PosiPix Vision

Saturday, 10 March, 2007

Tim Woolford, MD of Trek Wireless was down in Kingston talking about the rationale behind their Posipix product. Trek Wireless started out by driving around central London and taking fore/aft photos of all the streets. The high res photos are then sold on, en masse (e.g. Navman) or singly (through the Posipix website). They take a pragmatic approach to the distribution of spatial data (imagery) and haven’t gone down the complex spatial database route. Rather, all the photos are JPEGs so they have taken advantage of specifying the coordinates in the EXIF headers. They’ve also marked up all the photos in KML so they can be viewed in Google Earth and, after Google’s announcement a few weeks ago, all this spatial information indexed. After feedback from potential customers, they realised that in order to sell the photo, people want to know what’s in it. So they have been classifying all the imagery noting “points of interest” within them (tourist attractions, theatres, restaurantsm shops). And, of course, all of this is discoverable via Google or their own search.

Tim has a vision for street level photography that surpasses this though. The navigation sector is particularly interested in the product; its always good to be able to see what your final destination looks like. However it is the integration of smartphone and satnav that offers exciting possibilities. In this “brave new world” Tim sees many smartphones being GPS enabled within 2 years (at 3GSM this year one chipset manufacturer was offering the $1 GPS!) so one possible scenario would be ordering a Posipix photo of a destination over the web and having automatically sent to the phone. The navigation software automatically pulls the destination coordinates out of the EXIF header and plots a route which is displayed on the smartphone. If you are meeting anyone (at a theatre for example) you could picture message them the photo for the same purpose.

It’s a nice idea works simply at a technical level and also at the cognitive level because people want to see where theyh are going. Of course it needs implementation at the phone level which isn’t hard but not here yet. It’ll be interesting to see how this develops over the next few years……

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