Where 2.0

As if there weren't already too many conferences for GIS professionals out there, here's another one in San Jose on June 13-14th.

Everything happens somewhere. With open source and free web mapping tools like Ka-Map and Google Maps, we finally have a way to display location information. At last year's Where 2.0, we put the spotlight on the grassroots developers building mash-ups on platforms from Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Google. This year we'll look at the latest developments in those platforms as well as the latest startups, civic projects, and labs experiments built on them.

In addition you'll find source mapping tools, open standards for data and location web services, and sensors for obtaining location data. We'll learn how the established geo industry is reacting to the first businesses making money from their grassroots geospatial projects. There's no better place to meet the people behind the mash-ups, the people behind the platforms, and the people looking ahead to the future of geospatial.

Who Should Attend?

Decision makers, infrastructure players and entrepreneurs in the mobile, location-sensing, mapping and geospatial fields will mix with IT executives, top-level product and marketing managers, investors and inventive hackers across a broad spectrum of industries.

Arc to Google

This guy built a pretty nifty program that exports to Google from Arc. He's charging for it, and I know that there are free samples at ESRI that do this to a limited extent, so I would imagine that your $100 buys you lots of bells and whistles, or at least makes the process seamless.

Programming tips

Dave Bouwman is starting this great series on coding practices. He's a GIS programmer, so this stuff should be applicable to all GIS guys programming in whatever language. His first example is in .NET. Should be good for all the amateur GIS guys out there who only customize for themselves or other co-workers, not for a living.