After four years of attending the conference, I think I’ve finally got my head round one thing -  it is about B2C and C2C applications. This contrasts with the vast majority of mainstream GIS conferences that are almost exclusively focused on B2B applications.  This is of course a gross oversimplification - there are obvious crossovers. For instance, Google Enterprise is taking technology designed for B2C into B2B - with Google Earth now touted as the corporate geodata repository.

Significant announcements at the conference included the sale of Where Inc., a start-up little more than two years old specialising in indoor positioning, to EBay for a rumoured US$150m.  US$25m first round investment has been secured by Factual, a location data aggregator with customers including Newsweek and Facebook.

My maths on the investments covered in presentations suggests that over US$200m of new investment has been secured over the last six months alone, and the acquisitions in the same period have probably been worth double that.  The scramble to invest in location seems to be based on the recognition (or hope!) that knowing about proximity, whether of consumers to businesses, or consumer to consumer, is going to be a significant contributor to driving next generation commerce. 

So what some of the biggest players in the B2C location space up to?

Foursquare

The main conference kicked off with Dennis Crowley discussing the ‘Future of Location’ with Robert Scobel of Rackspace (the open source cloud platform provider).  Dennis, building his third successful business whilst still in his twenties, is the brains behind Foursquare - possibly the fastest growing location-based social networking business on the planet.  Foursquare describe their proposition as “check-in, find your friends, unlock your city”.  The idea of being  ‘mayor’ of your local Starbucks was something I could never see catching on but they have grown from zero to 8.5m users worldwide, and have over 10,000 developers using their API in just over 2 years.

These volumes have allowed them to develop symbiotic relationships with Facebook and Twitter. For instance, if I check-in on Foursquare my friends are alerted to my location on Facebook.  They have also won straight commercial deals with blue chip retailers such as Gap and Vodaphone in the UK. Furthermore, Marks and Spencer recently ran a fundraiser to coincide with the London Marathon by which, for every check-in on Foursquare at a store, they donated £1 (NZ$2) to the Breakthrough breast cancer charity.

Dennis was the first of many to talk about serendipity – defined according to the Oxford English dictionary as “the phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things by accident”.  One example of “serendipitous” functionality, now being developed in Foursquare, is being presented on arrival in a new city with advice on places to go and things to do, deduced from your behaviour in your home city.  Dennis also sees potential in “future behaviour” – using the app to tell your friends “I’m going to be in Denver next weekend”.  On the basis of the theory that, with so many users there must be something in it, I guess I’m going to have to try it out. You can watch the presentation on You Tube:

Google

Another major announcement, by Marissa Meyer from Google, was the launch of Google Earth builder. This is Google’s mapping platform in the cloud, and part of their drive to ‘productise’ their entire geo platform. This product will allow customers to upload their own vector data in standard formats like shape and MapInfo tab as well as raster data, including arranging ‘sidecar’ files (of metadata).  The management functions include:

• storage (presumably in Google’s own proprietary non-relational structure)
• processing (including handling projections)
• styling (symbolisation and dynamic rendering).

The final element of the workflow is publishing, where WMS will be supported as well as Earth and Map APIs.  An interesting feature is that you can ‘mash up’ Google’s public content with organisational content.  The product will be available in Q3 this year. Commercials were unsurprisingly not discussed but will obviously  be priced to attempt a rapid ‘landgrab’ from traditional GIS suppliers in their corporate and Government heartland.  See the presentation on You Tube.

When you add this to Jack Dangermond’s comments in a later plenary about ESRI having “…jumped in last year in a major way to the cloud…” it really looks like game on for control of the geo-cloud over the next year. Here is Jack’s presentation on You Tube.

Facebook

I never did figure out the difference between keynotes and plenary presentations but Justin Shaffer, Places and Events product manager at Facebook presented a keynote “Extending the Graph with Location and Time”.  For the uninitiated “the Graph” in Facebook-speak is the core of the system, providing a uniform representation of, for example, people, photos, events and pages and the connections between them (e.g., friend relationships, shared content, and photo tags). 

Much of what Facebook are doing around location borrows from others - what makes it interesting is how quickly than can build “capital” using their enormous user community.  They believe check-in is less about where you are but more about who you are with - so it’s the intersection of people, place and time that is of most interest.  However, they are offering merchants a platform for deals based on where Facebook users are currently located, and are building up a geospatial database of socially-interesting places.  Their approach is proclaimed to be crowd sourcing-led, however it is interesting that, although not mentioned in their presentation, they are working with outfits like Factual (see later) who are very much about creating definitive data. See the  You Tube video.

Bing

Microsoft has big plans for location too.  Blaise Aguera y Arcas, one of the least pretentious and deeply thoughtful of all the presenters, talked about the ‘Read/Write World’.  What they are developing is a hugely ambitious attempt to integrate together vector map tiles, nadir aerial imagery, birdseye (oblique aerial images), streetside (Bing’s street level imagery) backpack cams, user panoramas, flickr photos, indoor videos, 3D models, DSM/DTMs and 3D city (CAD) models on a global scale into a single database.

Their vision also includes single renderers for all platforms based on HTML5 and CSS 3.0. Don’t bet against them pulling this off, their pockets are deep and they are desperate to close the gap on Google. They appear to see location as one niche in which they can achieve competitive advantage by technological leadership and emphasising quality, completeness and currency.  Their increasingly close relationship with ESRI and Navteq may also be significant.  This presentation is on You Tube.