Quick update with what’s been going on with us at Where 2.0 thus far.  First and foremost, GeoCommons is now officially launched as of last night’s Launchpad event.  Thanks to everyone who helped us out during our initial testing phases and gave us great feedback on how to make it better.  We’re looking forward to improving it even more in the future, which everyone’s continued feedback will be absolutely instrumental in doing.

After Sean’s launchpad talk, there were a few other launches that are definitely worth checking out, which Artur Bergman has written up some very nice summaries for on the O’Reilly Radar Blog.

I’d actually like to give Swivel, who was one of the other companies launching their new Swivel G component last night a bit of a shout-out.  For those of you who aren’t familiar with them, Swivel has a great data management platform and suite of tools that you can use to easily explore and share both your data and the data published by other users.  Their launch last night incorporates a geographic component which you can use to visualize your data in a geographic context, and, if you are so inclined (and let’s face it, why wouldn’t you be? ), you can even export it back out as KML and throw it up into GeoCommons.  You can also take the CSV exported by the custom report generation feature available in GeoCommons dataset profile pages and put it into Swivel.  They’re a great group and I hope that it will be possible in the not too distant future for you to see some additional collaboration between GeoCommons and Swivel.  Plus, you just have to respect somebody that ends their Launchpad talk by doing the robot.

I also had some rather spirited discussions with a few folks after the Ignite/Launchpad event was over with on various things geospatial, specifically geodata, how to use it, and what we can do to make it better. Good food for thought and a good set of conversations all around.

For those of you who are out here at Where 2.0, by all means if you see somebody with “FortiusOne” on their badge, don’t hesitate to grab us and say hi, we’d love to meet you.  Also, as a reminder, FortiusOne will be hosting a BOF session tonight from 7:30pm-8:30pm.  We’re going to do our best to actually make it somewhat fun and engaging, and while we haven’t quite formalized the entire plan for that yet, the first step is handing out the free beer that won the pollmappr poll:

So, free Hoegaarden, discussions about open geodata, and the charming guys from FortiusOne, what could be better?

Hope to see you there!

Technorati Tags: geocommons, where2007, swivel

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One of the goals with GeoCommons is to enable people to raise awareness about information – whether it is a cause, the news or just a promotion. Along those lines we’ve designed it so any of the data you find or load into GeoCommons can be syndicated, allowing anyone to raise awareness about the data in a context they think makes sense. One of the first syndication methods is some simple embedding code to drop any map in GeoCommons onto your blog or web page. We are working through the particulars of making it work with as many platforms as possible and we started with our blog WordPress. We had to do a few little tricks to get it to work and we’ll pass those along after we go live and hopefully have it all automated shortly. If nothing else hooray for no more screen shots on the blog

So, what is the first map we embedded? AIDS deaths by country for 2005. With all the attention being produced by Project Red and other initiatives to combat AIDS in Africa we thought this map was an illuminating illustration of why the cause is important. The data comes from “The Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic 2006” – One look at why helping fight AIDS is an important issue.

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It was a good day at FortiusOne to be able to announce the close of our VC round. We’ve been working on it for a while and it is definitely a combination of relief and excitement to have it done. It is always a learning experience and we are thrilled to have In-Q-tel and Chart Ventures as partners. Both firms have great experience in the space and In-Q-tel’s success with Keyhole (now Google Earth) and @Last (Google Sketch Up) is a great benefit and nice compliment to our efforts.

We think the round will provide a solid foundation, for our admittedly lofty goal, of interconnecting and sharing the world’s geographic data. We’ve been digging up and organizing open source geographic data for a long time and have always been amazed at what we can find. Sometimes that has gotten us in trouble (at least the media’s perception of it) and others times has been a big help in crises like the London Bombings and Hurricane Katrina. What we learned through all our work with the wild world of geographic data is that it is horribly unorganized, difficult to find, and even harder to work with.

Google Earth did a great job allowing people to see the planet they live on and view places they had never been – raising awareness and becoming hugely popular in the process. We’d like to now tell the story behind the satellite imagery. Our goal is to reveal and share all the data that tells the story about a location. What are the demographics, politics, environment, health, infrastructure, neighborhoods, education, and of course best bars for any place on the planet. We believe this data should not be any harder to find than a local search query for “dry cleaners”.

We have a big chunk of data to start it off and are working like mad to make it bigger every day. The real success though will be connecting with the community of geographic data across the world. The value proposition is simple. Everything in GeoCommons is free to upload and free to download as long as it is shared with the community. When you upload data you immediately have the ability to combine that data with 35,000 other data variables. You put one piece of information in and get the network effect of being able to combine that with thousands of other data sets to discover something new. We’ll provide tools to let you easily consume the data and share your mashups so everyone can tell the story behind the satellite imagery. At the end of the day it is all about moving past push pins.

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Since we decided to put off the GeoCommons launch till Where 2.0 we had an empty void to fill – the over whelming urge to launch something. Since we need immediate gratification of some sort we decided to push out PollMappr. Mookie and Matt came up with PollMappr between Unreal fun on Fridays. The basic idea is a syndicated poll anyone can create and drop into a blog or webpage then look at the results on Google Earth. The first version tallies up all the votes for the poll by state then gives you a purty map in Google Earth showing the results. If you want the direct scoop check out Mookie’s blog post.

So we figured it would be a good tool to help us out with our BOF on “Geodata for Masses” at Where 2.0. The BOF would be a lot more fun if we had beer, but the question was what kind of beer to serve. Obviously, we should have a poll, see what wins and serve it up:

As an extra added bonus we’ll have a map of beer preference, so people can see where the hell people drink Michalob Ultra. Just having a beer poll is not quite exciting though, and what truly compliments beer well is a Cage Match. Everyone’s dying to know who would win in this one:

Lets face it though our ideas are not nearly as funny as what everyone else has come up with just today – www.pollmappr.com – so make your own poll drop it onto your blog or web page and have some fun.

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