You know those thigs that seem glaringly obvious once you’ve seen them, the ones where you go: “Damn, I wish I’d thought of that”. Well here’s one: Goggles :: The Google Maps flight sim
Take Google maps and turn it into the landscape for a flight sim. Choose your city and away you go….
Apparantly all done by one guy to promote his portfolio, if that’s the case I think his portfolio deserves promoting: http://www.isoma.net/
technorati tags:goggles, google, maps, flight
eBay Bans Sellers from Using Google Checkout – I think that says it all… I smell war.
OK, not totally. But this is an interesting development. A startup that will take your designs and turn them into coded web pages by outsourcing it to cheap places around the world (returning your pages within 5 days). Prices from $150. If you don’t like it you don’t pay. TechCrunch: XHTMLized Turns Your Design into Code
In fact. I think we should start to use them. In fact. We’re saved! Saved from pricey freelancers that is ;-)
As a trend, alongside Spotrunner which does a similar thing with advertising. (Creates bargain basement looking ads and schedules and optimises media placements automatically). It’s interesting to see how some of the ‘low-end’ (and I’m not sure about using that term here) of both the interactive and advertising industries are being made automatable and outsourcable in new ways.
I suppose when you add in PayPal, Google Checkout, Shopify, eBay, etc. It’s just the next wave of technological enabling of small businesses and entrepreneurialism. And I suppose that it could just be compared to the fact that when Desk Top Publishing was made accessible, design shops didn’t die out. But I’m not sure it’s quite the same…
I had a thoroughly enjoyable afternoon coffee with Russell Davies on Friday. We talked about lots of really interesting things.
Strangely the thing that I came away with most was a weird kind of nostalgia for the village where I grew up.
I’ve only met a couple of people in my adult life who actually know where I grew up. I normally have to say, do you know Birmingham? Do you know Nottingham? (Most people sort of say yes to both, but you can tell they don’t really know where either of them are – and why should they). Anyway, I grew up in a tiny village called Barton-under-Needwood, and it’s not really very close to anything.
But, not only did Russell know the exact village where I grew up, he’d been to one of the pubs there. And being an fellow East Midlander was familiiar with being called ‘duck’ and all those other strange things I’d not considered for ages. I’ve not been back there for nearly 15 years.
So yesterday I thought I’d go back there. Not in reality, but via the teleportational qualities of Google Maps. So I put in the name of the village. And got a nice map. Then I refined it down to the last postcode I could remember living at.
On the satelite view I could see my house at the end of the row of terraced houses. And I could see the cow field where me and my brother used to play. Then I started playing around, zooming out, looking at street names. And I started to remember other things, like the route of my morning paper round.
Then I remembered something I’d seen on Flickr a while ago: Memorymaps.
Memorymaps are an interesting mash-up between Google Maps and Flickr. People screengrab a meaningful map on Google, then they annotate them with memories, so when you move your mouse over the map you can see points of personal interest. OK, so it’s quite self indulgent. But at the same time I quite liked it as an idea: so I made my own.
One digital life reports on a really neat promotion run by MacZot.
They reduced the price of the Appzapper application by 5 cents for every blog that linked to the site. Mac bloggers went nuts for it and the price went down to completely free. Sensibly it didn’t stay free forever; just for a limited period / number of downloads.
What’s so smart about this?
Smart work.
According to a report from Marketing Sherpa:
Currently at least 75 million consumers and businesspeople in the USA and UK use RSS on a regular basis. However, depending on which study’s stats you believe, only 17-32% of RSS users actually know they’re using RSS.
I don’t find this at all hard to believe. I use RSS all the time, lots of people I know use RSS, but without knowing what RSS actually is or how it works. Before trying to write a definition of RSS I did about 10 minutes of fruitless searching, attempting to find a definition that you didn’t have to be a techie to understand. I couldn’t. I’m sure that there are simple definitions out there. But all the ones I found tended to stray off into scary things like XML definitions.
Having tried (and in most instances failed) to tell clients about RSS feeds the most useful description of RSS I’ve found is something like this:
“Using RSS you can make your website content very portable. It takes the most important information: titles, text, links and images. And makes it easy for you, or other people to display it in the way they choose. An RSS feed enables people to view your site content on their phone, on their computer, on other websites (MyYahoo, Google personal home page, etc.). It gives you extra distribution channels for your content with almost no extra effort.”
That’s the fundamentals (as I see them). Of course there’s loads more you can do with RSS, but as a basic description this sort of works for me. If my dummies definition misses lots of important things please let me know.
Google have released a heap of videos from their internal archives:
In addition to helping distribute content from across the world, Google would like to share videos featuring our company.
Some great stuff in there, especially the ever-brilliant Seth Godin doing a presentation that seems to cover the central themes of a selection of his books in under 50 minutes. I saw Seth present years ago when he was at Yahoo! and he’s always stuck in my mind as one of the most natural and compelling presenters out there.
Visit Videos From the Googleplex
Sony Ericsson are adding Blogger support and Google Search to their new phones – nice tie-up for all concerned I reckons. Scheduled for Q2 this year.
Some nice views of the new Sony Ericsson handsets on their Cebit 2006 site. My current favourite is the W950.
Funnily enough a second post about an AKQA piece of work in one day, they must be doing something right. And in this case they really are: Run London – RouteFinder. An extension of the undoubtedly great brand property Run London, this time a trendy mash-up with Google maps.
But this isn’t just a fashionable me-too, this is a really really smart utilisation of Google’s mapping API. It allows users to overlay and share their running routes. You can search for routes by postcode, type of terrain, whether it’s well lit at night and more.
Nice work.
BBC news reports on this rather odd story from the US. A judge in the States has ruled that Google have violated the copyright of Perfect 10 magazine (a high end ‘adult’ title). The violation results from the fact that Google shows thumbnails from the magazine on their image search site.
The only upside for Google in the whole thing is:
The judge said the search company did not gain financially from the thumbnails.
Instead the websites hosting the pirated images were at fault, meaning that a damages claim against Google was unlikely to succeed.
To my mind the whole case should have been built around this. The whole point of Google is to index stuff online. To expect them to be able to filter out anything that may have a copyright infringement is absolutely insane. If you look closely almost every single website in the world will have some form of copyright infringement somewhere.
Just look at the image above. I haven’t got permission from Google for that screenshot. And even more worryingly I’ve got no permission from Perfect 10 (those scaled down thumbnails are images from their magazine). I guess that makes me guilty too…