Location and the Internet of Things

Last night I presented at Ignite Spatial NoCo (Northern Colorado) in Fort Collins. There was a great turnout of 200 people and some excellent 5 minute presentations (plus a few that I thought were a bit too much "corporate sales presentations" for an Ignite event). There was a fun map competition, in which teams had to create a relief map of Colorado using an assort of supplied materials like cardboard, egg cartons, cloth, cotton wool, pasta, etc - I was impressed at what everyone came up with! Congratulations to Brian Sullivan for organizing a great event. And thanks to Glenn Letham for videoing the presentations.

You can see my presentation below, which was on "Location and the Internet of Things". The Ignite format allows you 20 slides which advance every 15 seconds, for a total of 5 minutes - it's quite tricky to get the timing right. I will try to post with a few tips on doing Ignite presentations soon, this was my third go at this format.

Update: Glenn has now posted a better quality video of the presentation on youtube (original ustream video included below too, just in case):



And here is the ustream version as a backup (clicking the small play icon at the bottom of the window below seems to work better for me than the large play icon in the middle, an eccentricity of ustream :) !)

My Ignite Where presentation on Future Location and Social Networking

Here's the (5 minute) video of my presentation last week at the Ignite Where event, part of the Where 2.0 conference. It was a great week - will be posting lots more on my impressions over the next couple of days.

Future Location and Social Networking, by Peter Batty at Where 2.0 from Peter Batty on Vimeo.

This clip is an extract from the O'Reilly video of the Ignite session (under Creative Commons license) - this starts at around 35 minutes in.

P.S. No fish in this one :) !!

Ignite Where and Launchpad event on Tuesday next week

I am continuing to iterate on the preparation of my 5 minute presentation for next week's Ignite event which is part of the Where 2.0 conference - but it's an evening event which is open to the public, so if you're in the vicinity of San Jose try to stop by even if you're not attending the conference. Brady Forrest's blog has a complete list of what’s on and it sounds like it should be a really interesting program. I'm third on the list for the second set which starts at 8:15pm - so the audience should have had a few drinks by then which hopefully is a good thing :) !!

My topic is “Social Networking Based on Future Location”:

This presentation talks about the challenges in building a fine-grained model of a person's future location, and about the range of powerful applications that can be built off such a model. Many applications focus on the current location of a person and their friends - future location is harder to handle but arguably more useful.

I originally proposed this as a 30 minute presentation so it’s definitely both challenging and fun to work on fitting it in to the Ignite format of 20 slides which auto-advance every 15 seconds, for a total of 5 minutes. I have done a few practice runs already and the timing is really critical in this format, so I anticipate several more iterations of tweaking the slides and content before Tuesday. I’ll write a bit more about tips for doing Ignite presentations once I’m done with it all. Brady referred the presenters to this post from Jason Grigsby which has some good advice in it – most especially the one about how you need to adapt on the fly when you stumble. If you are 5 seconds behind then you’re missing a third of your time on the next slide, so it’s pretty hard to catch up.

I believe they’ll be recording the presentations and posting them online, but I’ll also record one of my practice runs just in case - so one way or another we will get a version of it online shortly. I'm looking forward to an interesting time and catching up with lots of people at both Where 2.0 and WhereCamp.