Ignite Where (with Launchpad) May 28, 2007

This year at Where 2.0 we are going to have an Ignite. One is a series of Ignite talks, just like we did at the Web 2.0 Expo. The other is a Launchpad event for geo-related startups to launch.

These events will be mingled together. There will be 16 total talks each lasting only 5 minutes. The Ignite speakers will each get 20 slides that automatically advance every 15 seconds. The Launchpad participants will each get 5 minutes of demo (with a max of one slide). The Ignite and LaunchPad are open to the public (just as the Ignite Expo was). It will be held at the San Jose Fairmont Hotel on the evening of May 28th. Doors will open at 6:45 and the first company will go onstage at 7:00PM. The audience will vote on the best talks with Mozes. Two talks (whether demos or presentations) will do a reprise on the mainstage during the conference. If you wish to participate submit a talk or demo.

The schedule is not complete, but these are who we have signed up so far.

Launchpad Demos

1. 
   FatDoor is a neighborhood-based community social network. It aims to help you find out more about your neighbors.



2. GeoCommons is a community that enables the collective creation of intelligent maps. With access to a huge new world of geographic data and infinite ways to combine it, GeoCommons empowers you with the tools to gain and share insight across your neighborhood or across the globe.



3. Dopplr is a calendar and location focused social network. It helps you answer the question: "Who do I know in *this* city right now?"



4. Swivel is a place for data. Now there will be support for geodata.

Ignite Talks

1. Christopher Prezeau (Tele Atlas, ) - The Amazing Adventures of (Mobile) Mapping the World
Ever wonder how your car’s navigation system knows you’re in the wrong lane at a toll booth? Or, how the information about where the nearest Chinese restaurant can appear with a few clicks of a mouse on your Internet map? And, how does the ambulance know where the emergency it needs to get to is? I know. I work for a leading digital map company and I don’t just know how we build these maps – I know what it means when we say we’re “mapping the world” because that’s what I do. My team literally drives the road to help ensure every new neighborhood, every highway exit, every park, and really any place you might come across in the real world – is in our map database. Our innovative mobile mapping vans even capture the road slope and curvature so you can calculate if you really can pass that slow driver – right down to the exact speed you’ll need to do so.
2. Bernt Wahl (U.C Berkeley, ) - Neighborhood Maps
Factle Maps: Mapping Out the Nation’s Neighborhoods CET Technology Breakthrough Competition – IT Category As Internet and demographic information becomes more localized, there is an increased need for data that defines these regions. Through developing and applying 15-step process, Factle Maps generates high-quality datasets of neighborhood names and their corresponding boundaries .
3. Amber Bieg (Friends of the Urban Forest, OSGEO) - San Francisco Tree Map
San Francisco Tree Map When Green gets Geeky, trees get mapped. How Friends of the Urban Forest, a non-profit tree group dives into osgeo and the difference it makes.
4. Luistxo Fernandez (Tagzania, CodeSyntax) - Tagzania: There's No Place Called Nowhere
Tagzania is a social mapping application, very tied to tagging, folksonomy. If Europe is some sort of periphery as seen from the SF Bay area, we're in the periphery of the periphery, a small Basque company pushing a global website, from somewhere in Northern Spain. But geography is not constrained to a central point, specially since there's Internet, and this European and 'fringe' viewpoint might be interesting: Europe's multilingual, multi-national, full of governments not very friendly with the idea of opening public cartography...
5. David Troy (Twittervision, Popvox) - Twittervision: Location, Entertainment and Presence
Twittervision was launched as an experiment to help visualize traffic on the emerging service Twitter. But as it has evolved, it's become clear that it sits at the intersection of blogging, presence, location-based services, and entertainment. A grammar to support Twittervision location updates was introduced, and now it's become clear that other extensions to the platform can be made to support additional capabilities. Twitter and Twittervision point the way towards horizontal, federated approaches of providing rich presence and location based services, and we'll explore what's happened so far and spark some ideas about what might be ahead.

Official Website: http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/where2007/view/e_sess/12351