October 5, 2008

Gugi Map Day Comes to Seoul

Yahoo! Korea Gugi Map Day took place on September 23 at the COEX Intercontinental Hotel in Seoul. More than 220 developers and bloggers attended, eager for an introduction to Yahoo!'s open strategy. They came to learn more about the global popularity of map mashups, and how they could now participate through the use of local and traffic APIs, newly launched from Y! Korea, along with Yahoo! Maps and Yahoo! Local features for the iPhone. The Map Day also included a draw for prize giveaways -- one lucky winner went home with a notebook bag, another won an iPod Touch!

The conference included six presentations about maps on the Web. My talk was about map mashups and the use of public information to create interesting data visualizations via mashups. I was rated most popular speaker of the day. The secret of my success -- I think it was the screencast demo. Instead of doing a live demo, I prepared a high-quality screencast video. It’s not easy to make a helpful screencast in a short time, but it’s much more effective and impressive than presenting static screen captures. The screencast helped me make the most of the 25 minutes I had for my presentation.

In Korea, many developers want to try making mashups. But getting started can be challenging. So there is plenty of excitement about our new tools that make it easy to start building mashups. For example, the Yahoo! Korea Maps Open API wizard is interesting.

The screencast demo is here:

Although the menu is in Korean, you can probably understand how it works without reading. The Open API wizard automatically makes basic skeleton HTML according to the options you select. Thanks to the YUI team for providing the tools to build this.

Attendees walked away from Gugi Map Day with a new puzzle in hand -- a Y! Maps jigsaw puzzle. This swag came in four flavors, including puzzles for Seoul, Korea and Paris, France.

If the jigsaw puzzle is too hard to solve, you can take a peek at the hint here.

Jinho Jung
Yahoo! Developer Network,
Korea

Posted at October 5, 2008 5:28 PM

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