This weekend I went to the free WhereCamp unconference in the Yahoo! Sunnyvale cafeteria/conference center.
A lot of attendees arrived for the Where 2.0 conference last week, stayed through the Google Dev Conference and now WhereCamp.
All things geolocation were discussed and experimented with: cellular, ham, lidar and satellite.
The conference was well organized, with 5 parallel tracks, WiFi, free T-shirts, good cooperation, and adequate food. Where.com sponsored the BBQ dinner Saturday nite with a live band and beer kegs. The weather didn’t cooperate, being a little chilly to stay outdoors long.
Saturday
Where.com/Ulocate.com staff talked about telco partnership deals and the state of cellular geolocation. For $2.99/month, end-users can sign up for a where.com account that gives them a downloadable tracking tool and access to various gadgets available from where.com and 3rd party developers. The 3rd party devs can arrange an affiliate deal with where.com, or have a separate account signup/payment process, but use the where.com geolocation gateway to track people (lat/long, heading, velocity) and get Mapquest data. (Allen Smith is the where.com community development contact, Matt works for the parent Ulocate.com.) In turn, where.com has signed deals with Helio, Verizon and Spint, but not T-Mobile, AT&T or Nextel yet (many Nextel phones are too slow anyway.)
Often cell providers require a minimum of 1,000 downloads per month to sign a deal – so there is a chicken and egg problem when a start-up is initially promoting an app.
Some other companies that have offered tracking applications to their subscribers includes Intercasting and Bell Mobility Streethive.
Currently Java JMRS is the software used, but Flashlite would be nice.
Skyhook has a database of North American AP’s obtained by driving around. 70% of USA is covered, starting in Europe. Navtek could also get that data but would be expensive. Note that APs likely change a lot. ZoneGuy has cell tower ids.
Because the US govt requires E911 service on cell phones, surprisingly enough the USA and Canada lead the world in adopting cellular geolocation via cell tower and GPS. Additionally, if geolocation is available in Europe or Asia, then fees up to 25 cents per track make it prohibitively expensive for most applications.
For most US applications, tracking rate must be less that every 2 minutes per phone by contract. Also, tracking eats up battery life, so better to leave pluggedi into car charger.
Somebody demoed LIDAR data of the Redding area. Good for looking for older ditches, estimating volume of fill.
manning.com talked about Ajax in Action.
Nick Black did a talk on courier tracking for ecouriers.co.uk. It was interesting to see that courier traffic was proportional to distance from downtown in the day, and at nite showed the routes that couriers took homeward (or to their mosques.)
Chris Kahe of HP Federal did a talk on “How to Lie with Maps.” Cartographic “license” to identify copyright violators, KML “license” errors for various reasons.
Cartiki is a location database that anyone can edit. The name is a combination of cartography and wiki.
Anything that has a generally accepted name and is reletively stationary belongs in Cartiki. So, things like countries, cities, campuses, buildings, and rooms belong in Cartiki. Vehicles, furniture, and people do not.
Steve Coast and Nick Black did a talk on the OpenStreetMaps project. That site collects GPS points and offers 2 tools to edit the points into street maps. Started with Isle of Wight mapping party, has spread. UK data from Ordinance Survey is good but expensive.
OpenStreetMaps is looking for more volunteers for Rails hacking, helping newbies, driving, funding, importing US TIGER data, and holding conferences.
Geotude, 2 guys from Malaysia, did a slide presentation on their new, more human-readable lat/long notation system that divided each lat/long into 100 decimal boxes. It is notated as a string for human or search engine use, or stored as a compact int or long for computer use.
I had a nice conversation Saturday nite about the history and present of search with 2 VCs/VC advisors, Paul Jeffries and Bernt Wahl (ex-Infoseek). Favorite quote, “a social network start-up needs 200,000 registered users to get funding now.”
Sunday
Adam Glickman (KG6BSD) showed up with a car-full of ham radio gear for demos and a presentation on APRS. Some of the goodies were 2xYaesu VX-7R HT, a Kenwood TH-D7 HT with TNC, a Yaesu FT-897 mobile, an Alinco DM 330 MV power supply, a GPS with a 5″ display, a Microsoft Street Maps GPS, a Morse key and a RS scanner.
Many people stayed overnite and either hacked through the nite or crashed on a couch.
2 guys (one from Ordinance Survey UK, the exclusive mapping data provider there) from mapaction.org gave a fascinating talk on providing cartographic services in disaster zones, like Aceh, Kosovo, Bam, Pakistan and Merapi (Java).
Mapaction tries to fly into disaster zones before other NGOs arrive to do surveys and create maps for them to rely on. The UN mapping group usually arrives one to two weeks later with better equipment.
Volunteers train for one weekend per month. They used Garmin 76 units (upgrading to 60), VHF and SAT phones, and one or two printers to provide appropriate maps for aid workers.
They may need to introduce map errors for sensitive locations in war zones in case the maps fall into the wrong hands.
Mapping and reporting is very important to ensure that regions in disaster zones get fair, timely and equitable aid. In BAM, NGOs had to rely on a hand-drawn tourist map of downtown – totally inadequate.
They need to work out a common symbology so people don’t for example confuse Hospitals and Helipads, both which can be represented with an H.
Google Earth and Maps should be very helpful to them, but mostly to see topo and the state of towns before the disaster.
They are looking for one staff GIS member for 3 years and can pay a modest salary.
FreeEarth, Buddymapping, ufomaps, twittervision support GeoTude.
See nndb.com for a new mapping app.
An artist did a talk on mapping GPS drift. What’s interesting is that all nearby points will eventually be chosen rather than one point.
SAIC showed animations of residential areas digitized from a moving vehicle with LIDAR – laser. The animation enhanced with color was impressive. I believe the product is aimed at law enforcement to build models of cities. I think the program was called Urban Reality 1.2. They are in the business of selling LIDAR pods.
Bernt talked about one of his projects, imap.com, involved in neighbourhood mapping.
A Yahoo! rep named Ismail talked a little about the SF Brickhouse innovation center that Catherina Fake manages.
In the Town Hall-type meeting afterwards, the organizers said they had adequate sponsorship for the costs. The network connection had some filtering, so a suggestion was made to investigate that next time. Some attendees suggested structuring talks overall to be more inclusive of newbie speakers.
One attendee suggested that everybody do 2 mashups right after the conference, and said, “A map without a mashup is sad.”
Garmin to build a third Taiwan plant
JoS BoS: Regional Mapping Software
Parallax GPS Receiver Module (for Basic Stamp 2)
Google to harness satellite power for an Amazon tribe
