Zoto photo project aims to record more than 4.54m US sites
By Tom Foremski - June 28, 2005
. . . Route 66 at hyper speed
If you have ever wanted an excuse to travel the US and visit places you never knew existed, Zoto has the mission for you: upload a photograph of each spot where a whole-numbered minute of latitude intersects with a whole-numbered minute of longitude.
That's 4.554 million "minute confluence points." So make sure your digital camera has plenty of batteries.
Zoto is an online sharing site similar to Flickr with some interesting twists on Flickr-like features such as tagging.
Flickr developed into a community platform almost by accident, and continues to produce "accidental" communities of users that are drawn together for unpredictable reasons.
Zoto, in contrast, has been designed from the start to be a community platform. It will be interesting to see if aberrant behavior by groups, the "madness of crowds," will show itself in abundance on Zoto.
Encouraging the unpredictable
That is the best test of a community platform such as Flickr, Del.iscio.us or MySpace.com — that there are thriving communities of users doing different and unexpected things. I like to tag this as a "flickriscious" quality and it is the holy grail of community platforms.
To encourage online communities, Zoto has chosen to sponsor the minute confluence photography project, also known as GeoProject USA and inspired by the successful Degree Confluence Project.
"Google is using trucks equipped with lasers and photo gear to create 3D maps of cities such as San Francisco, [see SVW scoop] so we wanted to do something different," said Dakota Sullivan, Chief Operating Officer at Zoto.
He estimates it will take volunteers two to three years to collect photos of nearly all the 4.554m points — each with four views — which are just one mile apart.
"Then you'll be able to zoom across a virtual USA consisting of a montage of photos in any direction, at hyperspeed. It'll be stunning. And people will come up with applications and uses for something like that," Mr Sullivan said.
Zoto lets digital photographers store tens of thousands of photos on its servers, and publish them to blogs, for family members or the public. It was founded in 2004 with several executives from LookSmart, the Australian search company.
The GeoSmart project should help it attract an interesting crowd of users. All you need to take part is a standard global positioning device, a compass and a digital camera.
M&A deals in hot photo sector
Photo sites and photo sharing are active business sectors because of acquisitions such as Picasa by Google. This year Yahoo bought Flickr, Hewlett-Packard grabbed Snapfish and, in June, Shutterfly acquired Memory Matrix.
Google seems to have the most integrated and ambitious plan for photos, photo sharing, and photographing near every inch of the planet. In October it acquired Keyhole, which has huge numbers of satellite photos that can be integrated into a ground-level view for creating 3D photo montages of cities.
Google also wants communities of users to come up with interesting uses for this type of geo-location photography. And with 3D cities as a focus, this will create opportunities for Google and its partners to overlay commercial services.
Will big always win?
These are early days and Zoto can still carve out a decent sized market. But these are essentially infrastructure battles, which generally play out in terms of scale; whoever gets bigger faster, using open, standard platforms, will eventually win.
Google has scale and it has open standard platforms. I'm sure I don't need to step my readers through the opportunities, from the application of the Google advertising network to the Google Earth project. Contextual advertising has a new meaning.
. . .
From Cnet:
Shutterfly buys out Memory Matrix
HP to acquire Snapfish photo service
Yahoo buys photo-sharing site Flickr
Here is some background from the announcement Zoto will make on Wednesday:
Geo Project USA is inspired by the successful “Degree Confluence Project” (www.Confluence.org). More than 7,000 participants have visited, photographed and written about 5,000 degree confluence points in 166 countries, including 872 of the 1265 degree confluence points in the U.S. “People have been asking me for something like this for a long time,” said Alex Jarrett who founded the Degree Confluence Project in 1996. “Geo Project USA takes our original vision to an extreme level.”
Zoto is a natural home for Geo Project USA. Kord Campbell owned the Oklahoma internet service provider (ISP) where the Degree Confluence Project was originally housed and has been involved in the project ever since, personally contributing several degree confluence visits in Oklahoma and Texas.
Zoto is a Web-based photo hosting, organizing, sharing and publishing site. Zoto was founded in 2004 by Kord Campbell, Rick Dunning and Trey Stout and is privately funded. Zoto is based in Oklahoma City, OK, with a business development office in Berkeley, CA.
By Tom Foremski - June 28, 2005 | Permalink | Comment
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