Day: June 18, 2008

Go find me a restaurant …

On By rmascardoIn GPS, iPhone, urbanspoon, web 2.0Leave a comment

Here is an interesting little company called UrbanSpoon which at the core of it looks like a variant of Yelp.  They provide community based restaurant recommendation and reviews.  Recently, they released an iPhone application that will randomly find you a restaurant based on your geographic location.  Or, what could be described as location based Yelp.

What’s interesting about this?

  • iPhone SDK is not your everyday web application.  It provides a rich UI, very cool  accelerometer action, access to location information and much more.
  • Location based applications are now going to hit the forefront as the new iPhone 2.0 has built in GPS.  We’ll be seeing some interesting location based mashups and re-spins of existing ideas.

I’m still fully formulating my opinion on Google Android verses Apple’s iPhone SDK, but at first glance i’m more in favor of the iPhone SDK.

I better brush up on my Objective-C.

Dipity Timeline Widget

On By rmascardoIn dipity, software, web 2.0, widgetLeave a comment

As I was poking around the Google YouTube API researching a side project, I stumbled upon this cool timeline widget by Dipity.  There seems to be an endless amount of these “widget companies” that are worth much more than the name of their space leads you to believe (Slide, RockYou, etc).

Dipity caught my attention only because they came up with a very cool use of the YouTube API.  However, they also came up with a very interactive widget that, if done properly, could be as compelling as Slide’s slide show widget.  Basically, they allow you to create a timeline of anything and share them with the world.  Here is a link to the Apple Timeline.  Even cooler, they allow various views on the same timeline and allow multiple people edit the timeline.

Their biggest problem is going to be performance.  I’m running Firefox 3 on a pretty beefy Ubuntu box and the rendering stinks.  They’ll need to figure this out.

Bottom line, a compelling startup can be as simple as a different way to visualize something.  It will be interesting to see if they are able to gain traction.

My thoughts on Yahoo/Microsoft …

On By rmascardoIn Microsoft, YahooLeave a comment

My opinion is that I’m tired of reading about this damm Micro-hoo non-merger and the misadventures of captain Wang Yang.  (Did anyone notice that Jerry is appropriately titled “Captain Yahoo” on the corporate website.)

Please end the insanity and bring this story to a conclusion.  Millions of trees, gallons of ink and countless blogger hours can be saved by ending this mess.

Please!