Mobile Portland Monday: Maps and Mobile -- A Rapidly Changing Landscape
Jason Grigsby
----
Mobile Portland, Mon, June 22, 6 pm
Maps and Mobile: A Rapidly Changing Landscape
What happens when everyone has devices in their pockets that know
where they are and can display engaging maps? That's exactly
what innovative company Platial has been exploring since 2005.
Platial CEO Di-Ann Eisnor and VP of Product Jason Wilson will
talk about mobile mapping at Mobile Portland's June Meeting
[http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/2973341/]. Di-Ann's description
of their topic was so good that we're quoting it verbatim:
My daughter's school has an activity called "junkbox", where you
make stuff based on whatever scraps you find in a box of reused
components and objects.
Because both maps and mobile are in rapid iterative development,
mobile maps developers have been in a constant state of junkbox;
we've gleaned scraps of location data, bits of APIs, and grasped
at revenue models but there haven't been enough of the right
elements to make something truly wonderful.
This helps explain why a few services like Loopt, Platial Nearby
and Whhrl have seen some success but nothing on the scale of
Twitter or Facebook.
On Friday, our box was endowed with a shiny new item; location
-aware web browsing at least for iPhone, and with it, Map Kit and
new payment models.
Now, web developers will be able to create location-based apps
for iPhone, drastically increasing the number of services which
can integrate location.
This, in addition to recent releases of geodata APIs and location
APIs bring the vision of mobile mapping to reality almost surely
leading to augmented reality, truly social maps serving a global
purpose, better filtered & analyzed content.
Platial Nearby is directing all of this toward specific
contextual location filters. We'll talk about this and show some
examples of what we're making now.
About Di-Ann & Jason
Di-Ann Eisnor is CEO and Co-founder of Platial, The People's
Atlas, a widely used social mapping platform for the web and
iPhone. Di-Ann is working toward using social mapping for
cultural diplomacy across the globe through community engagement
.
Jason WIlson is VP Product and Co-founder of Platial. He focuses
on the UI and product direction across all of the Platial
properties with an emphasis on web services and iPhone.
About Platial
Platial, The People's Guide to Who and What's Nearby, is a free
resource where people around the world share and discover all
kinds of Places. Platial was founded to connect people globally
by making everywhere more accessible.
Social mapping can illustrate a post geo-political picture of the
world that allows people with shared interests to leap
geographic boundaries. The network of Platial maps, including
Frappr, which we acquired in 2007 is distributed on over 500,000
sites a month and on the iPhone to over 350,000 users.
Platial has contributed over 300 Million geographically
referenced pieces of media including photo, video, stories,
people to the Geospatial web at large. Platial is funded by
Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, Sherpalo Ventures and
KeyNote Ventures and Omidyar Network among others.
Maps and Mobile: A Rapidly Changing Landscape
Monday, June 22nd, 6 pm
AboutUs offices
107 SE Washington St., Suite 520
Portland, Oregon 97214
RSVP [http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/2973341/]
Add to your Calendar
[http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/2973341/export]
Slides and video from Last Month
Slides and video from Isaac Potoczny-Jones's presentation on
Android Market have been posted. You can find them on the
Mobile Portland site
[http://www.mobileportland.com/content/android-market-slides] or
on Isaac's Blog
[http://animate-innovations.com/content/android-market-talk-mobile-portland
]
.