Discover the world from your sofa

http://www.locr.com/

Discover the world from your sofa June 13, 2008
Company: locrIndustry: Internet/Web Mapping/Web ServicesLocation: Braunschweig, Denmark

Photo sharing site locr.com takes stock of initial success

Braunschweig -- For over a year, locr has offered users the possibility to tag photos with geographical data, to archive photos, to save them in albums and to share them with friends, relatives or any other user. In addition to many other innovative applications, this photo sharing community, with an emphasis on geotagging, has made a platform available where users can supplement the information given about the location of their photos and can interactively exchange information about pictures, locations and experiences. Since the site went live in January 2007, the offering has expanded through various collaborations, for example with major manufacturers of cell phones (Nokia), dataloggers (Leadtek), GPS chips (SiRF) and the WPS provider Skyhook Wireless.

The 50,000 users now registered at http://www.locr.com/ don't use the platform just for archiving and sharing geo-indexed photos. They can also access a range of tools for automatic or semi-automatic tagging of their photo files, such as the locr GPS photo software: this software can georeference photos taken with a device without GPS capability. If the photographer used an external GPS datalogger while taking the photo, the software automatically saves the location coordinates to the graphics file.

Electronic mapping material differs for some regions with respect to quality and coverage. After the first few months, when users could only access maps, aerial photos and satellite information from Google EarthTM, locr expanded its offering at the end of 2007 to include the services of Microsoft Virtual EarthTM und Yahoo! Maps TM.

http://www.locr.com/ not only displays the photos saved to the site and the location they were taken on a corresponding map; in addition, more photos of the local vicinity, the postal address, keywords, commentary and the appropriate Wikipedia entry also appear. Of course, by request, photos may not be published at all, or only within a certain group, or they may be displayed publicly to all site visitors.

After concluding numerous collaborative deals with datalogger manufacturers, most recently locr extended its services in cooperation with Skyhook Wireless, a provider of the WiFi positioning system (WPS). The groundbreaking combination of WPS and GPS will help users access locr offerings with cell phones and smartphones, also in areas that have been previously problematic for GPS, such as in buildings or the narrow alleys between.

Keeping their goal of continually offering users new, innovative features in mind, the creators of locr are now working on expanding their services to more cell phone platforms.
"With locr we are revolutionizing modern photography", says Malte Schloen, CEO of locr GmbH. He is looking resolutely toward the future: "Due to our pioneering work, locr has succeeded in professionally meeting the requirements for georeferencing with innovation. Because geotagging no longer functions just with GPS, but can also be used with WLAN capable cell phones, our popularity has risen markedly."

About locrlocr is a photo-sharing community with a focus on geotagging. The locr software (for cell phones, digital cameras, GPS data loggers and PCs) automatically tags photos with GPS data, shows their position on digital maps and generates for each photo descriptions of the locality. The locr online community enables users to upload photos, archive them in albums and swap them interactively with friends and acquaintances. For more details, see http://www.locr.com/