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Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Making Great Stuff for Real People - 2011 ESRI Developer Summit Convenes

Over 1,400 attendees from all over the world have converged in Palm Springs this week for this year's ESRI Developer Summit.

And from every corner comes one idea - building great stuff that comes to life for real people, not just for GIS pros.  Finally, there is the recognition on the part of all concerned that we must do much better to make our technology more transparent and useful to solve real problems for real, everyday people and present them with a much more engaging experience.

Perhaps Tim O'Reilly said it best - "Most of the web design we do sucks."

We must do much more to reach non-GIS audiences, particularly in business and local government.

More than half of the developers here (54%) are here for the first time, and 32% come from countries other than the U.S.  So far, the greatest Wow factor is probably the experimental Kinect interface that allows the user to make gestures (like with a Nintendo Wii or the amazing Microsoft Kinect) to pan and zoom the map, and do pop-ups.  That, and all of the technologies intended to make GIS more transparent, are the stars of this show.

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