This is interesting. The Windows Mobile team has combined Flickr's moblogging capabilities with the location data from the AT&T network to produce an interesting technology demo.
With all that, and a hearty dose of my own .NETCF and a little ASP.NET magic on the backend, it wasn't too hard to create an app that allows me to take a picture and hit "Send" ...
Two clicks, and a few seconds later, anyone can look at the website and see the picture I took, and where I was when I took it (within a pretty wide range, as I'm on the AT&T network, which does location at the cell-tower level, so you know I'm generally in Seattle, but you can't find me exactly).
Mobile location scenarios really get me excited ... anyone else have some ideas for apps that take advantage of the fact that when you move, so does your device? Let's hear 'em in the comments!
Expect to see more of this in 2005. Lots more.
Thanks to Scoble for the pointer.
Posted by jzawodn at January 14, 2005 08:42 AM
Take a look at the Nokia Album. It notes the location where a given image is taken, then embeds that information in the JPEG image. It's a very convenient way to sort your images, for example.
it's a closed source, non-free, Microsoft solution.
How is that exciting? Beats me...
I wonder where they got this idea. TZO.com released a product that does this last year. :-)
This comes free with the TZO.com Dynamic DNS service. (You can snag a 30 day free trial).
It works like this:
1) You get a TZO *.tzo.com domain name (or custom .com)
2) TZO creates the mail address yourdomainname.tzo.com@photos.tzo.com
3) Anyone can email an image to that address. All you need is to send the email, so it works from any operating system.
4) The TZO will download that image automatically, to a designated folder. (quarrantine/censorship options exist)
5) TZO Photoserver will build a gallery style webpage around the existing and new images in a directory, and the new page is ready.
I use this all the time to gmail pictures off my Samsung i700 PDA phone, right into my TZO webserver. It works awesome.
Currently the TZO webserver with the Photomail component is Windows only, but it doesn't have to be if we noted demand for other OS support.
FYI, I wrote the demo.
>> it's a closed source, non-free, Microsoft solution. How is that exciting? Beats me...
Well, it is all of that except a "solution" ... it's a demo. We're not shipping this. Justs show that the dev community has enough of the pieces to put this together.
The bummer is that the location bit is MS-specific, but doesn't have to be -- you could use a GPS or directly use any other locator.
Other than that, there really isn't any source to open up, is the sad+exciting thing ... The truly exciting part -- instead of just talking about making it easy to Moblog with location, I did it ... and I did it on my lunch hour!
The other exciting part is point-and-click auto-embedding of easily visualizable meta data.
As for TZO ... I don't get your point. Flickr is doing all that, too (in fact, that's what I use here, just so it isn't all MS). Maybe TZO has location somehow? I don't see that. The big deal is the data that is the location data is captured on the phone automatically, and the view is built around that.
*All* of this (all of it) could be done today with zero MS technology. But I work for MS, so I used MS stuff. Plus MS stuff is generally easy to glue together (OK, that's pushing it a bit, sure )
The easiest part would be to remove the MS Smartphone from the equation and move this to any cameraphone ... in fact, the support is there for exactly that, but I only have an MS phone to play with, and I don't want to get into the business of running a service. If someone else does ... I'm hoping I can talk MS into actually scaling it out.
David Stewart said:
The big deal is the data that is the location data is captured on the phone automatically, and the view is built around that.
Is that is what is happening here? I've been searching for information that windows mobile 5 devices can determine their location with out a gps unit. From what I'm reading about this MS example is that it uses a Map Point Server with a link to AT&T to determine the mobile location.
I'd like to know if there is anything similar to the Location API that J2ME has or the Location API in Symbian that actually uses the network to determine the phone location without a GPS receiver.
