Coming soon...no more!

Coming soon, originally uploaded by aefitzhugh.

MagCloud.com has been launched in conjunction with the humongous Drupa commercial printing show in Dusseldorf, Germany. HP supposedly has 20 presses running on the show floor (!), it is a truly massive event (held every four years, called by some "the printing olympics").

Fortunately we've managed to keep MC a soft launch. Being able to bury it under all the hardware and usual commercial print talk of Drupa is a blessing. In time I hope it will be clear to all that we're breaking more than a few traditions in commercial printing, and changing magazine publishing in dramatic ways. But we've got a ton of work ahead of us still. I hope to share more in the coming weeks, especially about the amazing folks who have enabled us to get this far.

I got my first MC mag in the mail just last week, and despite the dozens of mags I've gotten off the presses as "inside jobs", it was incredibly satisfying to pull a copy out of the mailbox, wrapped in plastic, my name and address on the back. Damn that's sweet.

Microsoft Pro Photo: Geotagging Goes Mainstream

I had to give up on Virgil in 2005 after 4-5 years due to lack of, well, not lack of interest, but lack of will on behalf of HP's product divisions to do anything with it . For a company struggling to differentiate our offerings in digital imaging, particularly digital cameras, you would've thought they'd be all over geotagging and location. Unless you're familiar with Rules of Life in a BigCo, that is :-(.

I've been happy to watch Flickr bring geotagging to the masses, but have remained disappointed at how little they've integrated location into normal Flickr functions like tagging, search and more (and especially disappointed in Y! Trip Planner's inability to exploit it; c'mon, could anything be more obvious?). So at Flickr, location is mostly about pushpins on a map, and you still have to go out of your way to do things like location-based search instead of having them seamlessly integrated into your photo browsing experience.

I'm thrilled to see Microsoft's Pro Photo Tools (Microsoft Pro Photo: Geotagging Goes Mainstream) with a few geotagging features I prototyped in Virgil, and also implementations of things I filed disclosures on. Most notably the idea of using a time-offset controlling slider in combination with a tracklog and geotagged photos to interactively position the photos correctly. One of my disclosures went a bit further to describe what I never showed I could implement: automatically determine the error in your camera's clock setting based on spatial clustering of mapped photos and assumptions about photo-taking behavior vs. movement. The key assumption? How many photos do you take when you are moving? I'll let you figure out the rest :-).

The first version of Virgil was built atop MS MapPoint (800MB desktop version!), then later on their MapPoint web services -- both well before mapping was a thought over at the Googleplex or Y!. MS knew there was value in location, had it locked up really, and fumbled the ball right to Google & Y! by not moving MapPoint forward quickly enough. I'll be glad to see them recover some of the leadership they demonstrated in the past -- but they'll need to stick with it.

Can't wait to download Pro Photo and give it a whirl. Will post a review when I get to it.