Collection of thoughts

Still missing my old but reliable bike after losing my keys. The trip journey back from the office has increased from 20min to almost an hour these days. I am starting to wonder if there are any other ways of cutting through my ABUS lock after exhausting my efforts with the council and police. Maybe I should just get a new bike instead; new year, new bike, makes perfect sense.

Sometimes I do wish what it will be if I am one of the Goldman Sachs employees, earning those amounts that some will probably associate the exorbitant numbers earned by Premier League footballers. One thing for sure, is that I will certainly not have the problem of deciding whether to pick the lock to my bike or treating myself to a brand new £1000 bike if I want.

Another NY Times article wrote recently on why he thinks Amazon should buy eBay which I find to be quite intriguing as I always admired Amazon for the way they have change our perspective of internet shopping since the mid 90s. But the more interesting points raised was how the industries continue to consolidate both to derive innovation as well as to inject freshness into the other which may seem to be losing its way abit.

And in many case, seems to be the same for the company that I work for. It was officially announced last week that Microsoft has acquired Multimap on my way back from Turkey. I am quietly excited about the change, but also worried how the changes in culture, policies, etc, are going to affect us all. However, I like to believe that if we can continue to hold on to the biggest assets of the company, which is its people, we can definitely make a difference to the mapping industry in the new year to come.

New Multimap website

The new Multimap website has gone live! (click on the link on the top left on the current site). IMHO I think this will really move the mapping arena to the next level. I really like the way information is presented to the users in the relevant way, with Points of Interests, ability to store your history and favourites, the useful A4 print friendly pages and some of the old functions that was available of the old site, i.e. booking of hotels, are really useful! The inclusion of eBay is probably another first for a mapping site (disregarding the mashups that uses google maps and eBay API), on top of the hybrid function which Multimap had for years before the rest of the mapping sites decided to do something similar. It might start a new trend of users who want to save shipping costs and use the maps to see where are the nearest items. Users can even select different types of maps by hovering their mouse over the map button (Although I think that's abit of an Easter egg!). The availability of weather, local information on each pan is a real nice feature as well.

Another key feature which is not obvious to the user is the convergence of web and mobile mapping! By indicating your mobile phone number when registering (really works only in UK atm), you will be able to do the same location searches on your mobile phone as well, and even the ability to retrieve what the user has stored as their Histories and Favourites from the web. If you are lost, you can just text a simple message and find out where you are! Extremely useful for those late night outs! I actually find it really useful if you are in need of trying to find a place, which is exactly what happened to me over the weekend I had when I pulled in a map of the flat that I was viewing by texting "mymm [postcode]" and it returns me the exact map that I would be seeing on the web, minus the screen size - which was not that bad on my N73.

I am extremely excited how the new site will be received by the users and look forward to the feedback.

BTW - It even works fantastic in Singapore - see attachment, and not displaying some closest relevant search results like what Google does if they do not find something.