O'Reilly is holding the Where 2.0 Conference in San Jose next week on May 29-30, and its Launch Pad portion of the conference will give a handful of search and mapping companies an opportunity to debut their products, which have all been deemed powerful, innovative and promising. Here is a quick rundown of the companies that will be launching at the Where 2.0 conference, most of which are currently in private beta.
Dopplr is a social network formed around your locations, and provides calendar and location tools. It looks to be helpful for travel planning, and connecting with others based on your current or future locations.
Fatdoor, still in stealth mode, is looking to be the wikipedia of people, with a reported 130+ million people and business profiles at launch, to be used for search purposes. You'll be able to search groups based on a variety of topics, keywords and interests, and get results featuring 3D geo-spatial visualization and user-generated content as publications, adding to the large index brimming with personal, local information. Fatdoor is backed by Bill Harris, former CEO of Papal and Induit, and Bertram Capital.
GeoCommons is a service to provide people with a way to tell their stories with maps. This is done by creating a map mashup, presenting geographically related data sets on an online map, which will display as a heatmap over a Google Map. The social aspects of GeoCommons comes into play with the sharing capabilities of the maps you can create. GeoCommons is funded by In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital arm, and Chart Ventures.
Swivel, previously reviewed here, offers graphs and charts on a number of topics, such as extra-marital affairs by country. Data can be shared, and compared with other data sets for an interesting take on correlations. Looks like Swivel will be adding some sort of support for geodata, which will be released at Launch Pad.
UpNext is a 3D virtual cityscape, providing users a way to explore cities. UpNext will offer ways to search visually online to find out what's going on in their city, or cities, on a local level.
