The problem with this film is, that one can watch the characters day by day walking around in this country. It’s not fiction, that’s why Import Export is so disturbing.
Monthly Archive for November, 2007
It’s a Tiki bar what is still missing in Vienna! Even if we are living in a landlocked city, we should pay our tribute to Don the Beachcomber.
Listen and watch The history of Tiki from Jeff Berry NYT. [via mother in law]
Whoever might be responsible for the newly introduced most beautiful terrain layer in Google Maps, they must have good connections, or are somehow related to Swiss elevation data. Compared to Switzerland, their neighboring countries just look like a rough terrain draft.
I totally missed that it’s allowed in OpenStreetMap to derive vector data from aerial imagery provided by Yahoo! Maps. Apparently already since December 2006.
Last weekend, when we checked Vienna on OSM, we started wondering how come that it’s suddenly so rich on details. Did we miss a local GPS boom or mapping party?
The last time, it was summer, I collected and edited some tracks in my neighborhood for OSM, Vienna was poorly covered. Some major roads showed up and only a few neighborhoods were mapped more detailed (including parks, cemeteries or water areas for instance).
I didn’t know then that I can actually use the aerial imagery to refine my tracks and relied on the data my GPS unit returned. Reception and therefore accuracy in dense urban areas and narrow streets isn’t the best as you can imagine. Some of my tracks were way off and it was quite a hassle to put them in JOSM to a valid street network together.
However, the boost the Yahoo! aerial imagery gave OSM is impressive. Most parts of the central Viennese districts are already well covered. No wonder, it’s very easy to edit without the need of previously generated GPS tracks, directly via the browser interface.
High resolution aerial imagery + collaborative mapping tools = the real public geodata!
(With some help of the good old Gründerzeit raster, which makes mapping this city pretty straightforward I guess)
What was wrong with the old Flickr map?
Maybe it’s just me, but I think the continent spanning words (tags) on the new Flickr map are a step backwards regarding usability, compared to the really nicely done photo-dots-generalization the previous version of the map had. The only interactivity on the new map is clicking tags, right? Or did I miss something? I really preferred the old version where I could zoom down to photo-dots and browse through photos directly on the location.
Well, it must be my dot-fetish, but on the new user maps the generalized dots are gone too. Now you see the most recent (or interesting) photographs placed on the map, which is just another exploring approach. If you scroll through the pictures on the bar, the map changes too, unfortunately not vice versa. When you pan the map, the photos aren’t updated in the bar. Would be something nice to have too.
Whereas the new Places feature is awesome. One page per place, containing excellently chosen photographs, active groups and people on that location. Very well done. Even though I wish I could navigate to other places more easily. With some interactivity on the small map or links to popular neighboring places for instance. Currently I have to go up and down in regional hierarchy or use the location search.
Even Flickr’s “Safe Search” works in Places. Although there are some properly tagged photos (and a whole lot more!) for an unluckily named Austrian village on Flickr, it remains for some reasons banned in Places…
Oh yes, this is an iPhone post. It’s all over the news and I simply couldn’t resist because…
- iPod touch = 299,- EUR
- iPod touch + GSM chip + 2MP camera = 999,- EUR
The science of pricing policies or how to fool customers!
Turns out that November is a quite popular strike month. So far we’ve got:
- television and film writers in Hollywood
- German railway workers
- civil servants, transport and energy workers in France
- La Scala opera house strike in Milan (perhaps all Italian operas following)
- Railway workers and several trade unions in Hungary
So if you planning to travel Europe on public transport, you better wait and give it in a couple of weeks another try.
Or just visit Austria. We never use this very fundamental labor right, promised! We’re cosy people, loving our Sozialpartnerschaft.
Yesterday Switzerland, today Austria. Seems like somebody is preparing for Euro 2008.
Google released today a localized version of Google Maps Austria. Users are now able to search and find information about local businesses in Google Maps here too. Apparently Google doesn’t make too many efforts acquiring business data. As they claim, all the data is provided by business owners who want to be found on Google Maps and communities (crowdsourcing is the new buzzword). Quite efficient I assume.
However, there is still room for improvement left. I personally know much more Schnitzel-places in the center of Vienna than the Schnitzel search on Google Maps returns yet.
Google entering the neighborhood business search market will give the local yellow pages top dog Herold some hard times. They recently came up with a brand new mapping application, very well done with beautiful high resolution aerial imagery and based on their comprehensive business data. It will be interesting to follow further development on that issue, especially in regard to strong local community sites like Tupalo or Qype. [via futurezone]
Last time we met, Max recommended the current edition of Le Monde diplomatique about globalization. After reading the first couple of articles about multinational corporations like IKEA, Wal-Mart, GE, etc. and basically how the shareholder value maximization is affecting economies in developing countries, I can’t put on my socks anymore without starting to think if they were produced in one of those sweatshops, sewed by 15 year old teenagers working 7 days a week.
That’s totally depressing.