A few hours before the keynote and already the PR pieces are flowing, little detail yet but Geophoto from Ovolab looks interesting, a iPhoto related tool for managing your images geographically on a globe.
I still think Apple may thinking along similar lines themselves… remember that in October hackers found references to GPS within the latest release of iPhoto.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
According to almost everybody on the internet, at 10am PST on the 9th January next year, at the Moscone Center Steve Jobs will introduce the iPhone, perhaps one of the most anticipated products ever from Apple.
There is much speculation as to what the phone will look like and its functionality, and this tends to focus of the “ipodness” of the phone – to me what is interesting are two things is particular, the potential that the iPhone will be should SIM free and that it might contain as well as a camera a GPS.
Actually I think the fact that the iPhone is likely to be sold SIM free and not tied to a network contract is the most important part of the whole iPhone story, – If this does turn out to be the case it will a direct attack on the already crumbling “Walled Garden” model of the operators – a major deterrent in the development of LBS so far.
In the walled garden, you buy a phone at a subsided price from the network operator in return for a service contract, and less obviously a set of applications and services selected and controlled by the operator. So if you want to make use of a music download service, you must use the operators one, likewise want to use LBS then you the one the operator provides.
Of course it is possible to buy phones today SIM free, but the marketing behind Apple and the buzz the iphone will create will I believe shift the market more towards an “open” model, where greater innovation in LBS applications can take place. There is clear precedent for this, just think what the online market might look like if we where all still accessing the net through CompuServe or AOL’s or even Apples eWorld (Anybody else remember that ?) environments.
A couple of months ago there was much excitement when hackers noted the latest version of iPhoto suggested support for co-ordinate metadata to be attached to photos – now what if the source for the photo was the camera in a “smart” iPhone and the metadata came from an onboard GPS chip-set – again this could lead to a future potential market of tens of millions of LBS capable devices.
Well it has me excited !!
Written and submitted from the BA lounge at Heathrow airport, using the BT Openzone wifi broadband internet connection.
So the mac hackers have been taking apart the latest release of iPhoto and have found details of potential GPS integration and closer ties with Google Maps.
MacTelChat reports that there are a number of hidden references in the package which suggest that photos may in the near future be organised by location and mapped using the google maps api.
The ability to extract GPS information available from a photo’s EXIF data is not new, and geo-tagging of photos has been made very popular by Flickr, but the intergration with google maps rather than mapquest as used in the past in the MacOS X addressbook is of greater interest ?
Then again the blogosphere loves to speculate about Apples future plans…
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.