Nokia has announced a beta product, Location Tagger that uses internal or external GPS information to tag photos taken with some of its phone (Tested with: Nokia N95, N95 8GB, N82, E90, N73. Should work but not fully tested with: all Nokia devices based on S60 3rd edition).

via The Register

I found this in an article about updating OneCall in Ontario, Canada, but the pilot program is in Virginia.

Excavators at a Fairfax County, Virginia site are using their GPS (Global Positioning System) enabled phones to walk the entire perimeter of proposed excavation areas.

After the outline of the area is complete, a file of the demarcated perimeter is sent to a one-call centre.

- Daily Commercial News and Construction Record

The name says it all. AdNav refers to itself as a GPS Solutions Marketing Company. The idea is to subsidize satnav distribution by hotels, car rental agencies, airlines and make money by offering ads on the devices to local businesses. The platform is called Boomerang and it allows the partner to customize the data offered. Among the offerings are weather, directions, Internet access, city guides. Among the partners are Tele Atlas, CustomWeather, Ask and others. I didn't see any listing of who's advertising yet.

While very clever, my sense is that regular business travelers will be in the habit (soon) of using their phones for such things. Vacationers are a more likely target, but they'll have to learn of the offering before they pick up the NeverLost enabled car at Hertz.

via SmartCompany (Australia)

To keep up on new media I just added a new podcast to my regular list: "For Immediate Release." Some good tech stuff, in addition to PR fiasco's like the bugaboo caused when an anonymous source noted that Edelman teaches its staff to lie on behalf of clients. (From the top execs at Edelman: they do not!)

Anyway, of note this week was another social networking service from FON - a quick, mobile image services - sort of Twitter for images. It's called Twixtr and the big news for geo types - it automatigally geotags pictures with the location from which they were sent. The current client is for the (jailbroken) iPhone (others to follow). And, there's a public API. But of course, this is all in beta, so all the usual warnings apply.

Now about that geotagging - it's called "location guessing." (I like the truth in advertising there!) Per the FON founder's blog post, that geo information comes from cell carriers: "Also thanks to cell providers the iPhone also has some rudimentary geolocalization so that is tagged to the Twitx." I thought iPhone location information was from Skyhook.

In any case, while many are noting "we already have too many of these" things like Twitter, the one hot spot seems to be the addition of location.

via Simon Says blog (he's one of the guys on the FIR podcast)

How do I know? It's the headline for an upcoming Nokia N82 firmware upgrade: "New, yet to be released, Nokia N82 firmware to include geotagging ..." I can't quite figure out this comment from the post: "Privacy advocates hold your horses, I'm sure this will be turned off by default."

- IntoMobile