Attending conferences in our own fields is easy enough, but branching out can be an eye opening experience. To see different industries converging is especially exciting, and that was exactly the message I took away from the Where 2.0 conference two weeks ago. Hosted by O’Reilly Media in San Jose, Where 2.0 brought together major players in mapping, location based search and advertising, plus a variety of companies and organizations working on everything from marketing to city planning and disaster relief. Private industry, government, and nonprofits alike discussed their innovations, discoveries, and needs. Over the past decade, web and other technologies have overlapped to create many new exciting and lucrative fields: apps have merged with mobile; PR has hit the web; news reporting has met blogging. Now geolocation is bringing everything together.

Location
Local search has been a major focus for many advertisers, but with more and more devices becoming location aware, local and proximity marketing is becoming a whole new game. The the iPhone is undoubtedly the current poster-boy of location aware devices, but it’s certainly not alone. Hundreds of new mobile devices and even more applications are bringing the power of geo-location to our fingertips. At Where 2.0, Ryan Sarver from Skyhook Wireless spoke about the updated W3C Geo-location API, and how their Loki product allows any website to determine a visitor’s precise location. Moving forward, the majority of computers you use will know where you are, opening a world of possibilities, including quickly serving up extremely focused information, and a new level of geo-targeted advertising.

Maps
Taking a step back from where a consumer is located, the web has embraced the ability to display a multitude of dynamic information on a map itself. Outside the GIS community, people often take the style, design and layout of the maps for granted. This artistic, technically challenging field of cartography is both a science and and art. Google Maps is and example of a well adopted design standard for global map viewing but many other companies are pushing the envelope in terms what is possible. Geo-extraction tools like Yahoo Placemarker and new mapping services from Nokia’s Ovi Maps are allowing developers to control more and more of the mapping experience while bridging the gap from a 2D to a 3D web, and sometimes to 4D by adding a time-based element. Marketers are going to be forced to think out of the box and innovate in the ways that they reach consumers. With these environments, the days of banner ads and popups are quickly getting wiped off the map.

The conference featured a wide ranging set of topics, sessions and speakers that explored everything from the technology used to gather map data to the future of augmented reality. Here are a great videos from some of the conference sessions:

Unleashing Innovation for the World with Maps
Michael Halbherr (Nokia), Christof Hellmis (Nokia gate5 GmbH)
The largest manufacturer of phones owns the largest geodata provider and has been busy building geo-aware web apps on Ovi. Michael will share their latest thinking.

Beyond Maps – The Hyperlocal Experience
Mark Law (MapQuest)
MapQuest has moved beyond maps and directions into a location-centric user experience with an emphasis on a hyperlocal strategy. Learn actual stats and behaviors of users, best practices for building a local network and how local data supplements a mapping experience. See the value of hyperlocal content strategy within the .com to mobile experience.

How Consumers are Really Using Location
Ted Morgan (Skyhook Wireless)
There has been an explosion of location based applications on mobile devices in the past year thanks to the opening of app stores and more advanced devices. Morgan will report on the growth and variety of location applications available today as well as how often they are being used and where.

Tricky Issues With Local Search
Danny Sullivan (Search Engine Land)
Presentation: Tricky Issues With Local Search Presentation [PPT]
As local search continues to grow, so do issues on how we represent the real work virtually. Should Google allow individuals to block their homes from Street View? How do you balance listing brick-and-mortar stores along with virtual outlets? Do we need a master control panel to clear location tracking from all our apps – and what they’ve stored on their servers?

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