I didn't buy the first iPhone.  I would have if it allowed me to take my existing SIM and pop it in, but that wasn't an unlocked option.  The locked-in two-year at&t commitment to voluntarily imprison myself was luring for sure, but in the end I converted to a skeptical technology laggard in exchange for freedom.  Despite the lockdown I avoided, Apple has nonetheless reached the mobile masses and some industry guru's argue they've changed the mobile industry.  Certainly, convincing at&t to give up applications power and taxes in exchange for exclusivity is one win; a touch screen changed the UI paradigm; and Apple is the first company in history to get people using the Internet on a mobile device in any meaningful volume.  All of these may be leading to changes, but for the most part, the US mobile market is still in the third world of development when it comes to consumer wireless freedom-of-choice. 

Here's a what if scenario though...  The 3G iPhone is due June 9.  What if Apple somehow works their magic and sells it as an unlocked, unsubsidized device in addition to carrier-subsidized options?   Would you pay the freedom premium?  I would.  And I imagine millions of others would as well.  And that would fix the US mobile market because consumer purchasing patterns would change through growing knowledge that mobile devices and their applications are available to purchase from alternative retailers and lifestyle points of sale beyond limited carrier shelf-spaces.   That would change everything, for everyone...

First off, an interesting company, and a friendly group of fellows...  The company was founded by two Amazon.com developers who wrote rank & rate systems.  Founded in January 2006, based in Seattle, with 35 employees, and backed by an A-series round from the Kleiner Perkins, the company has every intention of building a direct-to-consumer, long-term sustainable business around local advertising revenues supported by a free mobile download and online service for social places discovery and event sharing. 

With roots at Amazon, the company has extended that knowledge to mobile location, and have built a patent-pending passive location reporting system based on aspatial rate & rank reviews.  The technology has two components, 1) a location agent client for Java devices and the iPhone that publishes coordinates and recognizes when a device is geographically idle (if it is stagnant, then the software shuts down, thus preserving battery power), and 2) a server-side machine learning algorithm that reports & rates places visited by users who contribute rate & rank data.  This contributed data then becomes a sort of "differential correction" that reduces inherent error and uncertainty with location determinations.  Very neat technology!      

I'm at Where 2.0 today only. Here are a few notable quotes paraphrased but in context with some comments...

At O’Reilly we’re interested in finding things in the underground and helping them become mainstream. I think Where 2.0 is now mainstream.

-Brady Forest, Where 2.0 Chairman, During the May 13 welcome

[Translation, Brady found himself.  Just kidding.  What he means is Where 2.0 is prime time now.  The audience here is 3 times the size what it was when I first attended, and no longer a geohacker-only event, but now a mainstream geospatial gathering.] 

What is refreshing about Everyblock is that they’re feeding me data instead of asking me to give them my data.

-Adrian Holovaty, Everyblock,  …On the topic of public information/building permits data from local governments

I have two objectives here today, 1) to tell you what we’re doing, and 2) to wake you up. There is no mobile internet, just one internet. Maps on Ovi is a platform for us to extend to the Web and our mobile devices. We’re also interested in enabling the long tail of applications with our APIs

-Michael Halbherr, VP of Location-Based Services, Nokia,  On the topic of Ovi, Nokia’s Web portal

[Nokia is taking on the Web strategy full steam ahead.  It's clear they not only will offer LBS on phones, but also make NAVTEQ maps part of Ovi in the Web browser, plus offer a developer API to access maps, routing, geocoding, etc. and extend these capabilities into new or existing Web & Mobile applications]  

Geography is a really useful lens to look at the world. Geography is a really useful tool to organize information and make it universally accessible.

There are thousands and thousands of servers full of GIS data, but we haven’t had easy access to these. We reached out to an obvious partner, ESRI. They are the leader in GIS. It’s with great pleasure I welcome Jack Dangermond on stage with me today to help us describe how Google and ESRI are allowing GIS data to be used with the GeoWeb.

-John Hanke, Google

We are engineering ArcGIS 9.3 (not to deliberately mention a product) to empower the GeoWeb by supporting FLEX, and javascript to allow GIS users to mash up there GIS data into the GeoWeb.

-Jack Dangermond, ESRI on the topic of how ArcGIS Server is now publishing KML

[This development is huge.  ArcGIS users (hundreds of thousands of businesses across verticals and governments) can now publish their GIS data into Google Earth.  That on the surface is quite powerful, but I wonder if ESRI is giving away the farm here.  I mean, once Google has scraped the publsihed KML data and it's in their geoindex, what value do ESRI publishing systems offer other than updated data currency?  And, can't ESRI users just publish KML from their desktop GIS software?] 

The location infrastructure out there today sucks. Location is really expensive. Too many people in the ecosystem are bloodsucking profiteering gluttons. The three biggest inhibitors are cost, availability, and privacy. We hope to get to something that will be useful for everyone here.

This is this idea of a brokerage.  On the left, anyone can publish location, on the right anyone can use location, with Fire Eagle in the middle.  Fire Eagle is the lens to look at things, the Yahoo Internet Location Platform is the language to communicate things. 

-Tom Coates, Yahoo, on Fire Eagle

MIT's minds of tomorrow value Location in mobility contexts more than other features such as voice or messaging.  A professor there recently challenged his computer science students to develop applications using Google's Android SDK, and a majority of the entries focused on location-based scenarios. 

If the brainstorms of these MIT students are an indication, phones will soon challenge the Internet as a source of innovation. For these students at least, cell phones should be all about location, location, location. Most of the projects produced by the seven teams of students involved programs that let phones track people's physical place -- or that of their friends -- to help them do things and meet up.

Here's one example from project Loco 

Untrue to typical loud form in the press, deCarta quietly raised $10.5M towards yet another round of $21M financing - this one on top of about $40M raised over the years from multiple rounds.  It's unbelievable that the company can continue to convince investors to spend more money when deCarta's core geospatial primitives such as geocoding, mapping, and routing have been reduced to commodities care of Google and Microsoft, and when more mobile & GPS device manufacturers now have their own processing engines. 

deCarta is the last remaining platform vendor that emerged during the first spike of interest in location-based services around 2000 prior to the bubble burst, and that experienced some glory in 2004-2005 when the local search wars started.  All other providers focused on simple geospatial primitive processing have either dried-up-died-and-been-buried, have been acquired (e.g. Kivera by TCS, Webraska by Sanef), or have left the business behind and moved on to more sophisticated offerings.  With timing being everything, I suspect it's now too late to sell the company for a price that would reimburse investors for the contributions made over the years, and unlikely the company can make back the money in sales...   

Nokia's global 3G GPS invasion has begun.  According to CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo

We expect to ship about 35 million GPS-enabled Nokia devices in 2008, which is equal to the entire GPS device market in 2007.

Our goal is to act less like a traditional manufacturer, and more like an Internet company.  Companies such as Apple, Google and Microsoft are not our traditional competitors, but they are major forces that must be reckoned with. Make no mistake: We are taking on these challenges seriously and aggressively.

The pending acquisition of NAVTEQ will allow us to more quickly realize the potential of combining navigation and maps with our devices. And we believe the potential here is huge. Particularly as we move from devices with simple navigation to more sophisticated location-based services, such as pedestrian navigation and targeted advertising.

We are very excited about the prospects for pedestrian navigation and other location-aware services. The market for location-based services promises to be the next big thing in mobility.  Navigation is just one of the services we are targeting. Last year, saw the launch of our Internet services brand, Ovi. Ovi is our gateway to such new services as Ovi Share, Nokia Maps, N-Gage games and the Nokia Music Store. You can expect a lot more activity here during 2008.

 -Reuters, Dow Jones

Capturing and leveraging user contributed data (voluntarily or inadvertently produced) is the new business of the Web, enterprise computing, and Mobile.  The idea is that if user data can be harnessed and made sense of through backend analysis, then whoever has the most of it gains the strategic and competitive advantage by growing smarter through collective wisdom generated by millions of people unknowingly amassed into one monster publishing organism.  This is of course just a theory though because anything generated unknowingly, organically, and in chaos is by definition constantly mutating and without predictability, constancy, or deliberate decision making intelligence.  Ok Darwin.  

While the Web, and to a lesser extent mobile, have clearly evolved towards crowd-smart hyperspaces of information based on mass contribution, it's hard to draw a similar parallel for GIS mapping and maps.  Aside from OpenStreetMap, which is nothing more than a social experiment aimed at challenging authority and reducing expert-edited premium goods to a commodity, there really aren't any sources of real map data (sorry chumps, dots don't count).  The real stuff of choropleth regions, complex networks, and continuous fields of environmental phenomenon are part of a school of GIS professionalism where cartography and geostatistical interpretation is science, and the skills of geographical interpretation are rooted in mathematics and other scholarly pursuits requiring people to take time to study and learn.  

To argue for this favor of discipline, I leave you with an example map from Google with a piece of user-created geodata, devoid of any expert-edited oceanic basemap information such as bathymetry, buoys, passages, channel restrictions, etc.  Do you see the value?  No. It's the data, stupid, that is missing - the expert-edited variety.