The next photography revolution by Ron Lichty

Think about what it will be like when every digital camera has a GPS, so that your camera not only date- and time-stamps your photos, but also location-stamps them.

Think about searching through Flickr (or just your own personal collection of photos) by first bringing up a map and zeroing in on Bear Valley to find the cross-country ski training you did for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society's Team in Training, or West Yellowstone and Anchorage to find photos of the ski marathons you succeeded in completing. Or zeroing in on your parents' street to find the photos they sent of Christmas Eve at their house, or to the PBwiki mansion on the Peninsula to find the photos of the last hackathon held there.

It makes it all the more important to get geocoding support built natively into databases like SQL Server. (Microsoft knows this, by the way. At their recent SF announcement event for SQL Server Service Pack 1, SQL Server Always On, and SQL Server Everywhere, it was Microsoft Data and Storage Platform SVP Paul Flessner from whom I first heard mention of GPS-stamped photos, and Flessner's slide of SQL Server futures had the note "Spatial goes mainstream" tagged onto version "vNext".)