FANTOM PLANET

One can never say that they dislike a conference. For one, it gets you out of the cubicle farm for a few days. I’m at ASPRS this week in Tampa and the weather is pleasant, the people friendly. . . and I’m somewhat disinterested.

Nothing new really jumps out anymore to nab my attention. Photogrammetery suites are advanced, yes. Camera/LiDAR systems are schweet. I finally learned what Intergraph does well. And, ok, Microsoft does photogrammetery.

The most interesting conversations I had today were with DigitalGlobe and GeoEye folks and getting their response to the NGA Director’s comments about commercial satellite imagery. I guess everyone’s first takes were, “Holy-holy-holy crap!” Then everyone realized the commercial providers aren’t going to “out” American assets to make a buck. There are laws that they abide by, but there are even situations that the commercial providers see something and say, “let’s hold off on this product for release.” So, it’s good to know at least someone is using common sense.

. . . Then of course the commentary on the All Points Blog post about this subject was interesting. . .

On one note, Microsoft Photogrammetery and Virtual Earth are quite visible here. Demo showings are just as frequent as Spiderman-3. This kind of presence also tips us off to another visible thing on the expo hall floor: The Absence of Google Earth.

As we’ve read today, the GE Team, of course, had more important things to do. Like, launch their new blog. Welcome to the club.

Michael Jones, the CTO of Google, noted that GE’s user base is approximately the tenth most populated country coming in with 200,000,000 users in the world in his keynote. Today we also learned that about 8 million of those users are Dutch. But an interesting point to bring out of left field is: if GE is the world’s tenth largest country, what is Adobe Reader?

Don’t let the GeoPDF marketing team catch on to that, we may soon all be the victims of a similar rhetorical question.

Then again, we could all fall victim to bad jokes like, “If people in Poland are called pols; then are people in Holland called hols? And can you see those 16 million holes in Google Earth?”

Finally, the my point is that it has been an interesting day and I cannot wait for Where 2.0.

Tomorrow’s schedule: I’ll think about “WWGD” and will conduct a survey and mapping expedition to map local Hooters restaurants in VE and MyMaps.

My annual conference circuit starts Monday with the ASPRS conference in Tampa.  I haven’t been before, but I’m eager to see how it differs from Intergraph, ESRI, Where, AAG, Applied Geography, and FOSS4G.  If anyone’s attending, drop me a line.

I’m still alive, contrary to those rumors running around how I’ve survived an early death.

So, it’s March and Where 2.0.3 and the ESRI UC are going on in, oh . . . 2 . . . 3 months from now. Which means it’s time to start planning ahead for Geoblogger Meetups!

Here’s the deal:

• I assume that something’s gonna happen at the ESRI Dev Summit next week.
• Jesse noted that there’s going to be one at AAG next month.
• Is anyone else going to ASPRS or not?
• I  may or may not make it to Where, but hopefully I do.
• The Google Earth Team asked me today, “Shouldn’t we be sponsoring your Geoblogger meetup at ESRI soon?”
• FOSS4G is on at the end of September.  Whew.  A break.

Busy geo-events going on.  Now’s the time to start recommending ideas for the old Meetups!  I know I’m on the hook for ESRI.  Anyone else have any ideas?  Can we even have a geoblogger meetup at Where?  Will anyone attend ASPRS, or has my boss sent me to the wrong conference again?