Using Pictures To Determine Your Location?

Microsoft has 750 researchers worldwide engaging in skunk works-type of blue sky research, just looking for good ideas. Despite accusations that the company doesn't invent things anymore, it seems like they are actually very active. The accusation should be: "Do they invent anything useful, and do the inventions make it to market?" I imagine some probably do, but I'll leave that for Redmond to argue. A recent Reuters story covered Tuesday's TechFest Fair, where MSFT researchers showed off their latest ideas. In one idea, a lost person could get a map of their location by snapping a picture of a nearby building with a camera phone, and uploading the picture to a server. The server would do a recognition match for the building, lookup the coordinates, determine their location, and deliver a local map back to the phone. MSFT has trialed the idea by uploading millions of photos of Seattle to the server. Geez, what a waste! Somebody tell these guys that 99% of US phones are shipping with GPS today! A complicated system using photos is redundant, expensive, error-prone, and slower than the existing A-GPS.

Ironically, just before I wrote this post, my wife asked me, "Is there a way I can go into my contacts in Outlook, and click on a "show map" button for one of my contacts?" The answer is actually, "Yes" but it's buried so far in sub-menus that most people don't know about it. (click "Read More" to learn how.) It's frustrating that Microsoft sometimes makes the costly and redundant easy, while making the intuitive and useful difficult.