Posts tagged data
“ Green means the restaurant is serving a full menu, a signal that damage in an area is limited and the lights are on. Yellow means a limited menu, indicating power from a generator, at best, and low food supplies. Red means the restaurant is closed, a sign of severe damage in the area or unsafe conditions.”
FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate on the agency’s “Waffle House Index.”
It seems silly, but I find this to be really clever. Waffle Houses pride themselves on being able to stay open during natural disasters; they’ve even written an in-house “hurricane playbook.” Couple this sort of consistent response with the fact that Waffle House locations blanket hurricane areas and you’ve just bootstrapped a free, distributed qualitative indicator for conditions on the ground. (Via Gizmodo)
Green party politician Malte Spitz sued to have German telecoms giant Deutsche Telekom hand over six months of his phone data that he then made available to ZEIT ONLINE. We combined this geolocation data with information relating to his life as a politician, such as Twitter feeds, blog entries and websites, all of which is all freely available on the internet. By pushing the play button, you will set off on a trip through Malte Spitz’s life.
A German politician becomes his own Big Brother to demonstrate the importance of data piracy. (Via Flowing Data)
Brutal: Garmin and TomTom stock after Google’s announcement of free navigation.
I hate the stock market herd mentality.
This has been a long time coming. The herd mentality in play here is the joint realization that building your business around single-use, consumer, networked devices is not a good idea. Moore’s Law will obliterate you. The big winners will be the people that create multi-use platforms where unitasker products can be built upon. Apple. Google.
BTW, what was the long term strategy for TomTom and Garmin? Both must have realized that mobile was their end-game, hence their forays into the space: Garmin with an actual device and TomTom with software. The thing is, mobile is a cut-throat space where established businesses with hoards of data and capital have been staking claims within for the last decade.
And we’ve seen this time and time again. Apple developers always feared the kiss of death from Apple: that Cupertino would incorporate their function into their OS. (It’s telling no one really had those fears regarding Redmond.) Google has the data behind it to casually turn on features that kill entire verticals, especially around the maps product.
