Illustration by J. Longo
Last month, I had the incredible opportunity to visit Cuba with my global travel companion Marco Bani. It’s a dynamic place facing rapid changes. I talked to everyone I met – regular people, but for their exposure to the lucrative tourism sector – about technology. The result is this primer in Kernel, the Daily Dot‘s Sunday magazine, for their travel issue. Thanks to Jesse Hicks for his editing. More photos, below.
If you use the Chrome browser, you may have noticed that when you begin typing in the address bar, Google’s Autocomplete prediction service guesses where you might be heading to save you keystrokes. If you have Web History enabled, those guesses aren’t just popular websites, but rather the sites you’re historically most likely to visit.
I realized that this list of sites actually end up serving as a sort of internet time capsule of the last ten weeks (the amount of time the browser history spans). So, here are my Internet ABCs of my last three months of grad school at the Media Lab. Click any of the images to go to the site.
I went to the Giraffe Center in Nairobi today. They’ve successfully brought an endangered species of giraffe back from the edge of extinction. But also, they let you feed the giraffes. This is what that looks like:
I’ve heard the new Windows phone is awesome, too, but haven’t had a chance to play with it yet.
At first, it seemed strange to me that Photosynth, an incredible and free panorama-snapping iOS app, was developed by Microsoft. But then I began uploading my panoramas to Photosynth.net and happily agreed to share my panoramas on Bing Maps, as well, and I quickly realized that Microsoft did, in fact, have self interest in this endeavor. They’re populating Bing Maps with great 180-360 degree panoramas of famous and beautiful places.
The view from the top of Parque das Ruinas, in Santa Teresa, Rio de Janeiro.
Google added this element to Google Maps years ago when it purchased Panoramio in 2007, but like many Google-acquired start-ups, the service has sort of languished ever since (relative to modern efforts). It’s a good sign for Google Maps that Panoramio photos are no longer a primary feature, but not much has changed about Panoramio itself. There’s a neat API, at least, and a great collection of geo-tagged photos, but Google should probably introduce a competing app to rejuvenate submissions.
El Ateneo Grand Splendid, a former theatre in Buenos Aires, was spared destruction and given new life as the flagship bookstore of El Ateneo.
Anyway, Photosynth is awesome enough to make me re-install Silverlight and dust off my Windows Live (Hotmail) ID. Even though I took panoramas all over South America without 3G or Wifi access, when I went to upload them tonight, the photos’ metadata quickly brought up a list of nearby places to choose from. It was amazing how easy it was to assign each photo to a destination I am now 8,000 miles away from, without even consulting a map.
The Panama City, Panama skyline as seen from the harbor.
I’ve been through every iteration of panoramas in the last 20 years, with varying degrees of pain:
1997: I excitedly purchase a Kodak Advanced Photo System camera for its simple panoramic mode. My parents graciously pay a premium each time get my wide aspect ratio memories developed.
2002: My first Canon Digital Elph doesn’t have a panoramic mode, but I use clunky software programs to digitally stitch and assemble panoramas. The overlapping edges don’t look great.
2004: My next Canon point and shoot has a panoramic mode included in the firm/hardware, which consists of holding your elbows as steady as you can while rotating your torso enough to achieve a 30% overlap. The bundled panorama utility software stitches them together. Again, results are not great.
2005: I see that my friend in Leeds, England simply prints 4x6s and manually arranges them on her wall, as people have done for 150 years. I’m a little depressed how superior the analog treatment is.
2011: Microsoft releases the Photosynth app. It’s simple to use and is yet another smartphone app that makes the iPhone a justifiable replacement for actual cameras with far higher quality components.
Experimenting with a macro shot of my cafe carioca.
Matt’s 7-day forecast:
2pm Friday – Sunday = West Virginia
6:30am Monday – 9pm Friday = New York City
I should really spend my time packing tonight, not uploading pictures, but I can’t resist so here’s the first set:
P.S. How to ensure your band doesn’t make it big, #1834: Name your band ‘Fisticuffs‘.
Bonus points if you’re a British band and design a hardcore logo.
