Webware

BURLINGAME, Calif.--Think of it as crowdsourced cartography.

In about three weeks, Yahoo plans to launch a project called Corrections in which users of the Flickr photo-sharing site can help with a thorny computing problem: providing the name of the place where a photo was taken.

Flickr's geo expert, Dan Catt, speaks at Where 2.0.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)

Flickr has 68 million photos that have been "geotagged" with latitude and longitude coordinates, said Dan Catt, who works on geographic work at Flickr, in a speech at the Where 2.0 conference here. Coordinates are fine for computers, but human beings looking at a Web site generally prefer place names to numbers.

The trouble for Flickr is that it's difficult to actually retrieve a place name for a given set of coordinates, a task called reverse geocoding. One problem, for example, is that not everyone agrees where one neighborhood ends and another begins.

With the new feature, Flickr will offer its best assessment of where a photo was taken, then let users fix it, Catt said. The site will start with offering information at the neighborhood level, but if a user doesn't agree, it will gradually step back to larger-scale regions.

"If you're not happy with what we're saying, tell us, and we'll learn from that," Catt said in an interview after his talk.

The service will remember a user's settings, so a given location that's one person's Lower Haight San Francisco neighborhood could be another's Upper Haight. As more people weigh in with what the name for a given location actually is, Yahoo will update its boundaries, Catt said.

Initially, Flickr will offer its own alternatives for a given area, but later, people will be able to type in the location, Catt added.

Most of the time the service should work fine, but geography can elicit passionate responses. "This will ruffle a lot of people's feathers," he predicted.

Dash Express

(Credit: Corinne Schulze/CNET Networks)

Dash, which makes the very cool Dash Express GPS gizmo for cars (review), has opened up an API so developers can build new apps for the unit. On announcement, according to a company press release, several apps will be available: a homes-for-sale app from Coldwell Banker, a calendar app that can read appointments from Outlook, Google and automatically route you to them, a weather app from WeatherBug, a speed trap app from Trapster, and Mediaguide, which can display the songs that just played on local radio stations.

I want the Trapster app. Not only is this the most useful of the apps, I believe, it's also the one that leverages the Dash's two-way capability the best: You can add to the Trapster database when you drive through a speed trap yourself. There may even be a button that says, "Yo, I am getting pulled over right now." (I haven't tried the service yet; I don't know.)

Even cooler would be: Let me connect my Valentine One to the Dash device to update the database automatically.

The Dash API program faces two small problems, though: First, there's the chicken-and-egg issue for a non-market-leading platform. Dash is hardly the best-selling GPS product, even if it is the coolest. Developer interest will wane unless consumers start to get behind this product.

Second: Safety. I don't know how Dash is going to ensure that developers don't build distracting or confusing apps that get their users into trouble when they're driving. Building for the "60-m.p.h. user interface" is not something many developers have experience with. Hopefully this will be addressed is Dash's presentation at the Where 2.0 conference Wednesday morning.

Current Dash Express users can go to the MyDash site for apps.

Tom Coates, creator of Yahoo's Fire Eagle data location broker, took the stage at Where 2.0 to talk up some of the cool new apps that use the platform. "Fire Eagle is nothing," Coates said, without the apps. Nearly all the apps he mentioned are listed on the Fire Eagle's Gallery page (log-in required), but what I thought was more interesting were the apps he mentioned that don't support Fire Eagle yet, but should. Or that simply don't exist:

The Spot Satellite Messenger is a handheld device that reports your position, anywhere in the world, every 10 minutes. It gets your data from GPS and reports it via the commercial satellite phone network. It sends data to Google Maps but really cries out for a Fire Eagle link, Coates said. (Likewise the Isaac Daniels Compass GPS-equipped shoes--yes, they appear to be real.)

Fire Eagle architect Tom Coates at the Where 2.0 conference.

(Credit: Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Coates wants Last.fm to get geo-enabled. He sees two use cases. First, he'd like to be able to look into his personal playlist and see not just what he played and when, but where. Second, he thinks it'd be very cool to see group data on geo-coded music preferences: Which music is popular in a given neighborhood or building, for example. Sounds like a job for the Wi-Fi-equipped Zune player. Too bad Microsoft and Yahoo fell out.

Coates hinted that Yahoo is working on a friend locator widget for its Yahoo Widget Engine. This app, run on a PC or Mac, would show you when your friends are on their PCs nearby. A special case of this app is the "Boss Proximizer," which warns you when your supervisor is nearby. ("It's coming," Coates said, "Trust me.") I'd like to see location widgets for more popular platforms--like OS X, Vista, and Google.

Coates also wanted to see integration into Twitter, so Fire Eagle could post your location when you wanted it to. This may be along soon, via Whrrl (story), a geolocation service that will work with Skyhook Wireless' Wi-Fi location finder, Loki. And Loki, it happens, works with Fire Eagle.

Previous coverage: You are here, sort of.

BURLINGAME, Calif.--Geography buffs tantalized by the quantity of geographic information hidden away among countless municipal computer systems have something to cheer about.

Combining Portland, Ore., geographic data and Google Earth can help show how long it takes to drive from a given point. Blue areas can be reached in five minutes, for example.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

The new version 9.3 of the dominant geographic information system (GIS) software, sold by a company called ESRI, now makes it a relatively simple matter to expose that data for easy consumption over the Internet.

"We are engineering it so it plugs in. It becomes effectively a support mechanism to the geoweb," said ESRI founder and Chief Executive Jack Dangermond, announcing the change at the Where 2.0 conference here.

Showing one example of what can be done with the idea if detailed geographic information were more readily available, he used mapping information supplied by the city of Portland, Ore. Using Google Earth software, he showed a color-coded map that showed how far a person could drive in a certain amount of time from a specific location. Yellow was a short trip, blue took longer, green was another notch longer, and the areas were shaped according to driving speeds on different road types.

Another example showed a projection of the recent San Diego forest fires spreading into residential areas and evacuation routes that reflected up-to-date road closures.

ESRI CEO Jack Dangermond

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

GIS software long predates Internet-based mapping services such as Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, Google Earth, Microsoft Live Maps, and Microsoft Virtual Earth. The software is used for tasks such as recording housing property lines, telephone pole locations, sewer lines, and boundaries between residential and industrial zones.

Governments are naturally reluctant to reveal some details such as where the fiber-optic lines head into the New York Stock Exchange. But a lot of information is limited not by such constraints, but rather by the resources needed to process the data, argued John Hanke, head of Google Maps and Google Earth.

"It takes time and takes money," Hanke said. "If Jack can make it a one-click move for them, a lot more will do it."

The new ESRI software will let users export data as KML files, a Google format that's now a neutral format. KML data such as trails or 3D building models can be overlaid on online maps and with software such as Google Earth and Virtual Earth.

BURLINGAME, Calif.--At Where 2.0, Poly9 CEO Greg Sadetsky took the stage to pitch his Flash-based Google Earth competitor, Free Earth. Unlike other 3D mapping apps from Google and Microsoft, it does not require any client-side downloads (assuming the user's computer already has a Flash plug-in).

That means it's mashable into other sites, and embeddable in other pages. It is, for example, the mapping display engine underneath the Twittervision Globe, and can be used to create clever globe widgets like the 3D Flickr Globe, that are embeddable anywhere.

This Flash globe can be yours.

At Where 2.0, to further the message, the company announced a new public safety app, GeoAlert. Created in partnership with Cell Bridge Communications, it's for the people who monitor the safety of dangerous public infrastructure, like oil refineries. If there's a safety issue, a plant worker can click on the location of it, and then the app will look up real-time weather and wind data to identify the houses in the most-affected area, and call them first.

For GeoAlert, the Free Earth capability is arguably eye candy, although if made available not just to safety offices but to the public, it could save even more lives, by showing people the extent of a local hazard.

While I would not be surprised to see an embeddable version of Google Earth at some point, there are several other companies here at Where 2.0 that have alternative mapping technologies. Google is not the only place to go if you want to embed a map in your site.

Google Street View now blurs some faces in Manhattan.

(Credit: Google)

BURLINGAME, Calif.--Google has begun testing face-blurring technology for its Street View service, responding to privacy concerns from the search giant's all-seeing digital camera eye.

The technology uses a computer algorithm to scour Google's image database for faces, then blurs them, said John Hanke, director of Google Earth and Google Maps, in an interview at the Where 2.0 conference here.

Google has begun testing the technology in Manhattan, the company announced on its LatLong blog. Ultimately, though, Hanke expects it to be used more broadly.

Dealing with privacy--both legal requirements and social norms--is hard but necessary, Hanke said.

"It's a legitimate issue," he said. He likened the issues some have with Street View to the ones that took place when Google introduced aerial views to Google Maps. It took time for the public, regulators, and Google to get comfortable with the feature, but, "It needs that debate. We see that and try to let it play out."

John Hanke, head of Google Maps and Google Earth, speaks at the Where 2.0 conference in Burlingame, Calif.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)

New jurisdictions, new rules
Street View poses other privacy issues besides just faces. Some people aren't eager to have their houses on display, for example. But much of the hubbub seems to have waned since Google launched Street View in May 2007, and indeed other companies such as Blue Dasher are working on similar technology.

Street View presents a view of dozens of United States cities from a driver's perspective (unless a plastic bag is stuck over the Street View camera). It appears Google has begun collecting imagery in Europe as well, along with detailed 3D maps, including Milan, Rome, and Paris.

A Pittsburg couple sued Google for allegedly photographing images on a private drive in April, but it's legal to take photos from public streets in the United States. However, standards vary.

"A just balance needs to be found between what can be publicized, in deference to the principles of freedom of expression and of information, and what has to be safeguarded from excessive public curiosity, so as to avoid infringing the individual's right to privacy and right to his or her picture," the French embassy observes.

Years of research
The face-blurring technology took a year to develop and is based on prior research that took several more years, Hanke said.

Face detection, which humans perform effortlessly with help from some dedicated neurons in the visual cortex, is a decades-old computer science problem. It's finally arriving in basic form in real-world applications, though, including digital cameras that use it to track and properly expose subjects or take a picture only when subjects are smiling.

There are some potential complications for Google Street View, though. False positives that blur billboards or works of art with faces could degrade Street View a bit, but missing some faces that are visible could pose privacy problems.

Google thinks its technology has struck the right technology balance in general.

"It does a good job of figuring that out. It uses a variety of technologies to filter," Hanke said, though it's "not perfect."

Many times computer algorithms struggle to recognize faces that aren't straightforward views. But that problem isn't as bad for Google: the faces that are obscured by hair, telephone poles, or oblique views are likely the ones identifiable already.

Have you found any examples of faces the algorithm missed or that it should have caught? Share the links or other thoughts in the comments section below.

Twelve companies pitched to the crowd at the Where 2.0 conference here Monday night. Each had only five minutes to make their case. A full rundown of the companies is on the official Launchpad page, but here's the Webware takeaway on the most interesting of the dozen apps (not counting Whrrl, which we covered last week):

Orbster makes location-based games for mobile phones. The company was showing off GPS Mission. The cool thing is a Web-based mission designer lets individuals or communities create games based on their own knowledge of their locales. Game players have to collect virtual "gold" by going to the locations in the game and, I think, answering questions based on them. It's like geo-caching, but without that bothersome digging up of plastic bins. GPS-capable phone required.

Rhiza Labs is launching Community Insights, which is a Web-based platform for mapping data sets. It lets users compare data sets on a map, annotate existing maps, and also lets the users who upload data see what other maps use their data. Not quite as straightforward as a "Flickr for data," as the presenter said, but it looks like a very useful tool for any organization trying to make sense of its map-based data.

GreenMap is more a political initiative than a technology: the company makes it easy to create maps of items relevant to sustainable living. Also coming soon: A global, open map of green resources.

Pushpin is a map-making service that "looks and acts" like the maps you get from Google and Microsoft, except you get a lot more control over how the map looks and what data it displays. The news at the conference is that the company is releasing a free version of the API. Also, in the geeky-cool category, each location on the map has a human-understandable URL.

Concharto is a Wikipedia of mapping. On the base map (from Google), anyone can add their markups. But what's really interesting is that all markups on the map are time-coded, so it works better for plotting the course of history than static maps. Might even work for complex battle maps or for sports. Needs a better way to control the timeline aspect of the map display, though. Hopefully that will be added.

Nokia Maps on Ovi

Planning trips on your Nokia smartphone is about to get a lot easier. Today at Where 2.0, the Finnish cell phone manufacturer announced Maps on Ovi, a Web component designed to complement its mobile mapping software, Nokia Maps 2.0. As part of the Ovi brand of Internet services, which includes the Nokia Music Store and N-Gage gaming platform, Maps on Ovi will allow users to plan their trips on their desktop or laptop and then synchronize (automatically or manually) it with their smartphones. Conversely, if you're already out on the road, you can record routes and points of interest on your handset and then upload them to the Ovi service when you return home to share with family and friends. The interface on the Web side is similar to what you'd see on your phone for ease of use and a more seamless experience.

We got a brief demo of Maps on Ovi, and it looks very cool. Despite being booted off the hotel's Wi-Fi and some technical glitches with search (the service isn't even in beta yet), we can already see the benefits of such a service. The obvious benefit is not having to sit there and peck out addresses on your phone's alphanumeric dialpad, and it's especially helpful when you're planning a multidestination trip. The synchronization from the Web to the phone was smooth. Plus, we like the sharing aspect of Maps on Ovi, and this is a point that Nokia emphasized during our briefing. Michael Halbherr, vice president of context-based services at Nokia, said now it's not so much about route calculation (since that part of the technology is pretty solid) as it is about what we can do with the data. The next step is about discovering, collecting, and sharing those experiences. And this is certainly something I can get onboard with. Having covered portable navigation systems for the past two years, I find that most models offer the same core functions (text- and voice-guided directions, points of interest database, etc.) and do them reasonably well, so now the challenge is to find services that will further improve the driver's or walker's experience (and I don't mean adding multimedia features, people!)

Nokia hopes to have Maps on Ovi ready for public consumption later this summer, and though it will initially only work with S60 series smartphones, such as the Nokia N and E series models, the company said it hopes to develop it as an independent software for all types of form factors. Hear hear!

I'm at the Where 2.0 conference, looking forward to the Launchpad session tonight where I hope to see several cool new geo companies. Ahead of that I had a chance to meet with some other firms building new geo services: Plazes and Praized.

Plazes: Location reporting

Plazes has been around for a while. It's a service that helps you report your location so your friends and followers can see it. The latest updates revolve around new input and output methods for the service, according to Plazes' co-founder, Felix Petersen. On the input side, an iPhone app is coming (when the new iPhone app store goes public in a few weeks). It will let you update your location just by pressing a "locate me" button on your phone. This method will join the PC, Mac, and Linux software app that locates you based on the unique fingerprint of the Wi-Fi access point you're connected to (if you're not connected to an access point, you have to locate yourself manually, by entering a place name or address).

Plazes is for recording your location intentionally and episodically. It's not like Whrrl (story), which is designed to track you passively. The idea is that when you land at a location you want people to know about, or get set up at a location where you want people to find you, you click the big "locate me" button on whatever device you have handy, and then your location goes out to the people you want to see it.

Who sees it? That's part 2 of the changes in Plazes. Right now, your location is updated on Plazes.com and in your widget, if you've embedded one on your site. In a few weeks, Plazes will also update Twitter when you want, as well as sending your data to Fire Eagle, and to Plazes' own API, which other apps can use to grab your location from.

See also: Brightkite (review).

Praized: Local reviews

Praized's Digg-like ratings and reviews are local to the site they run on.

After talking with Plazes' Petersen, I caught up with Sylvain Carle, co-founder of a brand-new geo company, Praized. This firm is building a database of locations and a rating system for them. It's designed so that Wordpress and Movable Type site managers can plug the system into their blog, giving their reader communities a Digg-like rating system for the locations mentioned on the site.

While the Praized database content is hosted, Praized itself is not a destination site. Web managers put some code in their blogs, and the Praized content will then appear locally on the site and adopt the site's native styles. Furthermore, the ratings that people leave for locations and businesses will be specific to the site where Praized is installed. So if the users on a ballet blog leave reviews for a restaurant near a concert hall mentioned in a post, those reviews and ratings won't get mixed in with reviews for the same restaurant left by readers of a site for wrestling fans. Good thing.

See also: Yelp (location ratings, but not private).

Both Plazes and Praized are based on leveraging their own proprietary databases. Plazes is collecting the data of Wi-Fi access point locations (based on coordinating MAC addresses with user reports of location) as well as matching location coordinates with the places that users hang out at (for example, the Starbucks at SFO). Praized's database is one of physical location and associated reviews. Both look like useful infrastructure plays for emerging online geo businesses, but it's unlikely either will (or should) remain an independent company for very long.