A new feature for our conferences: Podcasts! Our debut offering is an interview Where 2.0 program co-chair Brady Forrest conducted with Robot Co-op’s Josh Petersen.
Josh talks about his “network of networking sites” which includes 43 Things, 43 Places, and 43 People. At Where 2.0, Josh will be presenting on 43 Places, where a user can list up to 43 places they’d like to go during their life. The site allows people to share stories about places they’ve been and read stories about places they’d like to visit.
A scavenger hunt for the new millennium and disaster preparedness are two new additions to Where 2.0, a juxtaposition illustrating just how pervasive location-aware technology is becoming in our lives:
Program co-chair Brady Forrest has all the deets about Pixie Hunt, a game organized for Where 2.0 participants. Teams use cameraphones, Flickr, SMS, and geotagging to add a whole new level of fun to the scavenger hunt we played at summer sleepovers back in the day.
Our new Where 2.0 closing keynote, Cartography Commando Style, FEMA’s Field GIS, will be delivered by Ron Langhelm of the US Department of Homeland Security.
This talk will provide a vision into the emergency management/geospatial support setting, looking at the work area, staffing issues, unique customer base, urgent product requirements, and FEMA’s plans for future geospatial support.
Ought to be a corker. If you haven’t seen the Where 2.0 Conference schedule lately, I encourage you to look it over–it’s a diverse program, well stocked with eye *and* brain candy.
We’ve been gently urging business folks to embark on the good ship OSCON for the last few years. Business-oriented sessions and tutorials have become a schedule staple; last year we held the Open Source Business Review. This year, OSCON has gathered a full head of business steam: Not only are we offering the O’Reilly Radar Executive Briefing that I’ve mentioned before, but program chair Nat Torkington has put together a full Business Track, which nicely complements the Executive Briefing.
Bringing geeks and suits together makes for a good attendee mix too, something we’re becoming keenly aware of in the conferences group of late. It may sound odd or corny, but there really is a tangible amping-up of the creative energy at conferences where two (or more, sometimes) insular communities converge.
The O’Reilly German office is sponsoring an open source programming contest, running through August 15, with sponsored prizes (thanks to Zend Technologies, Novell, MySQL, eZ Systems, and various magazines) worth more than 20.000 euros–winners will be announced at EuroOSCON.
If you have a programming tool for a web calendar, mash-up project, and/or CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart), be sure to enter! Contest judges are looking for creative, in-depth programming solutions; note that the the calendar and the CAPTCHA are to be programmed in PHP.
(Also note that the web site list information in German only–if you would like information in English, please contact Barbara Mueller in our German office at barbara@oreilly.de)
Take a listen to William Quigley’s presentation from ETel 2006. From the ITC show notes:
Are the RBOCs (Regional Bell Operating Companies) going away? Unlikely. Through reinvention and reinvestment, they will retain a strong position. There may not be openings to steal market share from the big guys, but William Quigley of Clearstone Venture Partners believes there will be plenty of peripheral opportunities for the innovative entrepreneur.
It’s The Economist’s turn to ponder “what exactly is Web 2.0?” gleaned, I suspect, from the Where 2.0 preview for press we held recently that took a little detour into a Web 2.0 discussion.
Attending Where 2.0 this year? Be sure to come a day early for an extra helping of geo fun at the (gasp!) Googleplex itself. Our friends at Google have put together a special event for the first 100 Where 2.0 participants, “an afternoon of good food, cool map demos, and a chance to chat up the Google Geo development team.” If you’ve registered for Where and can c’mon down to Google’s Deo Developers Day, be sure to sign up for it right away–seats are going fast.
As mentioned on BoingBoing and in The Guardian, this weekend, OpenStreetMaps is mapping Manchester, a project with the mash-up moniker,”Mapchester”:
Mapchester is a collaborative ‘wikimap’ project, a test case for OpenStreetMap that focuses on one city. It will involve a Mapping Weekender, when Manchester is mapped in a weekend!
Hope we’ll hear more about this project when Steve Coast of OpenStreetMap presents at Where 2.0.
Steady now. We’re almost ready to unleash the EuroOSCON line-up, almost. I can tell you that the schedule is looking excellent. As a little preview by looking back at last year’s event, here is IT Conversation’s audio of Alan Cox’s presentation on security. From ITC’s summary:
Security and validation are critical issues in computing, and the next fifty years will be harder than the last. There are a number of proven programming techniques and design approaches which are already helping to harden our modern systems, but each of these must be carefully balanced with usability in order to be effective. In this talk, Alan Cox, fellow at Red Hat Linux, explores the future of what may be the biggest threat facing software engineers, the unverified user.
“If you don’t know the way to San Jose, you may want to keep an eye on the Where 2.0 conference in the heart of Silicon Valley next month,” writes Jeanette Borzo in her excellent overview of the conference:
Where 2.0 2005 Exhibit Hall
Taking place in San Jose on June 13 and 14, O’Reilly Media Inc.’s second annual Where 2.0 conference is sure to be - at least for two days - the geographic hub of interesting things happening around location technology and its overlap with the Internet. The rich geographical data and functionalities that are now flourishing online are creating new business opportunities not only for startups but also for existing firms that can see the direction of current location-technology trends - and move quickly to capitalize on them.
ETech 2006’s theme of “attention economy” is still resonating, as this article By Teresa Williams notes:
…Linda Stone, a former Microsoft executive, warned us as far back as the late 1990s that we were becoming victims of what she called “continuous partial attention.” She reiterated this theme as recently as March at the Emerging Technology Conference, insisting that by “staying tuned” to so many technologies at once we aren’t giving our full attention to anything.
chromatic expands on the notes he took from Scott Ambler’s MySQL Users Conference presentation on database agility, and he asks: “Is Your Database Agile Enough?”:
If the quality of your data is important, are you testing it?
If your business (or your understanding of your business) changed, could you change your database schemas quickly and easily?
Sue and Jesse at VerySpatial have posted a podcast of a phone-in Where 2.0 conference preview with co-chairs Nat Torkington and Brady Forrest and O’Reilly honcho Tim O’Reilly.
Notes fearless co-leader Nat Torkington over on the O’Reilly Radar:
As the number of mapping platforms increases, standards start to be more important. If upcoming wants to offer access to its database for people to include in their own mashups or applications, what data format or web services API standards should they adhere to? Upcoming has chosen to use GeoRSS, a light-weight standard rapidly gaining traction. But there are others …
The press release was picked up by NewsForge:
Anonymous Reader writes “MySQL Users Conference 2006, SANTA CLARA, Calif. - April 27, 2006 - MySQL AB, developer of the world’s most popular open source database, today introduced MySQL Forge, a new Web site and community directory designed to encourage and support active MySQL-related open source development. Located at https://forge.mysql.com/ MySQL Forge is a central online resource for all MySQL users and developers to communicate, collaborate and share MySQL code and applications.
The MySQL Gang
Longtime FOO (and always dapper) Julian Cash turned his joyful lens on speakers and other participants at the MySQL Users Conference for the Human Creativity Project.
“MySQL Forge allows members to share articles and tutorials through the site’s wiki, post and maintain projects in its directory, and offer sample code snippets in its repository,” notes this article.
MySQL AB on Thursday unveiled a community site for users and developers to discuss, collaborate on and share code and applications for the company’s namesake open-source database.
MySQL Forge gives members the opportunity to share articles and tutorials through the site’s wiki, to post and maintain projects in its directory, and to offer sample code snippets in its repository.
Writes Antone Gonsalves over at TechWeb News:
HP will provide consulting, integration and support services to subscribers of MySQL Network. HP on Tuesday said it plans to roll out next month consulting, integration and support services for customers implementing the MySQL open source database.
An article from the ECT news Staff:
Open source database developer MySQL has introduce MySQL Forge, a Web site and community directory designed to encourage MySQL users and developers to communicate, collaborate, and share MySQL code and applications.
MySQL also announced new support for Ubuntu, a version of the Linux operating system that is gaining popularity among open source developers.
“Both MySQL and Ubuntu benefit from extensive open source community development and usage,” said Ubuntu project founder Mark Shuttleworth in a keynote address Thursday at the MySQL Users Conference 2006.
Where 2.0 program co-chair Nathan Torkington has begun profiling the people, companies and project that will be feature at the conference in June. First up: Skyhook Wireless:
Skyhook’s technology lets any device determine its position by triangulating wifi signals. You might have heard of Skyhook’s technology before, as part of the open source Intel research project Place Lab. Skyhook represents the venture-backed commercial extension of this technology.
Tim O’Reilly has just posted a few notes related to his keynote presentation from the MySQL Users Conference last Wednesday:
For my talk at the MySQL User Conference, Roger Magoulas, the director of O’Reilly’s research group, put together a few slides about the state of the database job market, with a focus on MySQL. The data comes from analysis of job postings from all of the online job sites, which we receive as part of a data sharing arrangement with SimplyHired. (Just as we do with the computer book market, we’ve built a data warehouse for technical job data and trends, which helps to put some “hard numbers” into the O’Reilly Radar.)
As the copy on ITC notes:
Hossein Eslambolchi, president of AT&T Global Networking Technology services, believes in a future of intelligent, open networks and smart devices. He expects a transformation from existing legacy systems and applications to a seamless, ubiquitous virtual world with multimedia applications…
In this short talk, Hossein describes the forces driving a transformation of the communications industry and the challenges and opportunities it presents. He outlines how AT&T is aligning itself to face this new world reality.
More Web 2.0 2005 audio is also available.
