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.

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?.

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.

related or relevant 03/08

- Upgrade to Google 3D
here

- 3d GPS by Dash
here

- Lane pictures on GPS device
here

- Electronic Compass != GPS
here

----

- Tech Talk on urban neo geo
here

- Google Skymap
here

- Glasto Earth (the expensive mans this)
here

- Panoramia has 4 million geotagged photos (here)
- Flickr has 1.5 million geotagged photos (here
=> maybe quakr should start speaking to Panoramia?

- Sandy learns about Gravity in WOW
here

related or relevant 02/08

- Microsoft Buys 3D Software Firm Caligari
here and here

- The logo changed...
here

- Does your GPS know which way you're facing? - NO!
here

- maps.live.com gets a birds eye view
here and

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- A review of the ATP Photo Finder - a GPS auto tagger box
here

- Build swf's on the fly? Use an external asynchronous get system?
here

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- Google MAPS get static ... but don't do satelite imagery?
here

- Taggr updated
here

- Viewr updated
here

- only $795 for a 360 panoramic lens and some software
here

- add the 360 thing with an eye-fi SDRAM memory card...
here

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- Home made GPS on camera auto tagger.
here

Not a winge, honest

from here.

I've been attempting to use sort with machine tags in the same photos.search api. Seems the sort is working to date level ONLY, even though the original photos are timestamped. I suppose I could attempt to sort inside my application, but ... is this a known bug / is there a workaround?

to reproduce, go to www.flickr.com/services/api/explore/
user id = 85097477@N00
tags = walkhome
sort = date-taken-asc
machine tags = geo:lat=, geo:lon=, geo:dir=
machine tag mode = any
extras = date_taken

first three results:
<photo id="978048548" owner="85097477@N00" secret="ad5dcdb8d5" server="1259" farm="2" title="DSC00289" ispublic="1" isfriend="0" isfamily="0" datetaken="2007-08-01 17:59:32" datetakengranularity="0"/>
<photo id="977179253" owner="85097477@N00" secret="011da408b7" server="1416" farm="2" title="DSC00285" ispublic="1" isfriend="0" isfamily="0" datetaken="2007-08-01 17:57:06" datetakengranularity="0"/>
<photo id="978039486" owner="85097477@N00" secret="df95c760e9" server="1270" farm="2" title="DSC00286" ispublic="1" isfriend="0" isfamily="0" datetaken="2007-08-01 17:58:02" datetakengranularity="0"/>

remove the machine tag bits and the first three results are correctly...
<photo id="978031002" owner="85097477@N00" secret="4a3bd3f881" server="1253" farm="2" title="DSC00283" ispublic="1" isfriend="0" isfamily="0" datetaken="2007-08-01 17:55:29" datetakengranularity="0"/>
<photo id="977176661" owner="85097477@N00" secret="3c646cda47" server="1346" farm="2" title="DSC00284" ispublic="1" isfriend="0" isfamily="0" datetaken="2007-08-01 17:56:24" datetakengranularity="0"/>
<photo id="977179253" owner="85097477@N00" secret="011da408b7" server="1416" farm="2" title="DSC00285" ispublic="1" isfriend="0" isfamily="0" datetaken="2007-08-01 17:57:06" datetakengranularity="0"/>

Meanwhile, I'm sure you've noticed some changes.... http://www.quakr.co.uk got itself a new logo! The Taggr has been updated to match and now has the quakr:zoom tag added. The Viewr is muchosly updated now at alpha 0.40 which must be some kind of milestone. The most recent additions have been a 'World Move' slider which loads into the world view more tiles and images, and a 'play' button which should auto-move the camera across the loaded image set. [due to the above flickr API bug however, it's not quite as perfect as it should be!].

All comments as ever most welcome. There's still a pile of things in our heads which will be rendered into the software in the coming months.

Quakr Paper on Issuu

Alpha 0.39 and Fast vs More?

So we've been quietly updating the Viewr in the past months, and have today released the 'World Move' slider to replace the previous 'Camera Info' slider.

Check it out at http://www.quakr.co.uk/viewr. All comments as ever welcome.

Now. In building and releasing this version (and the last three or four to be frank), we've changed the way we GET from Flickr. In the distant past, we asked Flickr for the whole set of geo-located photos in a specific Bounding Box. Simple really. The only trouble was that a whole pile of them (90+%) were *no use* to us as they had no directional tag. So then we extended the Flickr API query to get ONLY the photos which were geo-located AND had some kind of directional tag (geo:dir, ge:head, ge:heading, kml:heading or geo:heading). Fabulous. And FAST. Now we were only getting usable photos and the response was speedy.

But. Then we started thinking about usability and we added support for point. But point isn't a machine tag, so attempting the fast GET wouldn't be sufficient to capture all the newly tagged photos. Hmmm...

So what'd you prefer? 'Fast' or 'More'??? We're obviously considering a solution which would do both, but for now, give us a vote! We're defaulting to the 'More' version.

related or relevant 01/08

- 2008 the year of the neogeo?
here

- 2008 the year of the 3d web?
here

- 3d Manchester
here

- Sandy now released in AS3 and version 3.0.1 - time to upgrade?
here

- Dartmouth / Kingsweir looking better!
here and here

- POIs - a review!
here

- Uluru with sunset...
here

Happy New Year to all and sundry.

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- Everyscape - panorama's created by the people (but still not TIME based?)
here

- 3d glasses (again?)
here

- silly, but faces in places...
here

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- Strange maps
here

- in building the real world, Quakr is a VGI
here

- garmin, macs and the unhappy people...
here

- Ordnance Survey Opens Source Code to Frustration- a review...
here

- Interesting bloke in general
here

- PSP as GPS+Maps = "GPSP"?
here

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- Physical Map Artists going out of business
here

- 22,000 photographs = New York Mapped!
here

- Physics in 3d for Sandy = WOW
here

----

- A great geoblogger post - are we nearly there yet?
here

- Nokia Location Tagger Launched.
here

- A conference for me and thee?
here

- Un-blur-ing a photo.
here

- Make a 3d thing from a 2d photo.
here

- Garmin invade phone space...
here

- ldodds - his best ever post?
here