Author: leobard

http://a9.com/-/company/YellowPages.jsp

A9.com – they did it.

they cyberspaces half of america. great! Here a copy/pasted snippet:

The most powerful technology A9.com invented for Yellow Pages is “Block View,” which brings the Yellow Pages to life by showing a street view of millions of businesses and their surroundings. Using trucks equipped with digital cameras, global positioning system (GPS) receivers, and proprietary software and hardware, A9.com drove tens of thousands of miles capturing images and matching them with businesses and the way they look from the street.

The whole process (except for the driving!) is completely automatic, making it fast and efficient. Block View allows users to see storefronts and virtually walk up and down the streets of currently more than 10 U.S. cities using over 20 million photographs. We are driving and at some point hope to cover the whole country.

http://zope.niij.org/geekbuero/FrontPage

a friend of mine, Michael Zeltner, had the idea of a “geek office” which consists roughly of a bunch of friends that meet at a place where god has given WLAN and hack together, not necessarily on the same project but to share cigarettes and caffeine (at least thats how I understood it)

brings us to our state of the art research right accross my office door – the Virtual Office of the Future where DFKI, Fraunhofer IESE and RICOH work together on future office environments.

I dream of a coherence of the social aspects mentioned by Michael and the non intrusive, embedded, simple-to-use office tech of the future. Knowledge Working should be like hanging out with friends in the cyberspace. High tech, but looks like an iPod.

oh yeah, and I am in the middle of coding stuff for it. freaky.