I definitely want a mobile version of Last.fm radio!
The availability of Flash-enabled mobile devices to use Last.fm’s player wouldn’t be the problem. It’s rather the bandwith consumption of an internet radio together with mobile data transfer limits of our mobile carriers and costs for exceeding those limits. Using a high speed mobile conneciton like UMTS for listening to Last.fm simply would make me a poor man.
Unfortunately Vienna is far away from being fully covered by free wifi, so another option like using wifi enabled mp3 players wouldn’t work either.
In the meantime the only alternative left is continuously rearranging my iPod playlists to match my Last.fm radio a bit. It’s a bit unfair, because Last.fm is computing my profile, providing me with excellent recommendations, and then I (have to) search for certain tracks on iTMS or Bleep and buy the songs there. So the work is done by Last.fm and the profit goes to others. The only option to purchase music on Last.fm for me would be via an Amazon link, but sorry, times of ordering CDs are over.
Could you imagine a better combination for an online music store than being embeded within Last.fm’s recommendation system?
Probably not.
If you’re a jerk you might so go ahead and be a jerk. [The Vloggies]
It’s freedom what makes the internet to such an exciting communication media. Any kind of censorship undermines the very nature of the internet. At the end of the day it’s up to every site owner what content is going to be published and what not. I don’t need to sign a Code of Conduct for not allowing harassing or threating comments on my blog, I certainly would delete them, as I do it with spam comments. Still, it would be my own decision if I don’t agree with certain comments and therefore don’t want them to be connected with my online life.
What’s Yahoo! Local in the US or GoYellow in Germany is Herold in Austria. The Austria based company, specialized in Yellow Pages, business and marketing data (and locally famous for privacy violations), released a new mapping service for Austria: Herold Karte & Route.
Worth mentioning is the excellent high resolution imagery (by GlobeExplorer) in bigger cities, better than any other online imagery I’ve seen so far for this region, and in addition it seems quite up-to-date. At least I could get a glimpse at the roofs of some rather new (finished by the end of last year) residential zones in Vienna. Whereas in rural areas only rough imagery is available.
Other interface parts and features are similar to maps from Google, Yahoo, Virtual Earth, etc., nothing innovative like Ask City but proven usable: place search, business search, directions search.
Overall a well done, fast and useful application, and, since global players tend to ignore small countries, the only countrywide map-based search product.
Never ever I’ll complain about my life again (you’re encouraged to remind me the next time I do so). Compared to other parts of the globe our problems seem so tiny and unimportant. Just received an email from a friend, working for UN in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where a simple renewal of a drivers license in Kinshasa ended in the middle of a local war zone between two opponent election candidates (the election-loser and his army got a bit disappointed). A message about whistling bullets, looting, hiding and finally tanks to bring civilians out.
We all have seen pictures of African conflicts on the news or in movies, showing warlords and their armies, but it really makes a difference if somebody you know is telling you such a story.
Projects like the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum‘s Darfur layers for Google Earth are clearly not enough but important to raise awareness about that regions. One can only hope that the project doesn’t stop in Darfur and that it was more than a media hype (it even qualified as headline in TV evening news here).
There are not many movies I had to turn off because I couldn’t stand them any longer. The Passion of the Christ made it on that list. Mel Gibson sees or wanted to show “beauty in brutality”, but this movie is simply insane. Even worse is the message, everybody who claims it’s not an anti-Semitic film probably hasn’t seen it. If Mr Gibson would have read (or understood) the story his movie is supposed to be based on properly then he should know that the sins of every human being makes the guy called Jesus Christ in his movie suffer and die. Jews and Romans are only supporting actors.
Interestingly that Austria’s public broadcaster put it on Good Friday night on the TV program, once a very special date in persecution of Jews.
However, I’m off to spend a few days on the countryside. Happy Easter Holidays to everyone!
Ed Parsons, former Ordnance Survey CTO, joined Google as Geospatial Technologist for EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa). A brilliant move and Ed is surely a tremendous asset to Google.
It’s important for Google to have someone with his visions on board and bring traditional geospatial industry and neogeography closer together.
Congratulations!
I’m wondering how Google Desktop will handle indexing on the Mac?
On Windows Google Desktop index files grow up to multiple GB file sizes. So the question that came to my mind is: does Google Desktop make use of the Spotlight index or will Google create it’s own local index from scratch?
Spotlight obviously stores its index somewhere on the hard drive and I think it must be already quite large, supposedly more than a GB on my MacBook. I don’t want another local search application to create a second index, parallel to Spotlight’s, containing more or less the same information – there is only one local drive to index – and clutter up my hard drive with a few GB of index files.
Besides, Spotlight does a fairly well job. Extended by some plugins it searches within my del.icio.us bookmarks, Open Office documents or online on Google.
While it’s good to see that the European Commission cares about consumer rights, I don’t understand why they worry so much about entertainment industry (cf. Times). As if there weren’t other problems in the EU than varying music prices. Besides, I doubt Apple came up with the idea of separate iTMS for each European country by itself.
What’s next? Cars are in UK more expensive than in Spain too, and they even have the steering-wheel on the wrong side!
Has Google silently extended the geocoding service in Europe? Or did I just miss the announcement?
Until today I thought Google’s geocoder doesn’t cover Austria (and some other European countries too), but while trying the new XING features I was surprised to find Google maps based on address searches as well as driving directions within Vienna.
