First note at WhereCamp

Why ESRI is not really talked about:

There a lot of startups – programmers without the background in academic GIS – which is the typical path to ESRI

They are really into LBS – immersive stuff – and ESRI just doesn’t really focus on this stuff. Sure they have a few pages on this but they are not really pushing into this space.

They are almost all web based and as we all know ESRI is having some problems figuring out their strategy in this space.

ESRI is a rather large infrastructure to get up and running to play in the space. Much easier to put XY in a database with some attributes and start playing. Getting the full ESRI stack in place is $ and time intesive – not conducive to playing and rapid developement. Try and rent a cheap hosting server where you can install and get running with ESRI stack quickly.

Hence – I think these kind of conferences will probably not have much ESRI presence – there is little overlap between the audiences…..