Socialight / blog+news

Here’s a rundown of what’s coming up:

This Monday night, September 24th, we’ll be at the Web 2.0 Meetup here in NYC. But if you’re not in NYC, you can still catch the event. I’m told it will be streamed live so check the website.

We’ll be at the NMS Connect Conference in Boston on October 2. Registration is open for the event so register and come by. I’ll be on the Community Goes Mobile panel.

We’re part of what looks like a very cool panel called Introducing the Seventh Sense: Location Awareness at MIT/Stanford Venture Lab on October 16th.

And finally, there are a couple of events around CTIA in San Francisco during the week of October 22nd:

• We’re speaking at NAVTEQ Connections on Monday, October 22nd.
• We’re on a panel at SiRF Location 2.0 on October 23rd.

It’s shaping up to be a busy fall. We’ll probably be adding some European dates soon as well. Hope to see you around…

A front page piece in The Economist’s Technology Quarterly insert traces the rise of the geoweb from its first clear description in Neal Stephenson’s brilliant fictional work (and my personal fave sci-fi novel of all-time), Snow Crash all the way to Socialight. The article ends with a look toward the future; the real-world browsing we’re enabling with Socialight is identified as what will be common in the near future.

Here’s a quote from the article’s final paragraph:

…the incorporation of satellite-positioning technology into mobile phones and cars could open the floodgates. When it is available, simply moving about one’s neighbourhood can then be tantamount to browsing and generating content without doing anything, as demonstrated by a company called Socialight. Its service lets mobile users attach notes to any location, to be read by others who come along later. Taken further, the result could end up being a sort of extrasensory information awareness, annotation and analysis capability in the real world. “When that happens”, says [Google Earth chief technologist] Mr Jones, “then the map is actually a little portal on to life itself.” The only thing that can hold it back, he believes, is the rate at which society can adapt.

Article in print here.

An insightful story featuring Socialight was just published on the front page of LiveWire, the tech section for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, Melbourne. We’re psyched to get some love from our friends down under, home of the gap year and my personal favorite publisher of local guidebooks, Lonely Planet.

Here are links to page 1 and page 2 of the article from the print version.