David Pitkin

ZoneTag was the first mobile phone upload tool I used to send pictures to flickr, created at the Yahoo! Research Berkley lab. On the Nokia 6682 it was great, even without a GPS it would upload the cell tower information and they started to build a database so you could put it on a map. This was before flickr had geotagging. The other thing they did was suggest tags based on your location, so when I took a picture at Fenway it could suggest that tag on flickr, this was in 2006.

Fast forward and ZoneTag lacked in support for my newer phones and so I turned to Shozu for a while, the thing I missed the most was when I went to upload I could not tag or set the privacy of the photo being uploaded. This was a major disadvantage for me but I lived with it, I actually uploaded all my pictures as private and then selectively turned them public, but often forgot and never went back to tag.

Now with the new N95 and new version of ZoneTag prototype there is a ton of stuff, including the ability to tag a photo with a verb/Acton Tag like !scanr:wb will tell ZoneTag that I am uploading a picture of a whiteboard to send to scanR and have it perform OCR on that picture. Fantastic.

Now if only ZoneTag used the GPS coordinates as well as Cell Tower info…