Looking to Where2.0 2011

This week geo-geeks descend back to the ultimate in location and mapping conferences, Where2.0. For over 7 years Where2.0 has highlighted the cutting edge in technology, businesses, markets, and personalities that moved from primarily locative hacking into what has emerged to be a volatile and exciting community of opportunities and businesses.

With this growth has been a lot of convergence on “hot” topics such as check-ins, POI’s, and data marketplaces. Personally I think these are interesting because they’re easily understandable, and will yield short-term gains but are affected by many players that are still building their own unique silos. Likely at Where2.0 we’ll hear about who will emerge as the topmost winner in each of these niche spaces. Mobile more generally is interesting and will likely be part of almost every talk – from simple locative services, to more augmented or alternate reality, social sharing and friend-finding, and future uses as mobile payment systems.

I’m speaking on Wednesday on what I consider to be the really cutting edge and exciting future of finally enabling real collaboration through location, open data, and everyone being able to ask questions of their space and communities. I’m going to demonstrate some our new features and capabilities in GeoIQ for collaborative analysis and highlight our partners that are using GeoIQ to build a smarter world and better engaged customers. The GeoCommons community is growing up and we’re pushing it along by sharing unique capabilities with users and some surprising new opportunities for people to more easily and quickly gain access to our advanced features.

Finally, at WhereCamp on Friday and Saturday at Stanford we’ll really talk about the future of mapping – what new tools should we be looking at for faster and more interactive and dynamic visualization, standards and API’s, psychogeography, and new ways to engage global communities. As always – I’m ecstatic about Where2.0 and looking forward to seeing the usual friends and many new members of our community.