One rea­son I’ve been over­stretched for many months is that I’ve been work­ing since last August as the (unpaid) chief orga­nizer of the sec­ond Trav­el­ing Geeks expe­di­tion to explore cutting-edge tech­nolo­gies in a hotbed of inno­va­tion. Last spring it was Israel. This time around: London!

On Sun­day we launched the TravelingGeeks.com web­site using Word­Press, and I think it has some cool fea­tures, such as a wid­get that cap­tures real-time conversations.

On Mon­day most of the Geeks got together over lunch at the Westin St. Fran­cis in San Fran­cisco to hear how to use Nokia’s Ovi Maps (see above) on our mobile devices. Nokia is loan­ing us N79s for the trip while in Lon­don and Cam­bridge July 4–11, and Jorg Malang, Head of Ovi Maps, and Maria Raku­sanova, Prod­uct Mar­ket­ing Man­ager — who are in the area for Where 2.0 — walked us through an hour­long live demo.

Jeff Saper­stein, JD Lasica, Ken Kaplan of Intel, Chris­tine Ngo of Ogilvy. Photo by Susan Bratton

Here’s our still-developing Agenda — pretty impres­sive! On tap: a “speed date” with Seed Camp win­ners, a pod­cast at the Guardian on the future of news and media, talks and ses­sions at the 2gether con­fer­ence, meet­ing with Accel star­tups, par­tic­i­pat­ing in an Econ­sul­tancy Round­table with tech startup win­ners, hit­ting the TechCrunch Europe Sum­mer Party, then par­tic­i­pat­ing in a Round­table on Open Inno­va­tion at Cam­bridge. We’re also try­ing to arrange an after­noon tea with Tony Blair and hope to spend a lit­tle time relax­ing — say, punt­ing on the Cambridge.

Just a cou­ple of high­lights from Monday’s ses­sion with Nokia:

• Nokia, which released a major upgrade with Maps 2.0 in May 2008, is on track to release Maps 3.0 in a cou­ple of weeks.

• Maria said real-time traf­fic updates will be avail­able to pre­mium ser­vice sub­scribers in selected cities in the United States in “a cou­ple of weeks.” More infor­ma­tion on that when it gets closer.

• The City Explorer pack, which takes you on a detailed block-by-block tour of major cities around the world, looks awe­some, and we’ll be using it in Lon­don, along with GPS-guided Car Navigation.

The con­sen­sus at the table was that stand­alone devices like the Garmin are in big trou­ble when this GPS rout­ing capa­bil­ity becomes widely avail­able on cell phones and iPhones. (Nokia Maps doesn’t work on the iPhone.)

Robert Scoble made the sly obser­va­tion that Nokia should be con­sid­er­ing opt-in real-time track­ing of mobile users. “When you walk into a store, you’re express­ing intent.” This is the future of adver­tis­ing and mar­ket­ing, folks.

He also said it would be cool if Ovi Maps inte­grated with Tripit, a travel ser­vice sim­i­lar to Dopplr that lets you for­ward travel con­fir­ma­tion emails from the air­lines and then con­verts it into an itinerary.

Spon­sors who are pow­er­ing the Geeks

We owe a big debt of thanks to Intel, Nokia, Britain’s tech­nol­ogy inno­va­tion agency, NESTA, East of Eng­land Inter­na­tional and BT for under­writ­ing the cost of the trip. (We still need one or two more spon­sors, if you’re inter­ested in sup­port­ing the trip and get­ting some shout-outs in social media circles.)

We’ll be blog­ging, tweet­ing, live stream­ing, pho­tograph­ing and con­duct­ing video inter­views with tech­nol­ogy inno­va­tors we encounter all along the way. You’ll be able to fol­low the doings on this blog, on my Twit­ter stream and at Travelinggeeks.com. I had a great time par­tic­i­pat­ing in the inau­gural Trav­el­ing Geeks’ Inno­va­tion Israel pro­gram and watch­ing a cit­i­zen media posse in action.

If you live in the UK or will be vis­it­ing Lon­don the week of July 5, drop me a note and we’ll try to arrange a meetup, or you can come to the July 5 Tweetup we’re planning.

JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.

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