My wife Lisa, loves the Channel 4 TV programme Location, Location, Location in which Phil and Kirstie our friendly property experts, try to find a new house for a member of the general public who think they know what they want, but almost always don’t have enough money.
I mention this, as today I attended the Location Intelligence Conference, and was on a panel discussing “For how long will spatial data be free” – the short answer is that is isn’t now and it never will be!! – more on this in a later post…
Anyway Phil and Kirstie come into this because I was amazed at the number of mash-ups presented which were ‘Real Estate” applications, clearly the first real mash-up of Google Maps and Craigs List was groundbreaking, but over a year later I was looking for a bit more innovation.
Maybe this is a reflection of where the money is, the excellent theme of the conference is profiting from Location Intelligence Technology, and clearly there is a real market here which can be addressed by tools build using Microsoft Live Local technology for example. But in many ways the mash-up session felt like a similar session 10 years ago, when the same applications were developed using the first generation of desktop GIS, the technology has changed but the commercial markets are the same ?
Eye Candy remains important, and the best audience response was reserved for the wonderful “Pirate map” interface developed using the Yahoo Flash api.
An interesting question was posed at the final Q&A session of the day, and was left unsurprisingly unanswered… When will there be a standard mapping api adopted by all the portal vendors so that an application developed using google local, would work with MapQuest and Microsoft ?
Written and submitted from the Parc 55 Hotel, San Francisco, using the hotels broadband connection.
