Where 2.0 – Day 2: Part 1
by Google Earth Blog on Apr.01, 2010, under 3D Models, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, California, Denmark, England, Germany, Google Earth News, Google Earth Tips, Google Sky, Google maps, Hawaii, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Natural Landmarks, Netherlands, Sightseeing, Street Views, USA
The morning of Where 2.0: Day Two kicked off with keynote speeches from a variety of people and companies.
First up was Blaise Aguera y Arcas, architect of Bing Maps, who showed off some of the features he first unveiled at TED a few months ago. In addition, they launched a few new features for Bing Maps. In particular:
• Bing Maps World Tour App Launch: Just about every month, Bing Maps gets a makeover in the form of new map imagery for locations worldwide. The World Tour map app brings these updates to life using the Bing Map Apps framework, Silverlight and Azure.
• Bing Maps Oodle App Launch: Oodle.com, one of the fastest growing classifieds services is creating an app that will map rental housing on Bing Maps which will be available today. The Oodle Rentals app will pull-in Oodle data, allowing users to look at various rental housing available from Oodle.com.
• Bing Maps Foursquare App Launch: Last week at SES New York, we announced our partnership with foursquare and plans to roll out the foursquare Everywhere app on Bing Maps in the coming weeks. Today, the app will be live and ready for use.
More info about these new features can be found on the Bing Maps Blog.
Next was Tim O'Reilly (the man that created Where 2.0) and Chris Vein, of the City of San Francisco. They discussed how technology is shaping the government of the city.
Following Tim and Chris was Martin Lefebure of Parrot, showing off the "AR Drone". The AR Drone is a quadricopter (4 blades) with two cameras on board. It's controlled via your iPhone over wifi, and it streams live video back to the phone as it's flying. Here is a video of it in action:
It was still a big buggy, but could be really cool once it comes out.
Next was Tasso Roumeliotis of Wavemarket, who hinted at some big things coming. With 82% of phones being non-smartphone, it keeps location-based applications limited to a relatively small audience. They have the ability to discover location on 150+M phones using a cloud-based API, using similar technology as e911. No word on how exactly they do that.
The final speaker of the first session was Michael Jones, Google's Chief Technology Advocate. He didn't unveil anything new, but had some impressive statistics:
• Google Earth has been installed by over 600 million people
• There are 500 billion photos online with no blurred faces, yet governments make them blur faces from a few hundred thousand StreetView photos.
• There are 350,000 websites powered by the Google Maps API, with many others that use it a little bit, like for an embedded map on their "contact" page.
• Google Maps is the second-largest map provider, behind only the collection of Google Maps API sites.
• There were more than 500 million map edits made by users in 2009
• More people use Google Earth on the iPhone than on the Mac. I'm not sure if that's a plug for the iPhone or a dig at the Mac.
More great speakers are coming up soon including Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, Othan Laraki of Twitter, Michael Halbherr of Nokia and Dennis Crowley of foursquare. It should be an interesting day!