I’ll be in Silicon Valley next week, attending the Where 2.0 Conference. This conference, in its second year, brings together mash-up map hackers, open source geospatial enthusiasts, and corporate GIS developers and users.
Location-aware technology is a hot topic right now, as the grassroots crowd and the corporate types eye each other suspiciously, looking for both opportunity and danger. As I have written before, location-based technology of all types is having and will continue to have a major impact on AEC design and deployment technology.
Event sponsors include Microsoft, Google, Autodesk, ESRI, and MetaCarta—all companies covered in AECnews. The speakers are a widely mixed lot, with an equal dose of corporate, academic and hacker. Google is holding a briefing for the press the day before, so there might be some news to report. But then again, this is Google, a company that plays by its own rules, so no one outside the Googleplex knows for sure.
--RSN