Perspectives

Ourcity recently went live with Yahoo India’s maps(YIM) a little while ago (3rd april, do be precise). You can view your city’s map, click, drag, zoom and all the other things you can do with YIM. You can also search for a location and a few essential services inside the map you are viewing.

So, what do you think?

From Dr.Dobb’s,

New York State’s Department of Transportation has integrated Google Maps with its system for reporting traffic conditions, giving travelers more up-to-date information. The department’s Condition Acquisition Reporting System Web product, known as Cars Web, reports information on roadwork, accidents, and closures

Interestingly, this traffic information tool’s url reads “carsgoogle” Looks like these folks have installed cameras all over the place and give you live (well, almost) pics from them. Quite cool and fairly handy. There are also other layers such as “road work” , “accidents” etc.

So, how long do you think it will be before Bangalore gets it’s own live camera for traffic ? 10 years? Well, You can watch it right now at sify’s bangalorelive. Enjoy Maadi!

I was listening to “Boulevard of broken dreams“, one of my favorites of Green day on one of the radio stations in bangalore. During the course of the song, Billy Joe Armstrong sings

“Read between the lines..
whatz fucked up and everythings alright”

In a desparate effort to conform to what is plausibly Information and broadcasting ministry’s regulations..they had to insert a beep. Unfortunately, I heard the entire god-forsaken word before the beep arrived. I couldnt stop bearing a smile.

That got me thinking how they do this entire music censorship! I mean, does someone sit and listen to all the songs waiting for the adult word and insert this beep ? Or, does the censorship board take all the songs that has ever been and run it through some voice recognition system that can insert the beep? Can this system identify Billy Joe Armstrong’s fuck and Dave mustaine’s and James Hetfield’s?

Wow! That must have been the most amazing voice software ever written. AFAIK, even Google is having trouble recognizing people speaking, forget singing

Google has removed yahoo India maps from it’s index. Artifically, forcibly and manually. For a search query such as “yahoo india maps”, or “domain:yahoo.com india+maps”, I dont think there is any other site more relevant. Secondly, all the blogs that announced Yahoo maps’ arrival are very well in it’s index. And each one of these blogs have an inlink to in.maps.yahoo.com. Heck, even my pic on flickr is turning up. Googlebot knows how to reach the site then, right?. Not that I say technorati is right, but from what I see there, organically in.maps must atleast be third in the result list.

But that is not what is interesting. I saw in.maps.yahoo.com on google’s first search result page yesterday.

Dear Google, Do you know what you mean when you say “Dont be evil?”

Yours truly.

Wanna know Who’s Driving the Market up and Down and how?

It was autumn, and the Red Indians on the remote reservation asked their new Chief if the winter was going to be cold or mild. Since he was a Red Indian Chief in a modern society, he had never been taught the old secrets, and when he looked at the sky, he couldn’t tell what the weather was going to be. Nevertheless, to be on the safe side, he replied to his tribe that the winter was indeed going to be cold and that the members of the village should collect wood to be prepared.

But also being a practical leader, after several days he got an idea. He went to the phone booth, called the National Weather Service and asked “Is the coming winter going to be cold?”

“It looks like this winter is going to be quite cold indeed” the meteorologist at the weather service responded.

So the Chief went back to his people and told them to collect even more wood in order to be prepared. A week later, he called the National weather Service again. “Is it going to be a very cold winter?”

“Yes,” the man at National Weather Service again replied, “It’s definitely going to be a very cold winter.”

The Chief again went back to his people and ordered them to collect every scrap of wood they could find.

Two weeks later, he called the National Weather Service again. “Are you absolutely sure that the winter is going to be very cold?”

“Absolutely,” the man replied. “It’s going to be one of the coldest winters ever.”

“How can you be so sure?” the Chief asked.

The weatherman replied, “The Red Indians are collecting wood like crazy”

I am a big fan of RajniKanth, just like entire Tamilnadu.

Sivaji, probably the most awaited Tamil film ever is coming soon. There is no official word on when, but I hear it is roughly around May 8th. Sivaji’s music, scored by isai puyal, A.R Rahman is out of the box now.

Vijay fernando of hummaa.com, just told me you could listen to sivaji’s songs, first and completely legally, from hummaa.com. Hummaa, based out of bangalore, has been around for a little while now and it is a Indian film music lovers’ paradise. They are basically a streaming music service covering pretty much all indian film music in most major languages.

Check it out if you havent. And it seems to work fine on firefox & linux. Good work guys.

This is one long pending post. Zook is a new sms and/or wap based local search service that a good friend of mine and others released a month back or so. Sameer calls it “Mobile answer engine”. Pretty funky huh?
There are quite a few reviews about zook all over the web now, and Zook’s blog is here. But why keep reading when you can actually try it ? Point your mobile browser to http://zook.in or send in a query like “Zook ringtone” to 3030 in bangalore. (not sure if it works in other citites).

The USP of this product, ofcourse is the way it helps you narrow down on what you are looking for by way of asking a few unintrusive questions. Pretty neat, I should say. My point of contention there is that, zook kinda assumes that most queries have multi meanings. For instance, Zook excels if your query is leading, like “thai”. But, most users come from a Google background where they help the search engine find what they want rather than confuse it. If I am really looking for a restaurant, I would explicitly say “thai restaurant, koramangala, bangalore”. And for a query like that, Google or any other local search works just as well or sometimes better than Zook.

But, zook could work like a charm for the long tail of (confusing) queries. I guess that is the intent , but I dont think they have that rich data yet. For instance, I know of a very famous coffee shop recommended by “Lonely planet” in colaba, mumbai. Google does a decent job. Zook returns nothing.

I use the wap zook along with seraja for events, which is pretty good. Also, I dont think value added SMS is a viable option given the current state of things. Maybe, more on that later. On the whole, it is a very good start and Sameer is a think tank. Full of ideas all the time. I am sure they will crack it as we go along. He just gave a podcast on podtech with kamla Bhatt. He gives a few interesting data points there. Listen to it here. Or I have also embeded it in this blog post.

Sridhar pointed out this, the other day. Go to Google maps. Search for Chennai. Click on “Find business” tab. Search for a business, like pizza. Click on print map. God Bless America.

Interestingly, the map is of some place called coffeyville in Kansas. Do they know folks at chennai drink a lot of coffee ?

No, it is just centre of the United states, with whatever zoom level you choose to view the Indian location with!

I am not sure when this got out, but remember Google included tiles for India a little while ago? And do you know they have a downloadable mobile app for maps? Now, they have put them both together. And it is rocking!

You still cant search for anything within India. You would still have to head over to Yahoo maps for that! But what strikes me is the clarity of the map when viewed on my Nokia N73. I was to go to a school for an admission for my brother. I just knew it was somewhere in Indiranagar. The “city local on telephone” guys like 080-22222222 and 080-2777777 were both unreachable at that point.
I remembered G had many interesting points of interests on their maps. I just gave it a shot and I was able to find the school in 2 mins!

Again, Rock on google. What are you enabling search ?