While exploring the Yahoo Maps Flicker plugin in my recent geotagging experiments, I figured out that it can also show pictures other people have
uploaded in the neighborhood. Amazing how many pictures have already been taken even in small villages. I wonder if there is a
spot on earth left that has not yet been photographed with a digital camera or
camera phone and uploaded to the web?
When looking at photos taken by others close to a picture I had taken by I stumbled over a picture taken by Thomas Wagner who works for DoCoMo Labs Europe. Looks like they are working on an S60 Python program called ContextWatcher
for quite some time now and which they offer for downloading. The
program integrates information such as GPS, cell ID, body data, activities, visual data (e.g. 1D bar codes of books). Here’s the
description form their website:
The ContextWatcher is a mobile application developed in Python, and running on Nokia Series 60 phones.
Its aim is to make it easy for an end-user to automatically record, store, and use context information,
e.g. for personalization purposes, as input parameter to information services, or to share with family,
friends, colleagues or other relations, or just to log them for future use or to perform statistics on
your own life. E.g., it can be used to create automatic context bits for your own blog, so that your friends
can easily see what you have been doing the last days, including a summary of the pictures you have made.
Pretty powerful stuff and I think a lot of these things will become mainstream once tightly integrated into phones.