vanderwal.net

Amazon and A9 Provide Yellow Pages with Photos

Everybody is talking about Amazon's (A9) Yellow Pages today. Amazon has done a decent job bringing photos into their Yellow Pages for city blocks. This is a nice touch, but it is missing some interaction and interconnections between the photos and the addresses, I hope this will come. I really would like to be able to click on a photo and have the Yellow Pages information show up, everything I tried on Clement Street in San Francisco, California did not work that way.

One of the things that really hit me in playing with the tool today at lunch was how the Yellow Pages still suck. I have had problems with the Yellow Pages for..., well ever. I grew up in cross-cultural environments with British and French influences in my day-time care givers growing up. I moved around a fair amount (up and down the West Coast growing up and Europe and the U.S. East Coast). Culture has their own vocabulary (let alone language) for the same items. What I call things, depends on context, but no matter what, the Yellow Pages do not match what I wish to call what I want (or sometimes need).

Today's search I used one of the Amazon search sample, "Optica", which had some nice references. Knowing how I usually approach using the Yellow Pages I search for glasses (as that is what I need to get or need repaired) or contacts. Doing this in a paper Yellow Pages usually returned nothing or pointers to a couple other places. One would thing online Yellow Pages to be different, well they are, they returned nothing related. Glasses returns restaurant supply and automotive window repairs with not one link to eye glasses, nor a reference to "you may be looking for...".

A9 is a great search tool and Amazon.com has great product tools and incredible predictability algorithms, which will be very helpful down the road for the Personal InfoCloud, but the current implementation is still a little rough. I can see where they are heading with this. And I can dream that I would have this available for a mobile device at some point in the next two or three years.

Once very nice piece that was integrated was reviews and ratings of Yellow Pages entries. This is great for the future, once they get filled out. It will also be great once it is available from mobile device (open API so we can start building a useful tool now?). But, it brings my scenario of the future to light rather quickly, where I am standing in front of a restaurant looking at over 100 restaurant reviews on my mobile device. There is no way that I can get through all of these reviews. Our supporting full complement of context tools will be needed to get pulled into play to get me a couple or four good reviews that will mean something to me.

This is but a small slice of the Personal InfoCloud, which is much broader and focusses on enabling the person to leverage the information they have and find. Pairing these two and enabling easy access to that information when it is needed.

Back from SF

I am back home from San Francisco and I arrived home to 4 or 5 inches of freshly fallen snow. Yesterday I was sitting outside at overlooking the Bay Kelly's Mission Rock (freshening the sun block) and chatting with a friend while driving around in his convertible. I love my season's, but this really was tough. Although the temperature today was not as bad as the 14 degrees and windy at 4am on Thursday morning when I left.

I had a great trip, but it was far too short. It was the most crazy intense (in the most wonderful way) two days I have spent in a long time. I spent a lot of time on the freeways around the Bay Area, which allowed me to witness the Rollerball tactics of the CHiPs as they briefly stop traffic around a stalled vehicle or accident to push the accident out of the freeway and seem to gesture, "Game On" and all the cars resume their 85 mile per hour pace.

I finally had time to sit down face-to-face with friends and people I have been e-mailing and chatting with for a while to get some things done a little more quickly, as well as just put wonderful faces to the digital shell I had known. I am not sure who invented in person face-to-face interaction technology, but they are a genius as it is such a better technology than chat, e-mail, blog comments, or even the phone. So much gets done and it is such a broad channel of communication with all the non-verbal. There is so much energy that does not get conveyed in the electronic medium.

I will have to say I did more text messaging in two days than I have in quite some time. But, I also talked on the phone more in two days than I have in three months (other than with family).

Thank you to everybody I got to see on this trip, you made it wonderful. I am really sorry for not getting to see as many people as I would have liked as my time was jam packed from morning to night. One way or another there should be more trips.

Update from these parts

An hour ago I went out to pick up dinner (I did not make it grocery shopping today) and we were having snow flurries. This is the first of the season (usually they start in mid-December) as we have been experiencing Spring weather the past few weeks. Now it seems the flurries have stopped and it is just cold. I have been enjoying the Spring weather, but it has made me miss the Bay Area (soon enough, I tell myself) and I have not been missing the cold and snow as much as I thought.

Yes, it has been quite here, that will pass soon enough. We are buried in stuff and trying to get personal projects and presentations done, on top of regular work and some other things we have going on.

I am going to start pulling together some of the e-mail responses I have been sending out so that it will move things along on the e-mail front. Real e-mail and 1,000 spam e-mail a day have also slowed things down. I have a couple e-mails to get to tomorrow, but other than that I believe I am finally caught up.

Happy New Year 2005

Happy New Year! We here wish you a fantastic and peaceful 2005.

We do not make resolutions here as we try to make improvements when we find the opportunity, which is everyday.

Tragedy Brings Perspective

Take a moment out your day to focus on the tragedy in Asia and Africa from the tsunami. This quells the interest in technology and design when there is human loss, particularly on this scale.

Take a moment to give to provide aid. Oxfam (UK) or Oxfam America is just one good choice out of many.

Happy Holidays

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

Busy Busy Busy

Yes, things have been a little quiet here. Yes, things are alright. There are some people who are members of the "clean plate club". Well we are members of the "full plate club". Yes, we have a little too much on our plate at the moment. We have the usual work, articles, home life (teaching our son to catch the ball and throw the ball (which only may be so we can say "I said no throwing the ball in the house"), try not to laugh when he opens the oven door and yells in "Hot Hot Hot!!!", and teach him to speak a language that we his parents understand), and some projects we volunteered for as we inanely thought there would be more than 24 hours in our days ahead.

We have been a little sick in the past week. We are also thinking of moving our site to the new host we have been paying for and which has some wonderful things we need like secure e-mail and the ability to put all my domains on one hosting service. Oh, did I mention we have been trying to shop for Christmas? We have not picked up a tree as I was sick last weekend (as well as the parent in-charge) and I gave that gift to others in the house (the early presents were not welcome).

I also got to run errands tonight trying to find a laptop power adapter for somebody in the house that put theirs through the paper shredder, which lead to much amusement at CompUSA and Best Buy. I did learn a renewed love for Apple as they have one power adapter for their laptops (I also realized I largely only travel to places with Apple stores (official or fantastic independently owned)). It seems Dell has many variations to their power adapters and their newest laptop does not work with most of the "universal" power adapters.

Now I am going to get some sleep or check off something else on the to do list.

The Dishwasher Shall not be Locked

One of our son's favorite household devices is the dishwasher. Since he was able to crawl he would trek to the dishwasher. As soon as he could walk he could reach the buttons on the dishwasher as well as the opening latch. Not only is this a little annoying to us, but is a little dangerous because of the items in the dishwasher and the heat.

We bought a locking strap for the dishwasher. This was just a new game or puzzle for our 14 month old.

It was 2 minutes and he had figured out how to open the lock and remove the strap. Amazingly for us is he had not seen it used. I am utterly fascinated by his mind and his ability to quickly sort through problems and find solutions, often with out force.

[Update] We have a new lock we will mount soon. Then we will have a new race on our hands.

2 Feet, Thousands of Miles, and Time

My first afternoon in Amsterdam I ran in to Mike Kuniavsky in the hotel. Then Ben arrived and we stood in the hallway near the registration desk chatting and trying to work out logistics. My GMS phone has SMS and so did Mike's phone, with a Dutch SIM chip. He sent the introductory hello SMS ping to my phone so that I would have his local number. Once it was sent we waited for a minute or two to have the ping leave Amsterdam, go to the U.S. hit my carrier, route the ping back to my phone in Amsterdam a couple feet from the phone that sent the SMS.

I know this has been done thousands if not millions of times already, but the time bubble was wonderful. The length of time it took seemed like forever, particularly SMS at home can hit in seconds (with the exception on CDMA networks which seconds are about a minute or two). Yet, when thinking of the vast miles the ping traveled in that short a period of time it is still astounding.

Welcome to the 3rd World USA

Our power just went out and Pepco (the local) says it will be 2 to 4 hours before it returns. This is about the 30 to 40th outage in two years. It is time to move to a place that has proper infrastructure that works as expected, this is 2004 after all not 1910 and I did not think it was the 3rd world. My mistake.

[Update] The power went out just as we set the oven to finish our turkey (about two hours of cooking). We were going to be feeding 8 adults and three kids, not counting Will. We did some quick changing of plans, boxed everything up and took it over to Joy's sister's house to cook there. They were finishing their contributions in the oven so when those were done we began our turn. All turned out well, but a little later and with a lot of trucking things about (thankful for our beast on days like this to truly truck things about).

It was a good day of family being together, but the infrastructure problems in the greater Washington, DC area are really getting on my nerves. Yes we are thankful we do not live in a war ravaged country like Iraq and do have many amenities that are a little more abundant that other areas of the world. It is tough to have just come back from being abroad and knowing the U.S. does not have things as well as other countries. But, as learned abroad the closer one is to something the more the fine cracks show and they appear much bigger up close.

Adam's Thanksgiving posting is one of the best I have run across on this day, or most any other day.

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving Day all of you. Those of us here at vanderwal.net are very thankful for those of you outside of the U.S. too. Have a great day all, no matter where you are.

Tying Things Together from Design Engaged

Design Engaged is still interfering with the regularly scheduled thinking, which makes it one of the best gatherings I have been to in the last few years. It has been a positively disruptive experience. I have posted my notes on other's presentations, which are sketchy at best. The gaps can be filled in to some degree using Andrews links to Design Engaged posted presentation. Andrew also has wrangled the Design Engaged favorite book list.

I have two or three pieces that I am building essays or some other format from some of the ideas that bubbled up. Some are reworkings of some of my own ideas that have been changed by other's idea infusions and some are pure mashings of other's ideas. Now it is just finding time (as usual).

Back to Telecommuting to My Personal Life

I am back home from a fantastic conference, Design Engaged. An incredibly deep thanks is owed to Andrew for putting this conference on. I am so tired, but so amazingly still on the conference high that comes from spending time with people (some new to me and some already friends) who are bright, witty, and have similar view on the world and where it can be going. Having the conference in Amsterdam was wonderful and that really added to the uplifting nature of the conference.

Amsterdam is such a fantastic place for me, not only because some of my family comes from there, but the pace, the bikes, the freedom of expression, fantastic architecture, incredible public transportation that is truly world class, color and light built into the fabric of the city in ways that are permanent.

One question came up a lot in conversations, "do you telecommute?" My answer is no, I commute to work, but I often telecommute to my personal life. This conference allowed me to put actual people to the weblogs, comment names, IMs, and e-mails to a large portion of those I find to be holding a conversation that really helps frame my mindset. The conference was a synchronous time-place that collapsed hours, days, and weeks of asynchronous on-line conversations through weblogs and digital meta-trails as well as comment posts. Not only was the mind energized and engaged this weekend, but so was the heart as I got to know many much more deeply and still found wonderful warmth, which is a mark of fantastic people to me.

I am ready to go back, but that moment in time is gone. I can hope for future workings with each of these folks again. My life has been greatly enriched and I am deeply thankful.

Blinking

Suffering connectivity blinking, so bear with me. I had hoped to be posting more. This will get better. I am having a fantastic time and expanding horizons, which is what I had hoped to do.

Off to Amsterdam and Design Engaged

I am off to Design Engaged today, which is in Amsterdam. I will try to keep up with things here, but you can hopefully follow along with photos at vanderwal on Flickr.

I will be posting the That Syncing Feeling presentation after it is presented on Friday, which may be Saturday.

Could somebody please remind folks in the Netherlands they are a loving and accepting people. Being of Dutch heritage is something I take great pride and I would like to keep it that way.