Stop, Wait, Reverse It

The MS Live Labs/U-Washington Photosynth demos have fostered some talk here in the office about how such technology can eventually apply to mobiles (actually, Seadragon rather more so). But this morning Barbara realized that a great opportunity is being missed so far. At the moment that you take a photo with your cameraphone, it should be possible to get feedback as to where you are.

One of the biggest concerns I have with technologies like Nokia Point & Find that I mentioned before is that the searchbase will be tiny for a long time. If someone can build a system that uses a vast library of existing photos, the product could be really useful almost immediately.

And the relationship is quite synergistic; the more photos that are taken, the better the service gets. GPS-enabled phones might well want to use it to pinpoint the location, but the general location (via GPS, cell, sector or even user questioning) as well as the raster data, can feed even more information info the system for later correlation and retrieval.

We don't have a server farm and a suitably-large stack of developers, so Yahoo! (Flickr), Microsoft (see above, plus Streetside, Virtual Earth, etc.) or Google (earth, satmaps, street view), get on this please.