The Where 2.0 “Conference So Far” post

Quick update with what’s been going on with us at Where 2.0 thus far.  First and foremost, GeoCommons is now officially launched as of last night’s Launchpad event.  Thanks to everyone who helped us out during our initial testing phases and gave us great feedback on how to make it better.  We’re looking forward to improving it even more in the future, which everyone’s continued feedback will be absolutely instrumental in doing.

After Sean’s launchpad talk, there were a few other launches that are definitely worth checking out, which Artur Bergman has written up some very nice summaries for on the O’Reilly Radar Blog.

I’d actually like to give Swivel, who was one of the other companies launching their new Swivel G component last night a bit of a shout-out.  For those of you who aren’t familiar with them, Swivel has a great data management platform and suite of tools that you can use to easily explore and share both your data and the data published by other users.  Their launch last night incorporates a geographic component which you can use to visualize your data in a geographic context, and, if you are so inclined (and let’s face it, why wouldn’t you be? ), you can even export it back out as KML and throw it up into GeoCommons.  You can also take the CSV exported by the custom report generation feature available in GeoCommons dataset profile pages and put it into Swivel.  They’re a great group and I hope that it will be possible in the not too distant future for you to see some additional collaboration between GeoCommons and Swivel.  Plus, you just have to respect somebody that ends their Launchpad talk by doing the robot.

I also had some rather spirited discussions with a few folks after the Ignite/Launchpad event was over with on various things geospatial, specifically geodata, how to use it, and what we can do to make it better. Good food for thought and a good set of conversations all around.

For those of you who are out here at Where 2.0, by all means if you see somebody with “FortiusOne” on their badge, don’t hesitate to grab us and say hi, we’d love to meet you.  Also, as a reminder, FortiusOne will be hosting a BOF session tonight from 7:30pm-8:30pm.  We’re going to do our best to actually make it somewhat fun and engaging, and while we haven’t quite formalized the entire plan for that yet, the first step is handing out the free beer that won the pollmappr poll:

So, free Hoegaarden, discussions about open geodata, and the charming guys from FortiusOne, what could be better?

Hope to see you there!

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