Posts Tagged ‘coffee shop’

Google has done a lot with mapping. Google streetview gives you a good idea what to look for in a location. I have virtually walked down a street so I could be familiar with landmarks before I even get to the location. Well, what if I could have a better representation than what Google gives? What if I could have a full 3D – 360 view of a street?

Enter Navteq - a company that will take mapping to a whole new level. They have been in the mapping industry for 25 years. With a technology known as LIDAR Scanning, the mapping – like in Google Maps – will take your map from a 2D realm to a 3D level.

The Car looks like it has a weird device on top that spins at 600 revolutions per minute. It has 64 lasers collecting data at 1.5 million points. The Navteq car also has a panoramic camera and 6 other cameras that  take Hi-res photos of signs, trees and other data.

Andy McCaskey talks with Alwil about this very interesting project. Of course, the end result is a new mapping system that might just power your next Tom Tom or Garmin system. With this option, You can bring out specifics, such as if you are looking for a Starbucks, it can point that coffee shop out.

The technology is a couple years out for consumer GPS. But what a great find for us at CES!

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Another week has gone by. It was a fun one but also just bland. In fact, I am trying to think back to the week, and having a hard time remembering what happened. I know that once I start writing I’ll remember. Then there is the “oh carps bait! I forgot to talk about this”…

First of all, Kudos to Robert Scoble for making the move on. He’s got a great group following him, so whatever he does will be pretty successful. It would be fun just to spend a day with him and see what and how he does it.

Of course I commented that if he ever wants to do something for Geekazine, he is always welcome. I know it’s a long shot, but sometimes you have to do that. After all, Gene Roddenberry got his start by taping his resume on a pizza box.

I have been thinking about when the revival of the LIVE SHOW will be. I need to start thinking about how I want to do this encarnation and if it works with my schedule. That was the biggest issue – Mondays worked about a year ago, but now it seems I’ve got more work to do. If you have any ideas, please let me know.

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Well, I finally scraped up my quarters and nickels to get the plane ticket and Hotel reservations for VEGAS BABY!! This will be my first ever trip to Vegas. It’s a little nerve racking, but also extremely exciting.

I will be staying at the Monte Carlo. I am arriving at 11 AM PST on January 6th 2009. Will be there until 6:30 AM on January 12th. Hopefully there will be no snow in Vegas.

This will be an Awesome week with Todd Cochrane and Andy McCaskey. We will be running Back Channel, High def content and a lot more on the TechPodcasts Channel. In addition I will be pushing out photos and Blogs throughout the weekend.

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Something happened to me yesterday that not only took me by surprise, it threw my whole day off. My laptop stopped working. I closed the case to get ready to go to the coffee shop and the hard drive started clicking. When I turned the computer off then back on, the hard drive wouldn’t initialize.

I took the drive out of the laptop and ran diagnostics on it. No problems. I ran a full CHKDSK and fixed some bad sectors. I then proceeded in full backup and cleanup mode (removing files, defragmenting, etc). When I popped the drive back in there was no issues. I went on with my life.

Not all computers are lucky like that. While I am still not sure what happened, I am lucky it wasn’t broken. The best I can figure is the hard drive might have unseated from the laptop. I am being cautious with the machine, but in the meantime, I attribute this weeks (late) Bitstrips to the computer surgical skills.