Apple Store, Fifth Avenue: NYC’s fifth-most photographed landmark

[Jularc]

Apple Store, Fifth Avenue: NYC’s fifth-most photographed landmark (beats out Statue of Liberty)





Wednesday, April 29, 2009

"Billions of photos have now been uploaded to the internet, and many are tagged with text descriptions. Some are even geotagged – stamped with the latitude and longitude coordinates at which the image was taken. David Crandall and colleagues at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, analysed the data attached to 35 million photographs uploaded to the Flickr website to create accurate global and city maps and identify popular snapping sites," Colin Barras reports for New Scientist.

"According to Flickr, New York is the world's most photographed city... [and] the Apple Store in Manhattan [Apple Store Fifth Avenue] is the fifth-most photographed place in the city," Barras reports.

MacDailyNews Note: Crandall listed the top 7 NYC landmarks: #1 Empire State Building, #2 Times Square, #3 Rockefeller Center, #4 Grand Central Station, #5 Apple Store, Fifth Avenue, #6 Columbus Circle, #7 Liberty Island.


http://macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/20954/

[Jularc]

Revealed: the world's most photographed landmarks



Postcards from the edge ... the Apple Store in Manhattan is the 28th most
photographed landmark in the world, according to an anlysis of 33 million Flickr
photographs.


Stephen Hutcheon
April 28, 2009

An academic analysis of more than 33 million images uploaded to the popular Flickr photo-sharing website reveals that the flagship Apple Store in midtown Manhattan is the 28th most photographed place on earth.

The findings show that the Fifth Avenue Apple Store, which opened in May 2006, is more popular than many other well-known tourist sites such as St Paul's Cathedral in London, the Reichstag in Berlin and the Washington Monument in the US capital.

The store, which features a giant glass cube facade with a suspended Apple logo inside, is also the fifth most photographed landmark in New York after sites such as the Empire State Building, Times Square and Grand Central Station.

The research was published in a paper presented at the WWW 2009 conference in Madrid last week by a group of academics from Cornell University who had analysed 33,393,835 photos posted on the website by 307,448 users.

Studying the geotagged data which users attached to their photos, the researchers wanted to establish what the world's most popular landmarks were as judged by the collective wisdom of Flickr users around the world.

Among some of the other findings are:

:: New York City is the world's most photographed city with more than 12 million of the photos taken there.

:: The top seven most photographed landmarks are the Eiffel Tower, Trafalgar Square, the Tate Modern Gallery, Big Ben, Notre Dame, the London Eye, and the Empire State Building.

:: The top 10 most photographed cities are New York, London, San Francisco, Paris, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, Seattle, Rome and Amsterdam.

The research team was led by David Crandall, a former computer engineer at Kodak who is now a post-doctoral associate at Cornell's Department of Computer Science.

"The Apple Store landmark is an interesting and surprising result, but it's important to remember that our Flickr data is a heavily biased representation of the world," Crandall said in an email.

"Flickr seems to be most popular in North America and Western Europe, so landmarks outside those areas are likely to be under-represented."

Crandall added that people who used Flickr were also probably more likely to be interested in technology - and hence more interested in the Apple Store - than the average person.

Flickr, which is owned by Yahoo, is one of the world's most popular photo-sharing sites.

Crandall said the data showed that the five most photographed Australian cities were Sydney (ranked 34th), Melbourne (78th), Brisbane (201st), Perth/Fremantle (223rd), and Canberra (327th).

He said the data showed that the top landmarks in Australia included the Sydney Opera House, the Harbour Bridge, Circular Quay, the Yarra River and Sydney's Centrepoint Tower.


http://www.theage.com.au/news/technology...-landmarks/2009/04/28/1240684441792.html

[Policy Wonk]

Is it the store that is most photographed - or the women in skirts walking up the glass stairs in the Apple Store that are most photographed?

[staff]

Only an idiot would draw the conclusion that a certain thing is the most photographed in the world by analysing Flickr photos.

[Roaming]

Now that is funny. The Apple store in NYC is one of the first things I want to visit and photograph when I visit NYC.

[Jularc]

Anyway, in some other Apple on fifth news...


June 2, 2009

No recession at Apple's Fifth Ave. NYC store





by Erica Ogg

Apple's clearly onto something with its 24-hour store plopped down in a tourist hot spot.

The New York Post reports that as of sometime last year, Apple was pulling down $440 million a year in sales at its Fifth Avenue Apple Store in New York City. The numbers surfaced in the paper's investigation of empty retail space along Fifth Avenue.

Even if it is a high-end retail outpost for Macs, iPhones, and iPods, that's an impressive amount of money coming in when seemingly every retailer was clobbered by the arrival of the current recession. By comparison, the SoHo Apple Store rakes in about $100 million per year, according to the Post. And one of Apple's newest locations, in the prime shopping district of the ritzy California coastal town of Santa Barbara, is expected to pull in $20 million annually.

It's interesting insight into the company's flagship location, since Apple does not break out individual stores' take. The company did report in its second-quarter earnings filing that its 252 stores worldwide brought in $1.47 billion collectively for the quarter.

All of this explains why the company has not stopped investing in its retail presence. Apple's senior vice president of retail, Ron Johnson, said last week that 100 of its stores will be remodeled this year to allow for bigger displays and room for customer training courses.

The shopping frenzy at the tourist-clogged Fifth Avenue location isn't like to abate anytime soon, particularly if Apple releases new iPhone hardware next month, as is widely expected.


http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10254695-37.html