My Google Map Blog

For the past few years (2009, 2008, 2007, 2006), Frank has attended the Where 2.0 conference. I had the pleasure of attending with him in 2007 and we had a great time. Now that he's busy sailing around beautiful places like Bonaire, I'll be taking his place this year.

Where 2.0 happening March 30-April 1, 2010 at the San Jose Marriott in San Jose, California. Where 2.0 brings together the people, projects, and issues building the new technological foundations and creating value in the location industry. Developers, technologists, CTOs, researchers, geographers, academics, business developers, and entrepreneurs come together to debate what's viable now, and what's lurking just below the radar. Register before February 9 and save $300. Take an additional 25% off when using discount code: whr10ge

I recently had a chance to speak with Brady Forrest, Program Chair for Where 2.0, to talk about some of what we can expect at this years event.

You can find the full list of speakers on this page, but here are a few that he felt were worth pointing out:

• Dennis Crowley from FourSquare, Josh Williams from Gowalla and Jeremy Stoppelman from Yelp will all be there. Many people expect location-based services to explode in 2010, and these three companies are leading the way. Increasingly interesting game mechanics are expected to be developed this year, as turning these services into a more game-like experience will help to draw in more casual users.

• Speaking of Twitter, Elad Gil, Raffi Krikorian and Othman Laraki will be there. Of note is Ryan Sarver, formerly of Skyhook Wireless, who will be speaking on the "Increasing Usefulness of Location Data Geostreams".

• John Henke of Google will be there. In the past, Google has been known to release some major developments at Where 2.0, such as the release of StreetView in 2007. No word on any big announcements, but it's always a possibility.

• Blaise Agüera y Arcas, the "Architect of Bing Maps" and the creator of Photosynth will be there to discuss user-generated and crowdsourced maps.

• Sean Askay, who created the very impressive "Map the Fallen" KML will be discussing his work on that project.

There are literally dozens of other speakers and events, and it should be a great week. If you plan on attending, leave a comment or send me an email and we can try to meet up. Hope to see you there!