where 2.0 2008

BURLINGAME, Calif.--Think of it as crowdsourced cartography.

In about three weeks, Yahoo plans to launch a project called Corrections in which users of the Flickr photo-sharing site can help with a thorny computing problem: providing the name of the place where a photo was taken.

Flickr has 68 million photos that have been "geotagged" with latitude and longitude coordinates, said Dan Catt, who works on geographic work at Flickr, in a speech at the Where 2.0 conference here. Coordinates are fine for computers, but human beings looking at a Web site generally prefer place names to … Read more

Dash, which makes the very cool Dash Express GPS gizmo for cars (review), has opened up an API so developers can build new apps for the unit. On announcement, according to a company press release, several apps will be available: a homes-for-sale app from Coldwell Banker, a calendar app that can read appointments from Outlook, Google and automatically route you to them, a weather app from WeatherBug, a speed trap app from Trapster, and Mediaguide, which can display the songs that just played on local radio stations.

I want the Trapster app. Not only is this the most useful of … Read more

Tom Coates, creator of Yahoo's Fire Eagle data location broker, took the stage at Where 2.0 to talk up some of the cool new apps that use the platform. "Fire Eagle is nothing," Coates said, without the apps. Nearly all the apps he mentioned are listed on the Fire Eagle's Gallery page (log-in required), but what I thought was more interesting were the apps he mentioned that don't support Fire Eagle yet, but should. Or that simply don't exist:

The Spot Satellite Messenger is a handheld device that reports your position, anywhere in … Read more

BURLINGAME, Calif.--Geography buffs tantalized by the quantity of geographic information hidden away among countless municipal computer systems have something to cheer about.

The new version 9.3 of the dominant geographic information system (GIS) software, sold by a company called ESRI, now makes it a relatively simple matter to expose that data for easy consumption over the Internet.

"We are engineering it so it plugs in. It becomes effectively a support mechanism to the geoweb," said ESRI founder and Chief Executive Jack Dangermond, announcing the change at the Where 2.0 conference here.

Showing one example of … Read more

BURLINGAME, Calif.--At Where 2.0, Poly9 CEO Greg Sadetsky took the stage to pitch his Flash-based Google Earth competitor, Free Earth. Unlike other 3D mapping apps from Google and Microsoft, it does not require any client-side downloads (assuming the user's computer already has a Flash plug-in).

That means it's mashable into other sites, and embeddable in other pages. It is, for example, the mapping display engine underneath the Twittervision Globe, and can be used to create clever globe widgets like the 3D Flickr Globe, that are embeddable anywhere.

At Where 2.0, to further the message, the … Read more

BURLINGAME, Calif.--Google has begun testing face-blurring technology for its Street View service, responding to privacy concerns from the search giant's all-seeing digital camera eye.

The technology uses a computer algorithm to scour Google's image database for faces, then blurs them, said John Hanke, director of Google Earth and Google Maps, in an interview at the Where 2.0 conference here.

Google has begun testing the technology in Manhattan, the company announced on its LatLong blog. Ultimately, though, Hanke expects it to be used more broadly.

Dealing with privacy--both legal requirements and social norms--is hard but necessary, Hanke … Read more

Twelve companies pitched to the crowd at the Where 2.0 conference here Monday night. Each had only five minutes to make their case. A full rundown of the companies is on the official Launchpad page, but here's the Webware takeaway on the most interesting of the dozen apps (not counting Whrrl, which we covered last week):

Orbster makes location-based games for mobile phones. The company was showing off GPS Mission. The cool thing is a Web-based mission designer lets individuals or communities create games based on their own knowledge of their locales. Game players have to collect virtual &… Read more

Planning trips on your Nokia smartphone is about to get a lot easier. Today at Where 2.0, the Finnish cell phone manufacturer announced Maps on Ovi, a Web component designed to complement its mobile mapping software, Nokia Maps 2.0. As part of the Ovi brand of Internet services, which includes the Nokia Music Store and N-Gage gaming platform, Maps on Ovi will allow users to plan their trips on their desktop or laptop and then synchronize (automatically or manually) it with their smartphones. Conversely, if you're already out on the road, you can record routes and points … Read more

I'm at the Where 2.0 conference, looking forward to the Launchpad session tonight where I hope to see several cool new geo companies. Ahead of that I had a chance to meet with some other firms building new geo services: Plazes and Praized.

Plazes has been around for a while. It's a service that helps you report your location so your friends and followers can see it. The latest updates revolve around new input and output methods for the service, according to Plazes' co-founder, Felix Petersen. On the input side, an iPhone app is … Read more