Posts Tagged ‘maps’

French breakfast at Google

Sunday, August 2nd, 2009

French company sues Google over its Maps service

Google is looking to establish a monopoly in the mapping market.

Dear French guys, it seems you have woken up in the middle of the night and with one of hand in a chamberpot. Or you’ve just came back from long journey to Mars what would explain the disorientation and the fact you’ve overlooked the growing monopoly, which many see as having acquired too much power, too fast, without the wisdom to use that power responsibly.

In case you haven’t caught it yet: searching, mapping, e-mailing, multimedia & broadcasting, blogging & micro-bloging, documents, chats and business talks (many companies use Google Talk for communication, so Google has, and crackers may have too, fairly easy access to their business secrets), science & research (probably the highest density of PhD owners is in Google offices, but not in any university on the planet), storage of personal and sensitive information (medical records, health profiles, personality profiles, …), be or not to be (what’s not in Google it has never ever existed), <your favourite stuff goes here> All these belong to the Giant.

Vampires give interviews only in the movie. In real life, they suck the blood of the living.

Guys, give it up. Take your golden parachute. Relax. Book a flight to one of the sunny islands. Buy new shorts and live good life running a surf shop :-)

Sanoodi plays OpenLayers

Monday, August 4th, 2008

Recently, I’ve been playing with Sanoodiactivity-based social networking website for participants in sports and leisure activities. The idea of Sanoodi is very similar to Sports Tracker by Nokia.

The Sanoodi version 1.1.0.0 is based on Google Maps API. It works well, rarely reporting errors. Today, I migrated my account to Sanoodi Beta available for mysterious Friday the 13th (month unspecified :-)). Besides new & ugly user interface, I’ve encountered that mapping capabilities in Beta are based on OpenLayers engine. Great choice, if my vote counts. The core of Sanoodi application is based on Django framework. Another good choice :-)

If you are doing any outdoor activities, Sanoodi is a nice gadget and worth to try. I recommend to use version 1.1.0.0 for regular diary. In my opinion, the Beta version is still unusable. It is throwing errors while saving preferences or uploading GPX file, Save button for new route sees to be not even linked, etc. BTW, I’ve reported all my problems to the Sanoodi Team. Hopefully, they will fix it soon.