Yesterday, MS Research showed of new research. One of the items was – snap a picture of a nearby building, send off the photo to a database and soon you’ll get back a map and information about where you are.

The map-search technology required Microsoft to get millions of street-level pictures of Seattle’s buildings and landmarks. Those pictures were added to a database and indexed by distinguishing features that can be cross referenced to pictures sent in by users.

My question is WHY?

Most phones have GPS (granted GSM phones in US are out of luck for most part but they will be enabled soon). Doing this picture database thing is too expensive and cumbersome (if you want to make this service universally available) .. for some landmarks, it works fine and might be preferable in the short-term (given the confusion regarding the business model) but long-term, NO.