Looking Forward to 2011

I love January. The cold weather that forces you to enjoy the warmth of a fire, the crispness of a morning snowfall, and the feeling that you’ve just hit the reset button and anything is possible. We’ve rested from the holidays, recovered from our families and festivities, and we see the horizon of 4 seasons and 12 months laying before us, beckoning imagined wonders of new ideas, friends, and opportunities realized.

As with every new year, the community is buzzing with predictions of maturing markets and potential new trends. 2010 was widely considered the “Year of Geo” and definitely demonstrated very excited and numerous launched companies and products that featured location, maps, and mobile as key features.

At FortiusOne, we launched a number of new features and partnerships that already have set the stage for an exhilarating 2011. Appcelerator’s Titanium+Geo, powered by GeoIQ, will provide over 100,000 developers with in-depth analytics on the usage of their mobile applications. In December, our 12 days of Analytics gave a sneak peek to our industry changing collaborative analytics. And we have a wide array of new features, products, and amazing customers that will be launching their tools in the beginning of the year.

Sharing Ideas and Technology

In 2011, there are even more location conferences, but I’m particularly looking forward to the good ol’ ones like Where2.0 and WhereCamp. We’re speaking at Where2.0 on some yet to be announced news, and even hosting a WhereCampDC for the first East Coast WhereCamp! FOSS4G 2011 and State of the Map both come to the US and will be hosted in the town of our newest engineering office in Denver – so we’ll have a strong showing there to share with the community on open-source software and open-data.

Last year we open-sourced our geocoder and it’s been picked up by several organizations and continues to provide the best, open geocoding out there for unlimited geocoding. This year we’ll continue working with the community on making it an open and powerful technology – as well as a number of open-source projects we’ll be releasing soon that will help information and knowledge sharing and analysis all over the world.

Trending…

With 2010 a year where “Geo” entered the vernacular of companies and consumers, there is certainly a lot that is set to change. Lets see just a few possible trends we’ll see over the next 12 months.

Consumer Mobile and Privacy

Clearly mobile phone geolocation services are becoming nearly ubiquitous. Every application is incorporating some amount of geo, from social networks, to music and games, to note taking and to-do applications. We’re each creating a continuous and highly-accurate stream of our activies and locations. People will want to better integrate this capability to help bring them better contextual awareness of their environment, what to do, where to do it, and remember what they did. But as a consequence, we’ll begin seeing both real and perceived issues relating to privacy of this data. So far, the government and oversight organizations have only watched the increasing adoption of location-technologies, but they will need to come in soon to provide guidance, assurance, and verification of the protection and handling of this sensitive data. Hopefully in 2011 the dialogue can grow to share ideas, practicies and prevent any catastrophes, but likely there will be several major news stories about malicious activity due to leaked location data that will cause an immediate backlash.

Commercial Data -> Open Data

Open data has moved past a questionable possibility into a definite reality. Crowd-sourced data, opened information, and free services have dramatically reduced the barriers to accessing vast amounts of quality resources on places, environment, and people. There is, and will continue to be a profitable data market – but at a dramatically decreasing value. Open data is proving to be sufficiently accurate and more usable by companies, products, and organizations that want to utilize information in interesting and novel ways without concern of high costs or inappropriate use. Through 2011 we’ll see more free and open sources for what used to be considered very expensive, and while we won’t see an end to data markets – there will always be people that need complete hand holding and service support – there will not be a need for commercial data for a majority of location application and services.

Visualization -> Analysis

Visualization has increasingly become a way to deal with “big data” that is available through the plethora of API’s, social networks, and open government data. Polymaps opened a lot of eyes to the capabilities of rich mapping without Flash using SVG. There is a lot more to do here – maybe never to the full extent that Flash can do, but also many that it can’t do as well and be more integrated with the web. HTML5 client-side support, geolocation specification, workers, and other technologies are going to make our experience using location and mobile applications richer and more integrated. GeoIQ already supports output to at least 15 file formats – most of which users aren’t even aware of – which forms a base for quickly building new and innovative applications.

Beyond just visualizing the data, the industry is maturing and beginning to ask deeper questions of the data. Analysis will become more mainstream. Users want answers – like Quora for data. Traditionally analysis has been limited to a small number of trained experts using complex tools. In 2011, this will move out of the back-office, users and citizens will want to understand and gain insight into their own behaviors, which will only further enable understanding by organizations in how to better engage and provide valuable services.

A new decade…

Regardless if these predictions are correct or not – the next year, and the next decade – are clearly going to be incredibly exhilerating. We have a lot planned in even just the next few months – and not doubt the unforeseen changes that we will all experience will open even more possiblities. I’m looking forward to our careening adventure!