The GRL videos are impressive, but watching a live demonstration is way better. Even with regular office equipment (an iSight, a MacBook, a Benq projector and the green laser pointer) they achieved amazing results. Maybe it’s the solution for pimping boring PowerPoint presentations (especially if they’re somebody else’s…).
Photos of the event are already popping up and hopefully videos will follow soon. To ease a constant search of Flickr and YouTube I put a basic pipe together which grabs photos and videos tagged or named with “Laser Graffiti Vienna” and republishes them as RSS, JSON or KML.
Today the EU and US announced their agreement on the GPS-Galileo common civil signal. So future (civil) devices will be able to communicate with GPS and/or Galileo satellites.
Interoperability usually is a good thing and especially in that case it’ll help Galileo to literally take off because GPS is widely adopted.
However, a few questions remain…
A strong driving force behind Galileo was to become independent from US-operated GPS. In an earlier agreement the US already ensured that Galileo can be regionally turned off for security reasons. Does the current new interoperability agreement have any effect on the earlier “US veto” agreement? What happened to the independence argument in this new agreement?
One of the main advantages of Galileo over GPS was its higher accuracy (it was said to be to function even indoor quite well). As far as I know positioning accuracy depends on frequency and signal interference (I’m no engineer, so correct me if I’m wrong). If GPS and Galileo use the same signal, what happened to that advantage? I would assume that GPS and Galileo achieve the same accuracy then.
To say future devices will, based on the agreed interoperability, support both systems is kind of a weak argument. I guess they would’ve done so anyways. Putting two chips in one device shouldn’t be a problem until 2012 (when Galileo is supposed to start).
Since private companies left and the financing of Galileo is very likely done by public funding, which somehow shows that the private sector doesn’t really trust in future Galileo business opportunities, the “supporting European LBS business” argument is slightly disappearing too.
So where is the point for Galileo? Or why should the EU not drop Galileo, license, build and operate it’s own GPS satellites instead and probably save a lot of tax money?
30 seconds seem fine to answer political questions. It gives just enough time to focus on the question itself and point out the main concept or idea.
30 seconds minimize the risk of politicians attacking each other with rather stupid arguments.
Or maybe it’s just a matter of culture in political discussions. I mean here we’re used to (and probably a good part of the audience is sick of) TV discussions where the majority of politicians keeps on talking endlessly without saying anything substantial.
Some of the questions raised at the CNN YouTube debates in South Carolina where indeed quite interesting. Obviously not as sophisticated as if they were asked by experts, but that’s probably the idea behind the YouTube debates: address regular people, who are talking a regular language and make them participate.
Another thing which really impressed me was hearing the clear answer “yes” or “no” from a politician. Can you imagine?! The last time I’ve heard those words from an Austrian politician, even asked a straight “yes” or “no” question, is quite some time ago.
when it’s time to change, then it’s time to change:
So as most of you know by now, FeedBurner is now part of Google and I’m now working on the AdSense Product Management team helping integrate all we built over the last three years into Google.
I’m not sure if I’m going to like this since it certainly will increase ads in feeds. Feeds should remain plain, clean and, above all, free from ads, even from unobtrusive AdSense.
One major advantage of feeds is their compact style of information, which allows me to screen and read them quickly. Advertising would mean distraction and therefore destroy a major part of the concept. No, I’m definitely not going to like this. [via GWB]
According to this press release the dutch navigation solution provider TomTom is bidding for Tele Atlas, a global digital mapping company and major data supplier for navigational devices.
What’s next?
TomTom competitors ban Tele Atlas, Garmin acquires Navteq and Openstreetmap fills the gap?
You find more information on Laserguided Graffiti at the Graffiti Research Lab, who I think originally developed those systems, or just watch the video below to find out what this is all about.
It’s not vandalism, it’s interaction with public space!
I just tried to find a second opinion or review about a new restaurant I’d like to go and went therefore across some local recommendation sites.
Qype, the European version of Yelp, was one of them.
One thing on Qype, which I visited for the first time btw, called my immediate attention: the geocode in the address bar, where a 5-digit NUTS code followed by a place name showed up.
NUTS (Nomenclature d’unités territoriales statistiques) is a geocode standard for referencing the administrative division of countries for statistical purposes in Europe. [Wikipedia]
First of all I found it rather fascinating that a trendy 2007 Web 2.0 company, in times of folksonomy and the semantic web, makes use of an old and dusty statistical classification standard developed during the 1980s.
The second thought was already that, since we are dealing a lot with those region codes because it’s the only way to homogenized European statistical information, I can dynamically link our regional databases directly to Qype sites without having to deal with place name, spelling and search accuracy issues.
Considering that option, Qype is probably one of the best resources for a general overview of NUTS regions. Other regional information sites usually provide different, mostly national, views and definitions of regions. Actually I’m not aware of a resource where you can go through all European NUTS regions and get for each a homogenized picture and description.
An amusing detail is that you even can search by NUTS codes instead of place names in Qype: for instance looking up “pizza” in “AT130″. The local search any hardcore statistician ever dreamed of came true in Qype!
The restaurant was I Carusi btw, anybody been there yet?
Being a big fan of Google Reader, for reasons like keyboard short-cuts or tags instead of folders, I’m really glad to have finally found this Google Reader Theme developed by hicksdesign (it’s around since April though).
Clearly, it adopts much of the Mac OS X UI style, but still, it’s amazing how you can improve usability only by applying a decent CSS: the sidebar appears better organized and articles itself are easier readable than without the theme.
Adding the two extra style definitions as mentioned in the comment section here makes it even better.
If you’re using Google Reader, you definitely should give it a try.
Not only Vienna is heating up this week, we’re heading towards 35°C and more every day, no, even mapping sites are called hot today:
Microsoft released their research project Virtual Earth Hotmap.
Hotmap gives some insights about place popularity and shows where people have looked during the past 6 months in Virtual Earth.
It’s quite interesting that the map, the overall picture, is similar to other (spatial) analysis results we do in our day-to-day job: the map, literally based on hits and page impressions, shows an urban/rural divide and structures along major transport axis. Besides large urban areas, some tourism regions can be identified too – lake regions in Carinthia, skiing regions in Salzburg and Tyrol.
After a quick look at Virtual Earth Hotmap I’d say it provides some interesting data for regional marketing purposes and could be used additionally to other (tourism) website traffic analysis. E.g. if a tourism region doesn’t show up in Hotmap then probably not too many people are looking for information about or even searching directions to it (and going there?).
Big kudos to the guys at Metalab for the Laser Graffiti session last Friday at Mumok here in Vienna.
I just tried to find a second opinion or review about a new restaurant I’d like to go and went therefore across some local recommendation sites.
