| See http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/05/digital_camera.html and http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/05/what_is_where_2.html O'Reilly is running the Where 2.0 conference for people hacking geo-spatial applications. Google Maps has given a big boost to this. The second link is to a report that Ricoh now sell a digital camera with built in GPS which drops the lat-long coordinates into the metadata of the JPG images. With Phone Cameras now the market leader for digital cameras and with Phones (somewhat limited) knowledge of their location, there's a huge opportunity here for all sorts of hacks and interesting applications. As ever, it's the walled gardens that are holding it up. The phone networks don't want to let you get at the location info without paying. And they're still making it hard to get the pictures off your phone without paying. Even Garmin make it hard to extract the GPS info from their GPS devices. When will these people begin to understand that having simple, open APIs encourages third party developers which then expand the market. Lock in is always a short term game that is inherently limited. Openness is a long term game that always results in much much bigger rewards. One thing puzzles me in all this. Why are GPS devices so expensive? Presumably they've been around for long enough now that there's a single chip solution. There are USB-GPS antennas now for <£70 which means that the factory cost of the raw bits must be down at £10. At that price, couldn't they just be bolted into high end phones? Or is the network subsidy process such a problem that wholesale costs of even a high end phone are critical? |
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[ 07-May-05 7:58am ] [ Cameras
, GPS , Phones ] 