Everything that happened at Locate
Spoiler alert: it was a lot
By: Joe Gomez
We’ve got a lot to get through in this recap, so this update is going to be light on the words, and heavy with the pictures.
1,400 developers, cartographers, data visualizers, technologists, and media packed Pier 27 in San Francisco at a sold out event to explore the edges of location tech with us.
Here’s everything that went down at Locate:
Every Product Announcement
- The Vision SDK: With our vision SDK, we’re bridging the phone, the camera, and the automobile to give developers total control over the driving experience.
- Our Apple SceneKit SDK + React Native AR SDK: The new React Native AR SDK enables developers to quickly iterate and build cross-platform. With the new SceneKit SDK, iOS developers can use Apple’s native toolkit to build lightweight and deeply-integrated AR experiences.
- Mapbox + kepler.gl: We’re partnering with Uber to bring advanced data visualization to our developer community. Soon, you’ll be able to add layers like arcs and hexbins from kepler.gl to your maps with our GL Custom Layers API (launching this summer).
- New Foursquare POIs: We are adding 105 million places to the map this year, using the freshest place data from one of our earliest partners: Foursquare. From restaurants and bars to shops, museums, and hotels — all the places on our map are about to be updated and will be available via search.
Every partnership announcement
- Mobileye and our HD Vector Maps: Our first HD Vector Maps customer is Mobileye. Together, we are shipping with a major European automaker next year.
- Microsoft Azure and the Vision SDK: Our newly announced Vision SDK integrates with the Microsoft Azure IoT platform.
- Arm and the Vision SDK: Bringing faster machine learning to billions of Arm enabled edge devices with the Vision SDK
- Sumo Logic integrated Mapbox and Neustar into their core business intelligence tools and dashboards to help customers better measure against KPIs and discover anomalous activity
Removing the human join
In the midday keynote, Mapbox CTO Young Hahn asked “Is the world changing at a rate that’s faster than our ability to capture that change?” We’re departing from thinking of maps and the tools we use to measure our world as distinctly separate. We’re seeing an emerging effort to build networks of embedded sensors that are the map — maps are capturing the world live as it happens.
As machines rely on map data for new experiences spanning mobility, logistics, and commerce, it’s changing our data values because every discrepancy in the data impacts the end-user, especially when there isn’t a human between the data and the decision.
“We need to value accuracy and truth to the real world over consistency and aesthetics. We need to eliminate the human join.” — Young Hahn, Mapbox CTO
The Keynote finished with Rick Dazell, former SVP & CIO of Amazon telling us how he helped scale a scrappy code base and team of 200 into the multi-billion dollar e-commerce business Amazon is today.
“We wanted to be the most customer centric company in the world… Every team had the responsibility and opportunity to invent for the customer.” -Rick Dazell, former SVP & CIO of Amazon
We also learned how Amazon surfaces new ideas. Creaters author 6-page papers communicating the narrative of their idea, as opposed to bulleted lists in powerpoint. In fact, Amazon banned powerpoint entirely.
Donkeycars and beer
We took the tech we’re applying to autonomous driving and scaled it down to robocars so we could move fast and break things, and that’s exactly what happened. It was more of a destruction derby than a race, but it was so impressive to see teams create self-driving robocars in just two days. The neural nets were trained, and the pigeons were terrified.
Best of Twitter
With over 60 sessions in two days, speakers covered everything from applying computer vision to AR localization to maps that are shifting the balance of power in the world to the tech and business perspectives on LiDAR and autonomous to rock’n roll cartography. Here’s some of our favorite moments:
See you next year
Stay tuned as we release more photos and videos from live sessions at Locate. Share your feedback and photos from the event with us on twitter, @mapbox #explorelocate.
