Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Modest Maps and Microsoft intro

The Modest Maps guys were showing off a number of things including this:
http://hindsight.trulia.com/

OK, that's cool. It's some combination of apis and flash and uses trulia data for time-series animations. Cliph will love it. It has little value to cbre because it would be hard to automate and actually USE. It's pretty though. Pretty is better than not pretty.

Microsoft is coming up. I may skip it to go get coffee. Microsoft is the 7 foot center who can't dunk, can't run, and can't shoot. It looks impressive on a spreadsheet or a powerpoint slide, but is disappointing in actual action. Still, the crappy 7 foot player is better than all those 5 foot crappy players out there. Yah, yah, yah, 3d NYC in the browser. Let's see it play.

4 comments:

Jerry said...

I think Microsoft can get you 2 blocks a game.

Tom Carden said...

Hi, thanks for linking to Trulia Hindsight - can you expand a little on what you feel would make this useful to people like CBRE?

gene said...

To become useful for our little world it would have to:
1) use our own proprietary data in a secure manner
2) be able to save and deliver in offline, online, and hard copy versions
3) be able to associate specific points with the attributes of that point
4) allow customizable colors, size, dates, and other things on a case by case basis.

It shows data in a great different way. How sticky the site is will ultimately relate to how useful it is though, not how shiny it is. It will be useful to some, but not often enough to enough people to be something we'd look to do in our little world. Hopefully, it helps push the market to keep exploring new ways to visualize data. Thanks for your attention Tom.

Tom Carden said...

Interesting feedback, thanks for expanding your point. Some of those things could definitely be addressed in a follow-up version without compromising what we were aiming for at all.

Looking around one part of your little world (30 mapping experts, 20 Terabytes of data, 4000 maps a month, 6MB PDF "welcome" downloads...) at http://mapping.cbre.com/ I can sense plenty of fertile ground between our way of doing things and yours :)