Location: Interview, Mark Terry

Q. Give us a brief overview of Geotate and its services.

Geotate can trace its origins all the way back to the 1989 research labs of Philips Electronics. We build unique geotagging software that can be embedded into camera applications to instantly mark digital photos with a location tag so the place the picture was taken is recorded on the image – auto geotagging, as it is known.

With the number of images stored on PCs growing to unmanageable levels and the average household forecast to hold close to 10,000 images by 2011,, geotagging offers an effortless way for users to find and retrieve images from the vast banks of digital pictures they are storing.

Geotate’s auto geotagging technology is easy to integrate into digital cameras and requires no change in behaviour by users when they take the pictures. The system automatically competes the geotagging of images when they are stored on an internet connected PC. The technology provides an instant location tag on photos without any time to fix and draws only minimal battery power.

Q. Tell us about your newly released GPS-enabled camcorder.

Geotate, in collaboration with DXG Technology Crop, is powering the world’s first geo-enabled production-ready video camera. The camera is based on DXG’s DVH586 platform.

Q. Tell us about your partnership with SiGe Semiconductor and the Low-Cost Geotagging Solution for Digital Camera Market.

The two companies have created a Technology Partner Alliance to create a GPS solution to bring photo geotagging to low-cost, mass-market digital cameras. The collaboration initially combines Geotate’s unique Yuma and Kato geotagging software with SiGe’s award winning front end SE4120 GPS radio chip.

Both companies have developed their technologies to quickly access and process a GPS signal with a small hardware footprint and using minimal power – important performance concerns when integrating GPS into cameras and other mobile devices. These attributes, combined with a low BOM will bring GPS functionality to a price point that will allow it to be integrated into the most competitively priced cameras. Previously, GPS functionality has been viewed as cost-prohibitive for these low-tier systems and this collaboration breaks mould in this regard.

Q. Geotagging is becoming popular day by day. Why is it becoming so popular and what's the fun about geotagging?

Since August 2007, geotagging has had a massive ongoing promotional boost through Yahoo’s flickr! but in September, interest took a quantum leap as Microsoft (with a new version of Pro Photo tools) and Google via Picasa 3 put Metadata handling in general, and geotagging specifically at the forefront of their application functionality. And, we believe that there is more to come as other Photo Management giants from Adobe to Apple leap frog the functional capability.

The fun bit – geotagging is enabling more interesting visualisation approaches to displaying albums, but more importantly it’s allowing people to re-connect with their memories; most of which, are effectively lost on hard drives and memory cards. And there is a growing body of evidence that geotagging will help differentiate mainstream digital camera devices and accelerate sales by offering a technology that allows users to easily tag images and use this to find pictures their ever increasing digital archive. Already millions of images are uploaded to flicker using a cumbersome manual process. Making the simple and automatic could see that activity mushroom.

Of course, underpinning all this ‘fun’ is the business model opportunities. Geotagging raises ‘operator’ style opportunities and online services. Traditional camera makers understand the iTunes style risks and rewards. It is technology at a price point that could change the fundamental dynamics of the camera industry. It creates a business case for enterprising companies able to take advantage of online opportunities and it begins to connect device manufacturers to the 200 billion pictures taken each year. Perhaps it could mean cameras are sold with storage service contracts, which include geotagging as the way in which images are stored on online databases.

Q. Some envision on geotagging as an aspect of "autotagging," in which a rich set of metadata is recorded when the photograph is taken. Can we combine face recognition with autotagging to label photos automatically.

That’s right. It is a good example of autotagging, and the important thing, as you say, is that it happens quickly and easily without the user having to worry about it. That’s why our Geotagging technology at Geotate is so special – using our new the “Capture and Process” GPS approach, we instantly capture a recording of the GPS signal when the photograph is taken, and Process it later in software.

Because we do this processing of the location later, when you are connected to the internet the there are many things we can do to assist with labeling your photos when you browse through them. There is a whole set of “metadata” fields which are attached to the photos, and we use just some of them for the location. And you can fill in other fields as you like, for example adding a keyword “Mary” – although at the moment this is best entered manually. Together with the location information automatically added by Geotate’s software you have labeled your photo, so that applications can search for “Mary” at “St Paul’s Cathedral, London”

Q. Do you think Geotagging is continuing to gather pace without any help from GPS-enabled cameras.

Camera manufacturers have known for a long time that simplicity is paramount to enable consumer adoption, and indeed the simplest solution for the user is to have the GPS integrated into the camera. However there are many people who want to geotag their photos and either don’t want to change their camera, or would like to buy a particular new camera product. That’s why we have our Kato GPS software, which has been included in the PhotoGPS accessory just launched by Jobo. This is a simple camera hot shoe accessory, which attaches to your camera and just captures a short recording of the GPS signal every time you take a photograph. This works on a wide range of cameras with hot shoe connectors, so you can readily start Geotagging your photos, without having to buy a new camera.

Q. How do you consider the ‘GPS power consumption’ problem for geotagging camera.

To be honest that is not a problem for the software based solution that we use. That’s because we don’t do any actual processing in the camera itself. We simply capture the raw GPS signal. All the processing is done later, when convenient, on the user’s PC. This saves waiting time when you want to be taking your photo (it only takes 1/5th of a second to capture the sample), it saves energy consumption (we only use about 10mJ, in capturing the signal), and it saves cost and volume (as there is no baseband processor chip in the camera).

Power consumption is a problem that a hardware based solution will inherently have. As it has to do a lot of signal processing to find the weak satellite signals, measure them, and download from the satellites the information about the satellite orbits in space. We avoid all this with our Capture and Process later software.

Q. What are the trends in Geotagging devices and solutions market. How far away is the geotagging era?

If you saw some of the coverage from Photokina, there was an emerging feeling that the compact camera market needs to have something to bring it back to life. You’d expect us to say geotagging has a string case to be the technology that brings the industry back to life, but its more than that. As I’ve said elsewhere, the technology allows manufacturers to have a connection with the images. Because tagged images need to go to the internet to get the detailed GPS data, in our technology we link camera manufacturers back to the image... something that many of them lost when in the 35mm era.

Q. What is your company focusing upon in terms of solutions in the next five years.

The past year was a steep learning curve. Once we made the mental shift from being a GPS company to become a geotagging company, our product and engineering approach had to take account of the user case and systematically remove the barriers for consumers. We have an exciting time ahead of us, as we create practical geotagging solutions. You can see the range of applications which are appearing, with announcements both from Microsoft and in the web world, and the finding of content – yours and others’ - will be very important. That is what we will help users to do, by automatically geotagging content for them. As you hinted earlier – there are lots of new possibilities, and we’ll be using software, services, our leading technological base and our product imagination to bring further surprises!