Yahoo Mobile Gets into GeoTagging with ZoneTag

February 28th, 2006 by Loren Baker, Editor | 2 Comments

Yahoo Mobile Gets into GeoTagging with ZoneTag

Yahoo, the parent company of Flickr and del.icio.us, is expanding its tagging capabilities beyond normal search and social sharing onto the mobile camera phone. Yahoo has just Zonetag, a geotagging software which automatically provides images with a tag (or caption) labeling the place where the photo was taken.

Made available for Nokia S60 cellular phones Zonetag utilizes the Bluetooth GPS unit, then the GPS coordinates of the image will be uploaded together with a cell ID. This cell ID corresponds with the city, state and zip code of those GPS coordinates and so Yahoo is able to determine the exact location. The image is then uploaded to Yahoo’s Flickr.

MobileMag reports :

Some users, however, have noted some flaws, claiming that Zonetag has sometimes failed to correctly identify the place where the photo was taken. Yahoo downplays the flaw, saying that the software’s accuracy will improve as more people start to use it.

ZoneTag phone support is currently restricted to Nokia Series 60 mobile phones. It is also known to work with 6620, 6670, 6680, 6681, 6682, 7610, and 3230, 6630, 6260 models.

Vote for this post : 0

or Buzz it at Yahoo :

Comments

2 responses so far ↓

Mor Naaman on Feb 28, 2006 at 10:47 am

I don’t think we are downplaying anything.

As a member of the ZoneTag team, I will be the first to point out that much of the systems “location data” is user-contributed (check out the FAQs!). Yes, the coverage will not be great to start with, but as users of the system start contributing data about their environment, everyone will benefit (our users are amazing - we’re already learning dozens of new locations every day).

Finally, let me just point out that ZoneTag is a research prototype from Yahoo! Research Berkeley. No need to elevate us to “Flickr status” just yet (sign up quickly because our first prototype release will be very limited).
Loren Baker, Editor on Feb 28, 2006 at 11:03 am

Thanks for dropping by and leaving a comment Mor. ZoneTag sounds quite exciting and a natural fit into the overall Yahoo Social Media umbrella.