Ubiquitous Geocontext

Watch the talk of the century, Ubiquitous Geocontext from Where 2.0:

As Google translates this article by Luc Vaillancourt:

Who among all these people, representatives of companies, organizations, movements and products, is currently the “hot”?

This is Steve Coast (aka Stave C.).

He initiated the movement of mass collaboration in producing voluntary (professional or amateur) Geographic Information mainly road OpenStreetMap.

It is now serious business with startup CloudMade. CloudMade offer aims to provide an alternative to Google Maps API, but operating a software stack open source and data from OpenStreetMap.

He gave a good conference (see here) where I particularly liked his last 2 minutes (minute 14:40) when he starts sentences like:

– Think of what Openness means to you.
– Google Map Maker is open but there’re restrictions on the license.
– GeoPlanet is amazing but there is still dependency on Yahoo! Itself.
– TomTom think they have a community because you can fix a street. They do not. They have a set of data to customers giving them.
And the last slide of his presentation, a wink of a second Google Pardons and Ed:
– As open as my Clenched Fist – FakeEdParsons

… I suspect Steve C. to personify FakeEdParsons (http://twitter.com/FakeEdParsons). It denies the real Ed and swear not to know who it is. Ed is a false be virtual funniest of the community with a sentence like the following:

“Come and learn how lat49 GeoCommons and no longer have business models at the Google Booth” (in reference to the announcement of Google Maps API Data and Maps Ad Unit).

2 thoughts on “Ubiquitous Geocontext

  1. Yann

    Be careful SteveC you seem extremely arrogant in most of your speeches. I hate your ideas btw – I don’t want to live in a world where my phone knows my food tastes, nor in a world where people with money would block other people from traveling by having all lights green.

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