Kyle Mulka's Blog

Anouncing my newest Google Maps mashup using the Google Maps API:

Liquor Stores near Seattle, WA

In the state of Washington, in order to buy liquor, you have to go to a special store. You can’t just go to the grocery store like you can in Michigan where I’m originally from.

The Washington State Liquor Control Board has a website where you can locate the liquor store nearest you. However, the best you can do there is search by city. That doesn’t help much when you live in a big city like Seattle and don’t have a car.

So, in order to help the people of Seattle find their liquor, I’ve created a Google Maps mashup of the liquor stores near Seattle based on data from the full list of liquor stores.

I would have put all the stores in Washington on the map, but because of the way the Google Maps API works, it would take forever to load all the markers. Let me know if you are interested in any other part of Washington, and I’ll put it up.

Enjoy!

I think VoiceXML will be the next really big revolution on “the web”. Of course, its no longer the web because they aren’t really webpages. They are XML files that are read to you and have programmed responses. VoiceXML is an easy way for developers to create interactive voice response systems. Combined with a dynamic scripting language like PHP, these XML files can be very powerful.

Instead of a web browser, people will have voice browsers. These voice browsers will parse the XML, turn the text into voice, and receive specific voice commands based on what’s in the XML. Once a voice command has been interpreted, it sends it back to the server to fetch another VoiceXML page.

Notice how this way of doing things limits the bandwidth across the network and also makes the server extremely scalable because the server doesn’t have to do any processing of voice. Instead of sending voice across the network, we send text which the browser translates to and from speech.

UPDATE:

In response to Dave’s first comment below:

I’m pretty sure the blind already have this kind of technology to read web pages. In fact, I just looked it up and found this:
http://www.nfb.org/tech/webacc.htm

Sorry that I didn’t mention mobile applications in my initial post. I definitely don’t see voice browsers replacing web browsers on full sized screens. People can read much faster than they can listen or speak.

Depending on how small your screen is on a mobile device, it might be more efficient to listen than to try to read the screen. It is definitely faster to speak than to try to type on a very small keyboard if your device even has a keyboard at all. So, this would be perfect for small devices where the other methods of getting information in and out are inefficient.

Also, like you mention, it would be good while you are driving, because you need to keep your eyes on the road and your hands on the wheel. Or, you could just turn on the auto-pilot. Oh wait, we don’t have that for cars yet.

Microsoft has announced that Bill Gates will, over the course of the next two years, be stepping down from the day to day operations of Microsoft. He plans to devote more of his time to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Since I’m working at Amazon.com this summer, I pay more attention to the company than I would otherwise. One recent announcement that I was predicting several months ago, was that Amazon would offer groceries on their site. Just recently we announced our Grocery store along with a new feature… a Shopping List.

One reason I was interested in online grocery stores was because we actually had one that would deliver to the Ann Arbor area, specifically to student dorms at the University of Michigan. It was called Arbor Grocery. I doubt they are still delivering over the summer, but hopefully they will continue next fall. I was actually considering buying the business as it was for sale last semester because the owners were moving on to “real” jobs. It got bought for something like $500. I’m pretty sure they just went to the grocery store and delivered the stuff to you, so its not like they had a warehouse to sell or anything.

I was looking into a few other grocery stores. Specifically NetGrocer and Simon Delivers. Net Grocer actually sells products on Amazon’s website.

Maybe this is old news, but I found it amusing that Flickr is now in… no, not beta… GAMMA! Check out the logo on their page. Not exactly sure what they mean by gamma. Here’s what they have to say about it.

One of my professors from last year and a bunch of my friends have been developing Zattoo, a peer-to-peer video streaming technology back in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The client runs on both Windows and Mac and supposedly allows millions of viewers to watch a single live video stream over the Internet without costing the broadcaster a whole lot of bandwidth.

It is a little like BitTorrent in the fact that its peer-to-peer and doesn’t require the original person with the content to have a huge pipe to the Internet. It is very different from BitTorrent in the fact that the content is streaming. Timing makes a difference. If a piece of the video gets lost over the network, there is no need to resend it because you can’t rewind the video. There is no way to save the video to your computer either.

Just a few days ago, the news went out about Zattoo being the the system used for streaming the 2006 FIFA World Cup. That is very exciting news. I’m looking forward to being able to watch soccer over the Zattoo client in June! That is… if they are broadcasting to the US…

Quick-start, Long-play Internet Television Arrives with Zattoo P2P IPTV

Zattoo brings long play P2P broadcasting to Internet TV

UPDATE: Looks like Zattoo has a blog now! Yey!

The weather has been really nice ever since I got here. I think the only not so good day was yesterday when there was a little bit of rain. There were a couple other times I heard people talk of rain, but I never saw it. It seems like its been between 70-80 during the day and maybe 55 during the night, but I’ve never actually measured. Just a guess.

I found some grocery stores! Woot! One is right next to my work. It’s called Uwajimaya. Although the store is mostly filled with Asian groceries, they do have some normal stuff too. They also have an asian food court in back which is pretty good. Speaking of asian food… that is pretty much the only thing to eat around my work. You have to walk quite a ways to get non-asian food. But, its still pretty good.

I finally got a desk and chair for my computer and a connection to the internet for real. Before, I had to steal wireless from the neighboors, and it only worked in the other bedroom. By the way, I still don’t have a roommate, and I don’t know if I’ll get one or not. Now that I think about it, I probably wouldn’t want one.

I’m working this summer at Amazon.com. We’re busy building Marks and Spencer‘s new website and ordering systems. Marks and Spencer is a large retailer in the UK with over 400 stores. Here’s an article, explaining it.

I work in a large room on the 10th floor with about 10 people. We have a good view of the baseball and football stadiums south of downtown Seattle. The people are cool. Some are extremely entertaining.

Oh boy… facebook is expanding to include companies. I can just see where this is going. The amount of time wasted at work browsing facebook is going to be phenomenal. See… there’s a big difference between college and the corporate world. In the former, you are paying to be there, in the latter, you are getting paid to be there. I can’t imagine companies are going to be very friendly to the idea of people using company time to browse the facebook.

I wonder if there have been any court cases involving companies blocking certain sites. Here’s a wild prediction of a possible court battle…

Microsoft starts to see a bunch of people using the facebook… and not for business purposes either, just for social, outside of work type stuff. Microsoft says, “Hey, our employees are wasting time on a site that doesn’t do our business any good. Furthermore, we have been developing internally our own version of the facebook, but more geared towards businesses than the facebook currently is. We’ll block facebook so that our employees will be forced to use our not-as-cool facebook clone. Once we have Microsoft employees on board, we’ll sell this software to other companies and make lots of money.” Then, facebook sues Microsoft for loss of business or something and it goes to the supreme court, and they make some sort of ruling.

Ok, so I admit, that’s a pretty wild prediction. There are at least a few problems with it. 1) The number employees at Microsoft is really small compared to the number of people using facebook, so I can’t really see any one company with that scenario. 2) I think companies have the right to block things going to their internal networks. After all, they own their network and everything inside it, right? 3) No one will dare to challenge Microsoft in the legal realm unless they are sure to win…

So, basically, my point is that, facebook as it currently stands is not suited for corporate use, and companies will catch onto that fact very quickly and ban its use or create policies against it or whatever. Maybe facebook does have plans to make their service more useful to businesses and eventually companies won’t mind their employees using the service. But, they better get moving quick, or another site will push them out of the market. I kinda doubt facebook will change much to accomodate large corporations though. They have a good thing going with the college market. What they might want to do though is to make facebook less of a time waster and more of a school helper. I don’t know if that’s even possible, or if that’s what people really want.

Hmm… interesting. I just looked at the facebook terms of service. It specifically states that facebook may only be used for non-commercial purposes:

“You understand that the Service and the Web site are available for your personal, non-commercial use only.”

Here’s a couple related entries from a blog I just found called Inside Facebook:

Congressman introduces bill to block Facebook

Facebook opens its doors to a slew of companies

“According to company spokesperson Melanie Deitch, Facebook has just finished building a WAP, or wireless application protocol, that will offer a browsing service that more closely resembles the way the site works online.”

You don’t build a protocol… its already been created. You build a version of the site that runs on the protocol.

“WaveMarket, a location-based technology company that is powering Sprint’s Family Finder service, has a StreetHive mobile social network application, though the site is still in beta.”

Isn’t every web application on the internet still in beta?

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