Flutterby™! : Where Camp 2010

What a great two days! You know how the good bits of a conference are hanging out in the halls, talking with people about the cool stuff they're doing, sharing information and suggestions and brain power? That was WhereCamp 2010, except that instead of being in the halls that was what was happening in the rooms.

And I'm not even much of a geography nerd. Thanks to Eric for dragging me down there, Anselm Hook for putting the whole thing together, the folks from Google for the facilities and the food (which was the dominant cost), USGS, O'Reilly, Urban Mapping, geographic data and services, Four Square, whom you know, Krillion, location based shopping search, SimpleGeo, helping you build your geolocation infrastructure, Quova, geolocation from IP addresses and other stuff, makerlab, a Portland Oregon incubator space, Waze, crowd-sourced real-time traffic information and maps, Bing, the searcn engine that wants to be Google, ESRI, makers of the mapping software everyone uses if they can afford it, pii2010, August 17-19 in Seattle, on privacy, identity and innovation.

First guy I talked to? Flying small electric UAVs over Malaysia and neighboring countries to collect high quality aerial imagery without cloud cover. What sort of applications might this have? Well, imagine that you've got towns built out over shallow bays, and you're a post office, trying to figure out how best to deliver mail to these addresses.

I've got gobs of notes to go through, and various people to continue discussions with. One more note now, though: Sunday morning, Jeff, of Cartagen Knitter fame among other things, was trying to figure out how to fly his trash bag balloons in a little more wind than he was used to, so we sat down to try to build a lighter than air kite to capture some additional aerial images of the 1300 Crittenden portion of Google's campus. Here are some pictures from Jeff Warren's photo stream of our efforts on "Black Knight 1".