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Keeping Busy

Hey there, readers - we’re still here. We’ve just been busy making all the things we worked on at the lab real in some way or another (and yes, Fire Eagle is coming soon). So we’re not blogging every few minutes like some other sites… but we did write a few interesting papers in the meantime (come see us at CHI 2008 and WWW 2008).

We’ll tell you more soon… stay tuned. And for more frequent entertainment, click Next!

Dilbert Author Invents ZoneTag

From a recent post by Scott Adams on his Dilbert Blog:

First, my digital camera should have GPS so it always knows where I am. When I download my photos, a Google map would pop up, and the photos would go into storage according to the points on the map where the pictures were taken, ordered by date. The map forms the backdrop for organizing the scrapbook.

Second, I would use a special credit card for all purchases on my vacation, from gas stations to hotels to restaurants. The special part is that the records of my purchases would feed into my automatic scrapbook software and coordinate it with the camera’s GPS data. That would be enough data for the scrapbook system to intelligently guess the name of the restaurant or attraction where I was at the time of the picture.

Third, the system needs face recognition software so it can label photos with at least the names of family and friends who appear in them. It doesn’t need to be 100% accurate, but it could give you a big head start.

Minus the face recognition (which ZoneTag compensates for by suggesting tags based on your history and the tag’s likelihood, which often gets the names of the people in your images), we’re already there. And there’s no need to get into your credit report, Scott! ZoneTag knows where you are and will show you names of restaurants, landmarks and attractions around you as you take a photo. Just click, and it’s captures.

Get a Nokia N95, Scott, and start ZoneTagging. If you need help setting up, feel free to drop us a line. We’ll see what we can do (an originally-signed strip of Dilbert will get you up and running — and you know what — we’ll send you the phone pre-installed as well…).

via Andy.

Got N95? ZoneTag Now Runs on Nokia 3rd Edition Phones

You have a spiffy new Nokia N95, N73 or one of Nokia’s latest and greatest new cameraphones, but you were not able to run ZoneTag? Be sad no more. We’re very happy to announce ZoneTag now works for Nokia Series 60 3rd edition phones. For phones like the N95 with built-in GPS, ZoneTag will make geotagging easier than ever.

So, what are you waiting for? Get ZoneTag now. If you are a new user, just click the big orange “Try it now button”. If you are an existing ZoneTag user looking to upgrade (come back to ZoneTag!), click on the My ZoneTag link on top and you’ll see instructions on how to upgrade.

While you’re at it, make sure you check out ZoneTag’s faithful companion, Zurfer, the coolest mobile photo viewing experience on the planet. And let us know how it goes.

Looking forward to seeing all your super hi-res photos up on Flickr!

Hack Day TV - for Y! UK Hack Day

For those of you who could not be there in person at the Y! UK Hack Day, we’ve got a video treat for you. Want to see what hacks were presented? Want to see how people held out under the 90-second presentation rule after 24 hours of straight hacking? But you don’t want to slough through hours-long video footage? It’s cool, you don’t have to.

We’ve made a whole new way to watch long form video on the web, in snack-bite sizes, just the way we like our TV. In Hack Day TV, you can see a list of all the hacks (including which hacks won the judges awards), you can launch URL demos for many of the hacks, and, best of all, you can jump to any hack instantly to watch it (no waiting for it to load or fast forwarding through the video to try and find things). We’ve also displayed the list of hacks directly on the video time line, which makes scanning around for hacks incredibly simple. When you select a hack, the URL will change to point to that part of the video. This way you can directly link to an individual hack, for example check out the Best Overall hack from the NYTimes R&D Lab.

Surf over to Hack Day TV - UK and check it out.

World Explorer: A JCDL best paper!

Last night, we discovered our work on TagMaps / World Explorer won best paper at ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL). Rahul’s in British Colombia where he presented the paper, World Explorer: Visualizing Aggregate Data from Unstructured Text in Geo-Referenced Collections.

Read the paper, check out the demo and many shouts to Shane, Mor, Rahul, & Jeannie. Fantastic!

Oh and thanks Rahul for letting us know via this Flickr photo.