Digital Interactif

I'm no General but...

I came across news today that Google had added 54 new countries to Google Maps.  Here's the list of countries added(emphasis added):

Afghanistan, Aruba, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belize, Bermuda, Brunei Darussalam, Bhutan, Bolivia, Cambodia, Chile, Columbia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Fiji, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Indonesia, Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Kuwait, Laos, Lebanon, Mexico, Myanmar (Burma), Mongolia, Nepal, Nicaragua, Oman, Pakistan, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Timor-Leste, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Vietnam, Yemen.

"Afghanistan and Iraq?" I thought.  So I figured if I zoomed into a random Baghdad neighborhood I might catch an explosion or maybe small jihadi's blasting away at each other.  What I didn't expect to see was a detailed view of American military bases from the sky accessible to whoever wants to look. 

Long story short, I typed "american military base Afghanistan" into Google and selected the number one result which stated that "Bagram Airbase is located in the Parvan Province approximately 11 kilometers (7 miles) southeast of the city of Charikar and 47 Kilometers (27 miles) north of Kabul."  I then typed in Charikar, Afghanistan and looked roughly 7 miles to the southeast in Google maps.  Here's a sample of what I found:

Now, as the title of this post states I'm no General, but this CAN'T be a good idea, right?  I mean, for all the privacy issues that Google has trampled on in the past (and present) this is clearly a radically different issue.  As far as I'm concerned, there is no need for "Average Jihadi-Joe" to have access to overhead shots of American/Coalition military bases overseas. 

I imagine this will gain attention at some point on a larger scale, but where is the outrage?  Why is Google giving away our troops positions and unit strengths in the middle of a war?   Come On!

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Car Pooling via the Internet

Last week I went to the Massachusetts-based Web Innovators Group conference.  One of the companies presenting was GoLoco, a Car-Sharing service that connects you with friends and strangers in an attempt to save both the environment and your money.  GoLoco was founded by Robin Chase, co-founder of ZipCar, and it is based out of Cambridge, MA.   

I am pretty skeptical of GoLoco's business plan itself.  They have successfully established a presence on Facebook with a Facebook App but their plan for monetizing the service is weak because it is limited to a niche of people that can't build up the courage to ask people for money. 

Their monetization plan is to charge a 10% transaction fee when users pay each other through their Facebook Application via PayPal account.  The rationale is that friends typically don't ask friends to chip in $2.46 for a ride to the NH State Liquor store, and when they do ask, the normal response is "yeah, I'll get you back later" because it's such a small, inconsequential amount of money.

The potential situation arising from friends using the GoLoco service to pay each other is pretty awkward:

Driver: Hey dude, mind tossing me some gas money for the ride to Walmart?
Friend 1: Sure no prob man, is it cool if I get you back later? 
Driver: Errr, that's not gonna work.  I'd like you to sign into GoLoco and pay me through paypal real quick if you could.
Friend 1: Sure, no problem.  Dick...

This situation would be even better if there were even more people involved.  Yes there are people that are early adopters out there and it might seem cool to pay each other online, but who in their right mind would do so if it meant that some random company, GoLoco, got 10% of money rightfully owed to the driver. 

The cool thing about the service is that it calculates how much money the trip will cost for gas and tolls and therefore it provides you with a concrete amount of money to ask for.  I like the service but I am not convinced by their plan to make money off of it.  For more info on GoLoco, check out this New York Times article.

GoLoco is not alone in the market for Car Sharing via the Internet.  Ride Amigos is a similar service and it currently operates in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.  This company does not to seem to be aiming to make a profit on the service but instead is more interested in making a positive impact on the environment, or at least that's their marketing spin.  Unlike GoLoco, this service doesn't provide a mean to exchange money and it does not have a Facebook widget.  But it is noteworthy all the same.  For more info, check out this TreeHugger post.   

As for you Europeans out there, I came across the German website Mitfahrzentrale which translates into "agency for arranged lifts" (thanks Babelfish).   When I used this website last year it only had a German version and I was still able to navigate it which just goes to show how easy and straight forward the service is.  Thankfully though the site now allows you to translate it to English .  It appears this site is used mainly within Germany still.  I like the social networking functionality of the site and it's great how the homepage shows which cities are most actively using the service.   

So go sign up for GoLoco, add the Facebook widget to you profile, and go on n' get your carpool on.

 

Norman B. Leventhal Map Center

The other day I read in the Boston Globe that Philanthropist/Map Collector Norman Leventhal had donated $10 million to the Boston Public Library and loaned them 178 of his best maps.  So today I had a few free minutes and took a look at the Boston Public Library Norman B. Leventhal Map Center's website.  I can honestly say that I have officially found the coolest online historical resource ever!  check it out.

Essentially, you can scan thousands of historical maps in the online collection and you can sort them by location, subject, date, publisher, author, and mercator.  The site allows you to zoom in on the maps and the quality is superb.   There are 93 maps of Boston alone and there is even a map of my hometown, Andover, from 1882.   The online is pretty heavy on New England maps so this resource is great if you are from the Boston area. 

It's amazing to step back for a moment and compare this type of resource to Flash Earth and think about how far we as humans have come in recognizing where we are, literally, in the world.  How have our perceptions of self/neighbor/unknown changed as we have been given greater access to maps and knowledge of our surroundings?  The affect that the maps in this collection have likely had on societies and perception is unknown, but I am certain that it is definitely one of the cooler things I've stumbled across online is a long, long, long time. 

Cheers to you, Norman Leventhal.  You rock.

Asteroids are Scary

Researchers from the University of Southampton (UK) have just released a report on a modeling program they created which details the likelihood and consequences of a small asteroid (< 1km) hitting Earth.  According to Science Daily, a collision with a small asteroid would be devastating:

Initial investigations have examined how the consequences of an impact change with increasing impact energy. Taking a spherical stony asteroid travelling at 12,000 miles per second and varying the diameter to increase kinetic energy, the results indicate that a 100 metre diameter asteroid will predominantly cause localised casualties and damage across a few countries when impacting on either land or ocean. However, the consequences of a 200 metre diameter asteroid hitting the ocean increase significantly, with the generated tsunamis reaching a global scale. At 500 metres in diameter, almost any ocean impact will generate significant casualties and economic cost across the world.

Interestingly, the report specifies which countries are most at risk for a direct impact.  Those countries are China, Indonesia, India, Japan, the United States, the Philippines, Italy, the United Kingdom, Brazil and Nigeria.  I'm pretty surprised not to see Russia on there...it's huge! 

To see what a BIG asteroid would do to Earth, watch this ridiculous video: