Perspectives

Considering most of my posts are related to GIS, internet mapping and local anyway, Why not talk about a new entrant in the Indian internet mapping space? Called SadakMap

Sadak Map has “Mark your place” , and then another “ask a question/post a message with a location relevance”. I guess it really is about a discussion forum with location specific topics. Mark a point? Well, I can do that on G Maps.

Have you guys seen Microsoft research’s Mapcruncher? There are multiple versions of this software that can do multiple things, but the one that caught my eye was this version here that can basically make maps out of the images that you may have. The idea is, you have a map to scale. But that is all you have! You can then crunch this map on to the existing satellite imagery that MS has and then using Mapcruncher.

Load up your map image, then mark a few points on this map with the help of global map that you know. Now, lock them both up and ask Mapcruncher to render the tiles for you. Map crucher then provides you an HTML web kit, that you can just copy over to your web server and then, yes, you are done. As simple as that. Your map is now pannable, zoomable etc. I would have also loved if they managed to go some kinda OCR so that the contents on your map are serachable too.. Too much to ask for, I guess.

Here is a small mashup of the map of India from Yahoo India maps mashed up with Live earth’s satellite maps.

As usual, something needs to suck ass with microsoft, so you need “.Net 3.0″ before you can get mapcruncher working. Download it from here.

I was talking to a friend of mine a little while ago. I was telling her about the movies I had watched over this weekend. I recollect one of them, but the other, I just could not! Just goes to show what I think of the movie I guess.

Immediately, I headed over to my rusting “My Movies” section of IMDb and updated it with these two movies. But, frankly, IMDb is an archaically designed website and I wish folks at Amazon do something about it before some whizkid comes up with something more usable.

So, Conviced that “My Movies” ( Personalization features needs a little ingenuity in their naming. We got “My Yahoo” and “my Web” from Yahoo, “My Maps” from Google and this, “My movies”. ) is not what I am looking for, I hunted around to see if there is any usable Movies API out there. The closest I came to is IMDb interfaces. It is definitely a good start, but you need a ton of storage. Plus, I dont exactly understand how they (or me, if I were to use it) intend to keep it up-to-date. Do I need to keep downloading and compiling their data package ? But, if you are really eager to do something with movies, I think it is fair to begin with this.

I did not find anything else worth mentioning. I think this space is completely empty and the movie guys like Yahoo, aol, go etc should come forward and give us something to mashup with.

So, want an idea with Movies? Ofcourse. So, I need a place where I can quickly go type in a couple of words. It then gives me back a list of matching movies. I want to pick a movie out of it. (This is the movie I just watched). Now, as time progresses, You should be able to guess my favorite actor, actress, director, language, genre etc.

Hopefully, you can hook up to your database and give me suggestions on what I should be watching next! ( The puritans will have a problem with privacy, but not a problem for me). This is adding practical value ( I am looking for a term for this, any suggestions?). If you were to stop with just collecting my data, I aint giving you any!

Give me a badge that I can show off on my blog (yeah! ofcourse, I will say that)
Game to do?
Update: Oh, Forgot to tell you these two things:

Saw movie reviewr. Good start. And, found this on blogthings.

Your Movie Buff Quotient: 42%

You are well on your way to becoming a movie buff. You’ve seen many of the great films, and you have even probably developed an expertise in a few genres.