Monthly Archives: August 2006

Geotagging the world with Flickr, part II

Posted on August 31, 2006 by Rakesh Agrawal

With the release of Flickr’s geotagging, I wanted to revisit the topic of personal maps. Now that people can geotag pictures, I want the ability to use that data on my maps. If I’m on Google Maps and pull up … Continue reading →

Posted in flickr, geotagging, google, maps | Comments Off

Geotagging the world with Flickr

Posted on August 29, 2006 by Rakesh Agrawal

At long last, Flickr has released a geotagging interface. Geo tagging is the process of applying longitude and latitude data to assets – in Flickr’s case, to images. Why would you want to do this? It’s easiest to explain with … Continue reading →

Posted in flickr, geotagging, google, gps, local search, maps, mashups, web 2, web 2.0, yahoo | 3 Comments

Using the Web to tell a better story

Posted on August 27, 2006 by Rakesh Agrawal

Today’s crash of ComAir Flight 5191 reminds me how poor a job online news sites (especially those from the mainstream media) do in using the Web. Instead of the plain graphic on the USA Today article referenced above, how about … Continue reading →

Posted in airlines, email, media, newspapers | 2 Comments

Covering your search tracks on the Web

Posted on August 25, 2006 by Rakesh Agrawal

A friend sent me a link to a Firefox extension called TrackMeNot. It randomly sends searches to the major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, AOL and MSN.) The goal is to pollute the data stream so that it becomes hard to … Continue reading →

Posted in aol, google, search, yahoo | Comments Off

A posh pooper

Posted on August 24, 2006 by Rakesh Agrawal

I’m always looking for ways to improve things. Some things, however, are fine as they are. Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal writes about an $800 toilet seat that uses a combination of water jets and an air drier … Continue reading →

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Get me to a human – fast

Posted on August 24, 2006 by Rakesh Agrawal

When it comes to banking, I do pretty much everything online. I review my statements, pay my bills, download transactions into Quicken, check my account balances, change my address. If I need to do it and there’s a way for … Continue reading →

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Using Caller ID to improve customer service

Posted on August 15, 2006 by Rakesh Agrawal

Whenever my cell phone rings, I know who’s calling. And I usually know what they’re calling about as soon as their picture (or name) appears on the display. I’d like to see companies do this for customer service. I ranted … Continue reading →

Posted in airlines, customer service, travel | 1 Comment

Can you understand me now?

Posted on August 15, 2006 by Rakesh Agrawal

I was traveling a lot last week and ended up calling United frequently for flight information. They use a voice recognition system to provide that data. Horrible idea. In a previous job, I worked on speech recognition systems and know … Continue reading →

Posted in airlines, customer service, travel | 5 Comments

Google adds saved locations to maps – a first step

Posted on August 8, 2006 by Rakesh Agrawal

In letting users redraw the map, I talked about letting users save personal points of interest. Google recently added saved locations to its mapping product to let people enter requests such as “pizza near home”. The interface is a little … Continue reading →

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Getting to AT&T/SBC/Pac Bell Park with local search

Posted on August 7, 2006 by Rakesh Agrawal

I was in San Francisco over the weekend and needed to get to the Giants game from Golden Gate Park. I tried entering “Pac Bell Park” into the GPS. No go. “SBC Park”. Nope. I ended up looking at my … Continue reading →