Google Streetview (with a time dimension)

Hearing that Greece opted out of Google Streetview, I decided to take a virtual tour of Italy. Strolling down the streets of Milano reminds me of my trip there 6 years ago.
Aside from nostalgia, I came to realize that Google Streetview could be used to present a 4th dimension, Time. How cool it would have been if I can render a time-lapse animation of the Streetview  from 2003 to 2009, see all the small/big changes, experiencing different seasons at the same the location.
Technically, it adds 3 challenges:
1) The central of the camera array needs to be aligned across all different trips that the Google car took during the years.
2) The image dataset will grow at least linearly overtime, even if Google just want to cover the locations that they already covered today. With their ever increasing reaching, the dataset will grow much faster.
3) Economically, the cost of driving around all these street every 3 month is hard to justify by the free web traffic Google Streetview generates. So the business might not like the idea.

Still, even if Google only covers a few landmarks, e.g. Eiffel Tower, Rome Colloseum, Duomo Cathedral, Kaminarimon (雷门) over time, it would make quite an impressive application.

Ten Lessons In Bootstrapping (a startup company) (ZT)

Ten Lessons In Bootstrapping

By Daya Baran at May 17, 2009

The founders of Urbanspoon built their business with no venture capital, recently they sold Urbanspoon to IAC. They shared ten principles that other bootstrappers might find useful: 1. Start with savings. The math here is pretty simple. Assume you and your cofounders will have to go a minimum of two years without meaningful salary. Can you do it? Just as importantly, can they? Prepare to tighten your belt. 2. Found with good friends. The founding team will be slogging it out together in the trenches for years, and then heading out after work for beers. Remember that you can still be friends long after your company is only accessible in the Internet Archive. 3. Spend nothing. Nobody gets a salary. Don’t attend conferences, don’t travel, and don’t throw office parties. That stuff is for companies with investors or cash flow. Use Google Apps and Ubuntu. Buy everything at Costco and Newegg. Our only marketing expense was t-shirts, and we hoarded them like gold. 4. Ship quickly, and often. If your team is strong and your idea is manageable, ship a crappy version of your product in two months. Then keep shipping every few weeks. If something catches on, double down. Companies that don’t ship for years tend to fail. 5. Buy a big whiteboard. Don’t use calendaring, bug tracking or project management software. Put it all on the whiteboard. At the start of each week, erase and start over. Worried about losing something? If you erase it and forget, it wasn’t that important in the first place. 6. No time for pri-twos. In project parlance, a “pri-one” is a work item that is essential to the success of the project. Bootstrapped companies don’t have any pri-twos. Once you determine that a task is a pri-two, forget about it forever. Sadly, this is why Urbanspoon still doesn’t have “hours of operation” for our restaurants. 7. Outsource. Hire contractors carefully and treat them well. Find a great lawyer who doesn’t work at a firm. Deploy your product on ServerBeach or EC2. Use AdSense, but don’t plan on getting rich with it. For real leverage, discover new ways to use Mechanical Turk. 8. Follow the money. At a certain point in your company’s timeline, even the pri-ones may need to get tossed in favor of following the money. No amount of features can compensate for a lack of cash. 9. Hitch a ride. Bootstrapped companies can hitch a ride on larger companies with deep pockets. For example, we hitched rides with Apple (iPhone), Facebook (Connect) and Google (SEO). 10. Live your dream. Focus obsessively on what you’re good at, and ignore or outsource the rest. Don’t be afraid to enter a crowded market if you think you can compete. Dream of being Markus Frind of PlentyOfFish, with 1 billion page views and no employees. If he can do it, why can’t you?

What makes us happy?

A recently published Harvard Study (Grant Study) tries to decipher this life-long question by tracing 268 successful male Harvard students from 1937 to 2009.
The full article is here:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200906/happiness

Incidentally, JFK was within this selected 268-person group, but his files are classified until 2040.