12 Feb 2010

Quakr - done by the big boys

So, some 3 years after we started this here Quakr thing, Google Maps and MS Bing have taken our idea and 'done it'. With their respective street view bubbles and geotagged photos from flickr, Picasa and Panoramio, they have machine managed them into 'place'. Exactly as we imagined all those moons ago, only with bigger resources than we were ever able to muster in our spare time. Perhaps we should have really gone for it and quit our proper jobs and then been bought out by them thar big boys, but perhaps we've had our fun and we should focus on doing something new...

Bing with street images.
Geoblogger talks about Gmap's thing.
Oxford's Carfax Tower with pictures machined into place.

ps - If it doesn't kill you it makes you stronger. And if it kills you you're dead and don't care anyways. So get on with it.

16 Nov 2009

links for 2009

an uncoordinated set of links from the recent blogworld...

A google street view bike - here.
Home made street view - here.
GMaps onto android - here.
Semantic web dog food - here.
Semantic POI's for Mobile Phones - here.
A competition for Geo stuff - here.
GMaps 'more than real-estate' - here.
A cool tool for 3d environment construction - here.
A non-town in GMaps? - here.
Real Time GPS / GPS++ uses known stationary objects? - here.

9 Sept 2009

iPhone overtakes on Flickr

The iPhone (IMHO:rubbish) 2MP camera has overtaken all other camera's taking photos on Flickr. Reported here.

Surely it must be time for us quakr-ites to make an iPhone app like taggr that does ones tagging ready for the viewr? Oooh and we should update the viewr so it works and works in the iPhone's safari and oh dear I forgot we don't have any money or time or energy.

Maybe in a months time.

6 Aug 2009

google does us over

Your pictures and views thereof : http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2009/07/zoom-photo-navigation-in-street-view.html

Timeline : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOR0fPTx-os
Zoom, Tilt, Rotate : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3ytS7fHJf0

Actually, it's not quite all dead for us... we're still in a different focus space from Google - they show maps with the occasional photo, we want(ed) to show photo's with the occasional map tile for context.

29 Apr 2008

A year ago and XTech '08

A year ago, Peter talked on behalf of Quakr at O'Reilly Where 2.0 conference in San Jose, California. Some pictures were taken, and we talked about it here. The talk has now appeared on four sites as an Audio file:
1) itc (check out that angry face!)
2) earideas
3) podfeed
4) mefeedia

We're kind of expecting it to be in video format sometime, but we'll see.

We've all got too busy in our normal lives, or broken our leg, or doing too much generally so we are NOT going to be attending XTech this year - after being accepted. It's a pisser, but sometimes it happens that way.

We haven't done very much to the Viewr or the Taggr in recent months, and do not have any kind of list of urgent fixes to make.

18 Mar 2008

Congratulations OSM

A corner has been turned, the nice people from OpenStreetMap (OSM) have got some cash from Europe... here.

Seems they've given themselves a public name in order to package their offering 'CloudMade' - which is nice - and maybe we should join them - '3DCloudMade' anyone?.

17 Mar 2008

In to XTech 2008

Our submitted Talk Brief / Abstract has been accepted for XTech 2008. It's not clear who and when we'll be there, but I suspect we'll be there somehow.

Meanwhile the idea that although Quakr is the best idea on the world ever, it might not make us all rich is becoming clearer. After talking to XTech 2007, then being headhunted to talk at Where 2.0, then a couple of possible investors, then getting to the last 30 of 268 companies which applied to Seedcamp, then a couple of other nice people... it seems we're a bit ahead of everything and everyone. We're right of course that the new world will be a user generated environment and the other people who are trying to control a single set of 3D map data are wrong, but for now it may be time to leave it alone. Investment is not the thing that will turn this best ever idea into something with a reasonable return. It's still lots of fun and we'll more than likely still bug you all with it until we find the killer app that makes it financially interesting.