Yahoo! Research Berkeley
Recently, I have great interests in Yahoo!. I got to know that Yahoo! invests a lot for LBS. For example, Fire Eagle is representative. In some aspects, they concentrates on LBS more than Google.
Yahoo! Research Berkeley is one of the Yahoo!’s research labs. Below is their mission.
Yahoo! Research Berkeley’s mission is to explore and invent social media and mobile media technology and applications that will enable people to create, describe, share, find and remix media on the web. Our work combines the fields of media technology, social software, context-aware computing, mobile computing with user and design research to help shape the future of Internet media.
“Zone Tag” is one of their project. Zone Tag adds tags to photo or recommends tags to user using location info. How can we express location? Location can be easily expressed with map. However, map has several limitation in mobile device. Coordinate is difficult to people. So we need some other format of info. Text tag is one of them. It can be address or name of famous place. Zone tag automatically converts raw location to semantic text tag that people can understand. How wonderful is it?
In truth, Zone Tag operates not well. But, Yahoo! has several tremendous user database like a Flick tag database. Foolish A.I is worse than doing by hands-on. I hope Zone Tag to be useful service.