Month: January 2012

Categories
where 2.0 wherecamp

Where Conference

2.0 is rather passé in tech circles these days, so it now the O’Reilly’s Where Conference!

The annual meeting of the Geo tribes, this year takes place in downtown San Francisco in early April.

This is, despite the competition, the main conference to attend and along with it’s unofficial Wherecamp sister (this years date and location still in planning). It is worth a trip just to soak up the atmosphere of innovation and plain optimism you will not find at more traditional GIS conferences.

That said this year I will be stuck this side of the Atlantic that week attending other events, but many Googlers will be presenting and as an old hand O’Reilly have provided me with a conference discount code offering 20% of registration fees, so if you are going feel free to use the code “PARS20“.

Hope you like the new more stream lined blog design, I took the opportunity this weekend to update things when I moved domain and server hosting from GoDaddy (I know shameful) to an excellent UK operation tsohost, who have real support people answering email at 11pm on a saturday night !

Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)

Categories
Presentation

My ENTER2012 presentation

Yesterday I had the pleasure to present at the ENTER2012 eTourism conference in Helsingborg, Sweden. The ENTER conference is an excellent combination of academics and practitioners, a mix that other industry conferences would do well to replicate.

My presentation was on the continuing innovation is geospatial technology and how the addition of both social and curated content may impact on destination and travel solutions.

Here are my slides, as usual not that useful if your were not in the audience!

Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)

Categories
Thoughts

Find a hotel using isochrones

One of the benefits of getting comprehensive public transport information fully integrated in Google Maps is the potential to include public transport in all forms of local search. An example of this is the experiment launched over the weekend to search for hotels based upon a travel time from a location. In the example below searching for Hotels within 25 minutes of the Google Office by public transport…

The use of travel time or isocrone maps is of course not new , Mapumental really pioneered they use on line with their public transport map developed with Channel 4,  the next step for Google was greater integration of  this analytical capability with local search in near real time !

The areas you can easily reach from your point of interest are spotlighted on the map, and you can modify the search criteria using different maximum travel times or methods of travel, perhaps you only want to find hotels only within 10 minutes walk,  the map will update automatically to show a new spotlighted area and the nearby hotels.

You can also drag the red pin to find hotels near other places you might like to visit and agin the map will automatically refresh.

Written and submitted from the Google Offices, London (51.495N, 0.146W)