Friday, January 28, 2005

Photo-enhanced yellow pages

Amazon.com's latest offering - photo-enhanced Yellow Pages.
The most powerful technology A9.com invented for Yellow Pages is "Block View" which brings the Yellow Pages to life by showing a street view of millions of businesses and their surroundings. Using trucks equipped with digital cameras, global positioning system (GPS) receivers, and proprietary software and hardware, A9.com drove tens of thousands of miles capturing images and matching them with businesses and the way they look from the street.
Type in your search query : you can not only see a picture of the business, you can also walk up and down the block, and see pictures of other businesses on the same street. I love the way they have integrated the images and GPS data to create a seamless walk-down-the-street experience. Looks luverly.

[Cross-posted to Zoo Station]

Tuesday, January 25, 2005

Patting ourselves on our backs

Reuben Abraham made a short post regarding Zoo Station winning the Indiblog award for best group blog for 2004, signing off appropriately enough with a trivia question (click on the link above to see the question in the post). The answer to the question? Oh well, let us just say it is around here somewhere. Google around, and you too can find it :)
So, it seems like Zoo Station did win the Indiblog award for best group blog. It's pretty cool to win a blogging prize by popular choice just a month after ABC News crowned bloggers as their choice for People of the Year. First, thanks to all our readers who voted for this blog. Second, thanks to all the rest of the team at ZS who have made this blog mighty readable. Congratulations are also in order for frequent ZS commenter and friend, Atanu Dey and the Deeshaa/RISC blog, which won the award for Indiblog of the Year. Thanks go out to Indiblog nominee Rajesh Jain, who convinced me to start Zoo Station way back in 2003.