Google "my maps"

Google raised the bar again on easy "location intelligence" apps on the web when it introduced "my maps". So much of the information we interact with has a geographic or location component and navigating and exploring this graphically is much more compelling than traditional approaches. I liked these examples:

Where programing languages were invented (with colour coded flags for each "major epoch" of evolution!)

Famous Movies shot in the UK (the locations of everything from Tomb Raider to the Hunt for red October)

Magellan's voyage round the world (interesting use of line thickness to highlight additional information)

Our Earth as art (Cool sat pics!)

We'll be exploring the use of this to support our TrekChina initiative later in the year.

Reasons to work at Spock

Spock is a start up search engine focused on finding people – plugged by Tim O’Reilly himself! So I took a look at the site…..it looks like a great idea. As usual I was interested in the culture and energy in the company, and how “connected” it seemed to be. I was impressed by the pseudo-subliminal marketing (adding the line “Spock is Awesome” at the foot of the registration “thank you” box is a clever. Stuff like that really works). But it was the “jobs at Spock” page that convinced me they were switched on. The top reasons for working there were:

5. Free lunch every day and tons of snacks to keep you full all day.
4. We still have a very small engineering team. You won't be a cog in the wheel here
3. Giant flat-panel monitors for all engineers and a new Mac or PC.
2. You get to work with Jay.
1. SPOCK has potential to be a part of every Internet user's daily life!

I’ll leave you to find out about Jay yourself. And I'm 100% behind the giant flat panels. These guys really know how to attract talent!

The other thing that got my attention were the job titles, three of which were:
• Backend Rails Developer
• Crawler Architect
• Information Retrieval Engineer

I love the way new technology creates the neeed for new roles and skills. I am pretty sure no one could explain what a Crawler Architect is to my dear old mother!

Timeline History of Computing

Timeline History of Computing - Wikipedia
A colleague sent me this link today. Quite relevent as I'm currently (for a side project) looking to bring alive a "time tunnel" to physically show how computing has evolved and to extrapolate the future. (It's sobering to think that just 20 years ago most big businesses were still using punchcard systems somewhere!!!!)
Anyway - this wikipedia article might not look pretty but it reminded me of lost gems like the Apple Lisa and the Commadore PET (on which I did my degree project!)