A quick note regarding my previous post on digicams with geotagging.

Even though it’s not a dedicated camera, the Nokia N96 seems to do this correctly. Check out about 3 minutes into the review video below.

You get auto geotagging, and you can pop them up on the internal mapping application and push them right to Flickr. This is the way it should be done.

Clearspring is making big strides over in Europe, especially in the UK where we just opened an office in London. Check out out:

We’re also excited to announce some new widgets with The Telegraph. They have integrated our Launchpad product on widgets that can get you News, Sports, Entertainment and a lot more information to your start page, social network homepage, or desktop. Check a couple of them out below, or go here to see them all.

Again, this is awesome stuff, but I’m still partial to our Top Gear Widgets:

As my collection of digital photos becomes ever larger (I’m at 14 gigs now), I look at their mass as a whole and grumble over the fact that none of them are tagged with anything other than basic EXIF data (for the most part). They’re all in relatively well-described folders, as subfolders of the year, but still - as a record of life passed on, it would really help people to understand then =if they had some semantics tacked on.

But who am I kidding, it’s hard enough keeping my mp3’s ID3 tags populated.

But geotagging is something I don’t have to think about, and gives a good bit of context to any photo without any work on my part. A bunch of mobile devices have this now, and iPhone 3G will have it (still trying to figure out if the iPhone 2.0 software will use the basic cell tower location in the original iPhone to geotag). But where are the true point and shoot digital cameras with GPS?

I know, it’s probably a hard problem. Though GPS chips are all over the place now, they still need time to get a fix. Digital cameras are turned on and off so quickly, they don’t have much of a chance to acquire a signal before they’re off again. So there has to be some idle state where it tries to acquire a new location while the device is “off”. At that point, you have issues of being in your pocket, and using up all your juice before you snap a photo. So yeah, it’s a tough problem.

But can we at least see a first stab at it? I’m perfectly happy getting to a location and asking the camera to get a fix first. It can then persist that data, so all subsequent lock-ons are super quick. The photo doesn’t have to be tagged exactly when it’s taken either. Usually the camera stays out of your pocket well after you take a shot, so the camera can spend some “off” time immediately after a shot to acquire and do some tagging.

There’s a practical solution here, I know it. Just let me be able to buy a Digital Elph with geotagging so at least some of my photos have some more context…

… or I could wait for image recognition software that asks me who people are, and tags everything automatically for me. Come to think of it, that shouldn’t be too hard right now either!

Lubna and David are setting up this month’s Mobile Monday NY. I really need to try to make this, but it’s just been too crazy to get into Manhattan lately.

Speakers TBD

When:
Monday, June 16 2008 at 6:30 PM (until 10:00 PM)

Where:
Sunshine Suites
12 Desbrosses Street
Between Hudson and Greenwich
Below Canal
Take the 1 or A, C, E to Canal Street stop and get off.

RSVP here.