Location Day, an event that was, somewhat spontaneously, organized by Petter Palander (co-founder of PinMeToo), got a great responses and lots of interest when announced in November. Unfortunately, the weather was not on Petters side, and due to the Sven / Bodil storm the schedule had to be redrawn at the last minute. Fortunalty, enough people still managed to attend and most speakers managed to get to the location, at the STPLN hackerspace in Malmö.
The event was divided into two parts. The first was the friday session with talks, presentations and discussion panels. All with a focus on location, from many different perspectives. The second part was a 24 hours hackathon, where teams could build location based services.
Day 1: Talking about location
Some of the most interesting talks where from Måns Adler form Bambuser, Karin Bäcklund from Schibsted Media Group / hitta.se and Craig Taverner from Neo Technology / Neo4j. The entire event was filmed by the FKDV team, and we have embedded these three talks below. If you want to see everything, you can checkout the Location Day YouTube channel and we have also listed a lot of them in our TV channel section here in this site.
Day 2: Location Hacks
The second part was the hackathon. Unfortunately the combination of bad weather conditions (lack of guests from outside Malmö) and the fact that the party on the first day was too good, meant that only a handfull of teams managed to finish their builds. We do however not judge too hard, and there were some interesting hacks being demoed at the end of day two, so it all went well.
The winner of the hackathon was the ‘Hellberg‘ app, which is an automated version of the extremely popular Swedish TV quiz show “På spåret“. Using Google Streetview images together with Foursquare and Wikipedia data, the team could build an automated version of the game (going on roads) in the 24 hours: Impressive!
Footage from the event
The Demo of Hellberg:
The talks from Måns Adler, Karin Bäcklung and Graig Taverner (Unfortunatly not all of the talks where in English)
Overall a great success, and hopefully only the first Location Day of many!
