10, where does that go? It’s my 6 out of 10. What if I want to change it, delete it?
Thanks to the wifi provided at wallacespace people were updating and commenting during the event with over 200 Twitter updates being made using the #geomob tag either during the event itself or later on that night; you can see the latest set at search.twitter.com.
A lot of cameras were also at work before, during and after the event; with photos from the author, from Roman Kirillov, whose pictures are used in this blog post and will soon be on the official #geomob Flickr photostream.
Overall the evening far surpassed the success of the first #geomob meetup and showed the scale and enthusiasm of the London geo community. We’re all looking forward to the next #geomob meetup, details of which will be posted here, on the Geo Technologies Twitter feed and on the #geomob web site.
Gary Gale, Head of UK Engineering, Yahoo! Geo Technologies
Photo credits: Gary Gale on Flickr and Roman Kirillov on Flickr.
First to speak was AGI Geocommunity conference chair and strategic consultant Steven Feldman who talked on Location-based Social Networking: Opportunity or Blind Alley. Steven gave a pointed but amusing summary of the location market and how he feels we have effectively lost the right to location privacy, predicting a high profile divorce within the next 2 years due to a celebrity neglecting to hide their location via their GPS enabled smartphone.
Next was Alex Housley, founder of Total Hotspots, who asked the audience Are We Nearly There Yet?. Alex gave a overview of the growth of Location Based Services since 2004 and looked at how a trust based model can help give relevance to a proliferation of data streams and sources.
Continuing the pace, the next speaker was Google’s Geospatial Technologist, Ed Parsons. Ed, fresh from the day’s media blitz on Google Streetview, spoke eloquently and without an accompanying deck on how users will, over time, move to develop an understanding on what sharing information, such as their location, will mean in terms of benefits when weighed against the potential cost of privacy loss.
I was the last speaker of the night and gave a, 5 minute talk (thanks to Tony), on a topic that both Ed and Alex had touched on, that of location privacy, entitled Location Privacy, Where I Am and Why It’s OK to Lie About That. I argued that we are socially conditioned to expect and to accept a lack of privacy and that to gain our own privacy in areas which matter to us we have to manage a complex series of opt out procedures; whereas your location stream should have a default model of opt in. I also touched on a series of questions an individual should ask of themselves and of a location service before revealing one’s location.
