the wonders / dangers? of unified nicks
Tag: me
PostNuke stasis
i can’t believe they are at the same release, basically as when i left 4 years ago.
local.ch J2ME
At local.ch we made a XHTML version – m.local.ch – of the phone book and event search available in July 2006. The last few months we have been working with Endoxon to create a more advanced solution using J2ME technology. This allows us to do more with the map – zooming & panning – displaying multiple results – read GPS position.
our new J2ME mobile map app
Plazes Feed
sadly, only the last 10. there should be a tweak to get the whole history out
Cell Phones? Hell Phones!
i totally subscribe to these reasons not to have cell phone (obviously)
Customers with a clue
you have no idea how refreshing it is to work with customers with a clue. on tuesday, our second yellow pages project went live: local.ch, covering all of switzerland. local.ch was very gracious to let us have a geeky field day with nice urls, hcard support (view source), geo-aggregated blog posts per city (via geourl), for a start. given that local.ch is the answer of a staid media company to the competitive pressures of the internet, i find it quite refreshing to see their CEO blog (on a blog hosted by my former startup KAYWA, no less :), or post pictures of their ground troops (ie, sales) after a slam dunk on flickr.
meanwhile today, we spent all day in a very productive exchange with the goyellow team to talk about new features (more about those when we deliver on them..). their willingness to listen to my crazy ideas for 8 hours straight surprised even me 😉 they quickly took up blogging as a way to communicate with the german blogosphere, with good results.
and finally, we also launched housing search and hotel locator sites for homegate and hotelplan, respectively. quite the busy week 🙂
dear sed
sed, i know we haven’t seen eye to eye in the past, and i have called you an ugly little bitch, but today you saved the day, so thanks. that is all.
2 approaches to rss
i don’t normally comment on RSS, but i have recently had occasion to deal with 2 sets of RSS extensions. both extend RSS into the geographical realm, but are lacking test cases so far. so i wrote to the 2 originators of those extensions, and got wildly different responses. a clueless “shucks” from yahoo, collaboration from the georss community. luckily, the yahoo extension is not causing a lot of damage since they are limiting their own success with their ineptitude.
coworking boston
i while ago, i wondered if the coffeehouse will be the office of the future. now it looks like it might: i am happy to report that i found a teahouse(!) who are eager to implement the ideas outlined in my earlier post. if you want to be part of it, you should add your name to coworking boston.
Mapping Germany
The screenshot above is from GoYellow maps, a german yellow pages publisher. they are the first customer of my new startup and went live a couple days ago. it is an online map for germany with hybrid satellite/airplane and vector views. GoYellow allows you to overlay this map with yellow pages data, so it’s easy to look for wifi hotspots in berlin or radar traps across germany. of course, it also has the standard issue restaurants, atms, public transport, you name it.
bernhard has more. as noted elsewhere, the image quality is one of the distinguishing features of this application. together with our partner endoxon, we beat the quality you see at the GYM (Google Yahoo Microsoft).
speaking of the GYM, i get asked a lot how you can compete against them. besides kicking their ass in quality, there are quite a few companies that are afraid of going to the GYM, and are looking for partners. we are one such partner workout buddy. (ok, i will shut up about the GYM jokes now).
so what’s next for us? besides settling on a name (heh), there will be more coverage at that crunchy sub-meter resolution, goodies for the mashup crowd and more help for innovative users like this guy who is doing a competitive analysis of his cafe with data from the map. and more.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 