august 2008 archives

Sunday, August 31, 2008

Foot-loose or location-based

My Maps: Start-ups If there is one industry where location should not matter, it would be the Web industry. Right? With (free) Wi-Fi hotspots popping up everywhere you should be able to access the World-Wide Web from anywhere around the globe to do your job. However, it appears that location (or is it proximity?) is still an important factor, at least in the Netherlands.

First I created a list of 60 Dutch Web 2.0 companies, a compilation of the first 33 hot Dutch web companies recently identified by Bubble Foundry and the 24 startups that presented themselves at the The Next Web Conference 2008 in Amsterdam earlier this year. The physical addresses I either found them on the companies' websites or I looked them up on the website of the Dutch Chamber of Commerce. All the information I simply stored in a MySQL database.

As a next step, I used the Google Maps API geocoding service directly using server-side scripting. As a side note, this ties me to using Google Maps to display the results as well, because the ToS state that You may use the Maps API geocoder solely to obtain and display points on map images provided through the Service. An example of how to do create a PHP script to automatically geocode a batch of addresses stored in a MySQL database can be found on the website that accompanies the book Beginning Google Maps Applications. The coordinates returned in the XML document from the Google Maps geocoding services were automatically stored with the other information in the database.

GeoRSS logoWith Google My Maps, you cannot only add single locations by putting place marks on a map, but you can also upload multiple locations simultaneously by importing map data from a KML, KMZ, or GeoRSS file. Since I am most familiar with GeoRSS, I created a PHP script to get my data from MySQL into a GeoRSS feed. Then I imported the feed into Google My Maps, added a title and description and finally set the Privacy settings to Public, which allow others to find this map in search results and on my profile.

From the map, you can see that these Dutch Web 2.0 companies are located throughout the Netherlands, but actually most are still in Amsterdam. It nicely matches the density of datacenters in the Netherlands.

So even the Web industry is not foot-loose. Some interesting companies to watch are Bliin, GyPSii and Nulaz. But why are these location-based social networks all starting in the Netherlands? You see: it's all about location!  permanent link for this entry

Friday, August 01, 2008

A world-scale city: Belgrade

The artist Slavisa Savic discovered an unusual and an unexpected coincidence between the town plan of Serbian Belgrade and the map of the world as shown on the website Belgrade is the World. The world's continents seem to match the cities populated areas. Just as the Atlantic Ocean separates the Old and New World, the river Sava separates the Old en New Belgrade. Just like Greenland is situated in the confluence of the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans, the island Veliko Ratno ostrvo lies at the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers.

Users can zoom in and out step-by-step using the respective magnifying glasses. The steps between the zoom levels are very small. In order to quickly zoom in, you can drag a rectangle across the map to define the view port for the next zoom action. To pan around, you have to drag the rectangle in the overview map. Since most people are now used to draggable maps, this is not a very intuitive way to move the map view. Finally, there is not a option available to quickly return to the full map view.

Clicking the button with the question mark first before clicking on a world city on the map, another browser window opens with pictures of Belgrade that correspond to the world city. For example, when you click on Strazbur (Strasbourg) which is one of the seats of the European parliament, you see pictures of the parliament building on the Nikola Pa?i? Square in Belgrade!  permanent link for this entry