[California] Berkeley Booth on Thursday

[maplabs at light42.com]

Hi All -

  as previously mentioned, I had the opportunity to present the Live 
and mapping at a poster session here:

     
http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2013/12/13/big-turnout-for-launch-of-big-data-center/

The writeup is largely accurate.. however I can fill in some personal 
observations.. The woman Katy in the picture with Tim OReilly was 
directly across the aisle from me.. She is going to be program chair 
for SciPy again this year, in Austin 2014. Katy said that "geo data is 
going to be one of the two themes for the conference - do you know 
anybody ... " !!  So that was humorous.. "a lot of people are aking 
about geo data" says she..   I did point out that OSGeo has a 
speakers page here

    http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/OSGeo_Advocate

Another humorous bit is that I called the office of Tim OReilly before 
the show, and left a message that OSGeo was going to be there.. Tim did 
listen I think, because in his allotted four minutes on stage, he told 
a story about maps.. the punchline to his story was, that he thinks 
maps will "disappear" into consumer products that do the searching and 
such for you.. I think that misses the point, in that geodata will be 
embedded all the way through, whether you see a map or not.. (pun 
intended)  Tim is a complex person however, and many of the other 
things he said were indeed thought provoking and showed unique 
insight..Maybe Tim was thinking about his own Where 2.0 Conference 
which "disappeared" when he said that !! who knows.. 

  Lastly, the sort of round'ish fellow in the day-glow green t-shirt 
is Dav Clark, with whom I have had a few discussions. I think at the 
practitioner level, the grad students and post-docs do get the geo data 
story quite well, and have a healthy respect for the software stack 
that implements it. I will confess that the depth and detail of the 
particular Berkeley posters emphasizing maps, made me realize once 
again that the map is only the beginning. 

  Speaking of which - I did have a chance to wander the American 
Geophysical Union (AGU) hall for two hours on the last day of the show. 
I saw the posters hall.. at least three thousand full scientific 
posters.. not kidding.. Two talks on field surveys of agriculture in 
Russia, but sadly the exhibition hall was already closed.  Every 
single talk, poster, product and research area involved maps, as you 
can imagine. The same comments apply here - the map is just the start.. 

  best regards from Berkeley, California

--
Brian M Hamlin
OSGeo California Chapter
blog.light42.com


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/california/attachments/20131214/50f73fc8/attachment.html>