Tim Howell’s Weblog

In the past couple of years, it appears that all of a sudden the promise of the web has started to be realised. I’ve always been a believer in “interconnectedness” and that there is huge opportunities for devices, web sites, organisations and just about everything with an IP address to be connected in some way shape or form. Convergence forms part of this, with the melding, for example, of phone and PDA functions in a PDA, or television delivered over IP. The web inevitably has a role to play, and it was exciting to read about A9’s “Yellow Pages” which extends Amazon’s A9 search engine with a pseudo Yellow Pages with images – you can effectively “walk down” streets and look at shop frontages for several large US cities.

What’s also interesting is how the service was technically achieved, as reported by Business 2.0: “In short, Manber and co. (urged on by Jeff Bezos, who Manber says was “very involved”) strapped GPS-enabled digital video camera-cum-terabyte server rigs to the top of a bunch of SUVs, then drove them around the commercial areas of major US metropolitan areas, recording what then became composite still pictures of entire cities, one address at a time. A9 took more than 20 million images of 14 million+ businesses across ten cities (more are coming soon), then created a local search application they call Block View.”