We built a nice application over Google Maps, that runs smoothly, can map multiple views no matter which corner of the world... We have a dedicated web application server, tuned to a nice database. It works. We have learnt the tricks of the Google Maps API.. We could use that elsewhere, and we did, partly because our effort has been noticed by others as well.

As a matter of fact, there are already customers and projects for our company, CodeSyntax. The FON wireless connectivity network, an ambitious idea by Argentinian entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky, has launched in Spain with maps provided by us (in collaboration with another company, Alianzo).

In turn, ideas used for the FON maps might be applied to Tagzania. From this platform, we hope to promote our work, and contracts that we may get will return to Tagzania as improvements, features...

maps.fon.com are now restricted to Spain. But the network may go international soon. A test for Sweden...

This Mechanical Turk is a (slightly) rewarded system to distribute tasks that need humans to be completed has been launched by Amazon and described in detail by Techcrunch.

But which tasks will be assigned to the Turk? First examples in the site are from Amazon itself and, a-ha, looks like they think they can tag, describe, disambiguate or illustrate places. Reminds familiar of our Tagzania tagline: Tagging the plane. Several tasks are destined to the illustrated streetplan system of A9. They reached thousands of street corners, and now seemingly need people to assign the correct pictures to those places.

This is a task I found at the Mturk.com site:

  A9 BlockView(tm) Image Adjustment -- Seattle, WA  Requester:             Amazon Requester Inc.   HIT Expiration Date:           Nov 6, 2005  (1 day 5 hours)  Time Allotted:         60 minutes   Reward:        $0.03  HITs Available:        13  Description:   You are presented with the name and address of   a business as well as a set of photos taken along the  street where   the business is supposed to be located. Your task is to identify the   best photo of the business that is  listed.  Keywords:      A9, Blockview(tm), image 

I've entered in a task: I had to choose the beste picture for a business building in Phoenix... Then I returned for pictures and the URL to write this post, but there was an error message. Will this micro-rewarded effort tag the planet? Tagzania has a different approach: you tag what you want, not what we need, and you are rewarded with a collection of places (like bookmarks) that you can recall in the future or share with others.

Tagzania's presentation at Webdosbeta has been published at that site. It's in Spanish, of course.

Back from Madrid, some Tagzania-related work among our hands. Working for Martin Varsavsky's FON project, we are involved in the mapping side of the website that they will deploy, in collaboration with another Basque company, Alianzo.