Here are photos from our Summit last week. Three fun filled days of architecting our contribution to the geospatial web. The entire Platial team (only 9 of us but we rarely get to see each other in person) and investors, advisors and others. Mike Liebhold kicked it off with some far out future thinking in IFTF style, followed by partners, friends and pundits. Clay even managed to make it to town! Thanks so much to everyone for participating. Times like that for a small start-up feel momentous. Next time, we'll even get to see Baostar I hope. I'll let Bao and Tracy tell that story.
The road ahead is very exciting. For the first time we have a one year plan- a whole year. I wish we could build it all in three weeks. The thought of an entire year makes me antsy because patience is not my strength. Coincidentally, Google released MyMaps and KML search the day of our board meeting and summit kick-off. (Do you think they were so excited about our summit they thought they should release something relevant? Good on 'em :) ). The most interesting part of their release for us is kml search. There is a ton of momentum toward building the geoweb and seeing enormous amounts of stories, images and video about places being shared freely with people around the world.
The KML search launch helps underscore the complex economy of mashups, information, collaboration and attribution. KML structures assume a tidy single entity for a piece of content, for example, attribution for Platial as a source. However, we aggregate 36MM geobits form Flickr, Youtube, Yahoo! Local, Wikipedia, geonames and others so we want to make sure each is properly attributed. To add to this complexity, we have thousands of users who painstakingly craft amazing local guides and community maps and we want them to be recognized whether their work is on Platial, Flickr or anywhere else. Going even further, we want their work recognized on their OWN sites and blogs. So many bloggers use us as a resource for themselves and their communities- we want to give back how we can and right now thats traffic and attribution. How can we collectively build up a high search rank as a distributed network? So, there is a great conversation brewing about all of this. We appreciate very much the fact that Google is engaged in this conversation and taking these issues seriously (I'm personally very impressed - they're kind of defying all of those nasty rumours. Jason and Tracy are being necessarily vocal on the attribution issues.). A couple of the Google guys have imparted helpful wisdom to us about kml this week and Jason is working feverishly to pull it all together for you.
We're happy that we have georss and kml to draw from and give back to as we we all work toward weaving a navigable and useful experience for people around the world for this geostuff (Which was formerly hard to get, commercially skewed and politically biased. It's going to be a fun, hard year. We're working to make this all relevant to your community - relevant to you. So let us know how! Thanks for all your comments last week and feature requests too. This is the time!
Di-Ann, I wish I could of been there. I was excited to meet the band... But to much of my surprise, I couldn't pull up my airline ticket at the ticket booth. When I cut in line and asked a personnel for help, she look it up and said to me with a funny look: "You must be really anxious to get to (The Summit). Your flight is for May 5." It turns out "someone" booked my flight for the wrong date and I didn't even look at it until departure time! We are sooooo goofy!
Posted by: baostar | April 13, 2007 at 10:06 AM
"Someone" here. Ugh! I just clicked on the first Saturday of the WRONG MONTH in the Orbitz interface. Boa, come to Portland and I promise you unlimited free quarters at the old-school video arcade bar.
Posted by: Tracy Rolling | April 13, 2007 at 01:16 PM