You know what’s great about on-demand internet TV? You can link to it!
I was reading a Twitter blog post, which linked to a TechCrunch post, which linked to an episode of The Daily Show which referenced Twitter. Links… its all about links to more information.
I am officially announcing my retirement from mapping projects as of today. Today coincides with the start of Where 2.0 which I attended last year. Some may know that I decided not to go this year. Along with Where 2.0, there were also two related events, Google Developer Day and WhereCamp which I attended. Google Developer Day which was free at the time has turned into Google I/O which now charges the equivalent of about 1 iPhone. WhereCamp kind of rode on the shoulders of Where 2.0 as a smaller free unconference for people really interested in geo stuff.
I’ve always been interested in maps. When I was a kid, I would always want to be the navigator with map in hand while riding in the car up north with my family. In boy scouts, I was very interested in orienteering… starting from a given point, navigating to other points using a compass and a map, or sometimes only a compass. Once GPS devices got cheap enough I bought a simple, but proven Garmin eTrex and went geocaching with it. When the Google Maps API came out I got really excited and started developing all kinds of different things with it. I even created a maps subdomain and titled the page Kyle Mulka’s Google Maps. While in college, I worked with my good friend Dan Feldman on a site called liveUgli, which was a real-time study buddy finder. We used the Google Maps API, but instead of the typical world map, we used floor plans of the major study locations on campus. In order to make the site more extensible, I developed two offshoot projects. The first, Gmap Uploader, had the goal of making it really easy to get floor plans into the system. The second, Cartiki, which actually uses the Gmap Uploader, was designed to make it really easy for users to edit the locations in the system.
So, why am I doing this you might ask. Well… there’s a few reasons. The mapping projects that I have worked on so far haven’t gotten much usage. When I was playing around with the Google Maps API, I wasn’t really interested in web mapping itself, I think I was more interested in just playing around with new and cool technology. With the liveUgli, I was interested in making the life of college students better. With the Gmap Uploader and Cartiki, I was interested in building reusable components that could not only be used for liveUgli, but could be used by other developers for their projects. So, I get the feeling, I wasn’t really into mapping so much as the technology behind it, and then the applications of it. Now, I feel as though I have exhausted the interesting and useful stuff (at least to me) in the mapping space, I’m going to move on to other, more interesting things. Hopefully nothing too revolutionary (like the Google Maps API when it came out) gets released at Where 2.0 that will cause me to change my mind.
What am I going to do if I’m not going to be working on mapping projects? Well… I’ve got a few other things up my sleeve, which I will tell you about in more about in upcoming blog entries. Also, don’t forget that my day job at Amazon doesn’t have anything to do with maps, and they disbanded A9 Maps, the only mapping project they had, a while back.
So, if the only reason you are subscribed to this blog is because of your interest in Google Maps, maybe now is a good time to leave. Or, you could stay and read about my new adventures in the next phase of my life.
It really shouldn’t be this cold in Seattle this time of year. I guess I wouldn’t know since I’ve never been in Seattle this time of year… but it has only been this cold a couple times this winter. It even snowed a little the other day.
Last weekend I participated in this thing called Startup Weekend in Seattle. Basically, there were over 100 people attempting to create a startup company (basically a web app) going from concept to launch in just over 50 hours. It was pretty intense.
The weekend started Friday evening with everyone sitting at tables of 5-6 people. Each person shared their idea with the table. They were then written down and one person took the ideas and pitched some of them to another table. The other table decided which 1 or 2 ideas were worthy. These ideas were collected at the front in paper form then randomly distributed to different tables. Each table read the idea on the paper separately and voted either yes or no to the idea. Only about 5 ideas made it past this stage. My theory is that ideas on paper in a sentence or two don’t get people nearly as excited as if someone else was pitching it to them. We ran through that again to get a different set of about 5. So, 10 ideas total. Each of these 10 was pitched to the entire group by the person who originally suggested it. We took a vote on all 10. You could vote either yes or no to each one by either raising or not raising your hand. There were about 4 that made it past this round. Next, there was discussion about each of these 4, and different people talked about the merits of each. Then, a final yes or no vote from everyone and we came out with a clear winner. We were going to build a RideShare that actually worked and that people actually used.
So… now to figure out exactly what we are building, and who else is building similar stuff. An hour or so into this, and the business development people come back with their findings on the competition. They determine that there are some strong competitors in our area, namely Goose Networks. They are doing a lot of the stuff we would be doing and it would be difficult to differentiate ourselves. So, we took a vote if with this new information we should switch ideas. Most people thought we should switch, and so we decided on the “Match.com for Enterprise” idea.
Basically we would create a web application that would allow small to medium sized businesses get a better sense of what skills their employees had to better utilize these. Each employee in the business gets a profile which has basic information plus their answers to certain questions the boss had asked. So, the boss could ask something like “What languages are you fluent in?”. Each employee would answer this question and their answer would show up in their profile. Then, later you could search through the system to find an employee fluent in Spanish to talk with a new client. This is just an example. I’m sure there are plenty of questions you could ask to get useful answers to help in finding skills in your organization. What are we going to call this? We call it SkillBit. The skill part is easy to understand. The bit part represents the simplicity of the software and lack of features I suppose. As with any good web application, it does one thing, and does it well… hopefully.
We have yet to launch SkillBit publicly, but you can sign up on a waiting list to get an announcement of when it launches. If you want more details about how the weekend went, you can read the Seattle Startup Weekend blog which was posted two by two people throughout the weekend.
Over the last year or two, Yahoo hasn’t been doing so well. Their CEO, Terry Semel, stepped down last year. One of the founders, Jerry Yang, took over and embarked on a 100 day review of the company looking for ways to improve the situation. Recently he announced that they had evaluated priorities and will be laying off a good chunk of employees. Just after Yahoo’s most recent earnings report, Microsoft announced an unsolicited takeover bid. Microsoft is definitely taking advantage of the fact that Yahoo’s stock has recently fallen significantly recently. The offer is more than twice their current stock price making it seem like its a really good offer. We’ll see what happens. Will Yahoo accept the offer? Will Microsoft be able to acquire the company without breaching any laws?
I don’t know exactly when Google Maps added this, but now you can get directions from point A to point B using public transit instead of using a car in certain major cities. This works pretty well. You search for directions between two street addresses, and click “Take Public Transit”. It then gives you three options coming up in the next few minutes to take a bus. It shows you if any transfers are necessary. It shows you how long each option will take and when you have to leave and when you will arrive. It of course shows you the route on the map and which bus numbers to look for. I’ve started to use this pretty much every day. I don’t always leave work at the same time, and I want to avoid waiting at the bus stop for too long. There are a couple bus stops near where I work, so I have to choose the right one to minimize the waiting time. I use this new feature pretty much any time I want to go anywhere because, like I’ve said before, I don’t have a car. I use Flexcar when the bus just won’t do.
I watched the MacWorld 2008 Keynote by Steve Jobs, and frankly wasn’t as impressed as I’ve been by the last few. I guess its hard to follow the announcement of the iPhone.
The MacBook Air is pretty cool, but how much value is there in getting a laptop that small? I consider my current MacBook to be thin and light enough to not worry about it. The screen and keyboard looks to be the same size, so the amount room it takes up hasn’t really changed. The extra multitouch gestures are again cool, but with the current applications, don’t appear to be that useful. Maybe I just don’t use the right applications. Maybe it will enable entirely new applications that we haven’t seen yet. That would be cool.
I think the movie rentals on the Apple TV will be a game changer, especially since you don’t need a computer anymore. But, since I’m a technology guy, I’m not that impressed because I don’t see any new technology here. It’s all about the content deals with the major movie producers. I’ll bet that it was the content deals which was causing Steve Jobs to keep saying that Apple TV was Apple’s hobby project. He couldn’t say anything about what was in the works, so he was putting off the fact that Apple TV wasn’t doing that well.
Time Capsule I think was a smart move for Apple. People really need to backup their stuff. It needs to be really easy to do. I think that adding a hard drive to the home router is a good way to go. I personally don’t need it because I bought a Drobo and hooked it up to the Airport Extreme. So, I have two redundant 500 GB hard drives in there so that if one dies, I don’t loose any data. So, I can use it not just as backup, but for primary storage.
A lot of stuff has happened since I last posted, both in the world and in my life. I’ve been hesitant to blog about it mostly because I have to spend time doing it for, what seems to be of little benefit. I’m not even sure who really reads this. I know my family reads it, some of my friends might read it, other folks out there interested in Google Maps stuff might read it, and maybe some other random people out there might read it. I’m going to try to post more often, and am going to do a few quick posts right now.
