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An organization has its own shuttle bus and provide free transportation for their employees is a very common service in China. Workers in schools, government agencies or private businesses all enjoy some sort of transportation tip free bus, taxi re reimbursement etc. on a monthly basis. However, it is quite rare here in North America. A recent article in New York Times exposed that Google is providing this service to the employees in the San Francisco region. I suppose it may be not as needed as in China since most people work in Google can afford cars but it is still a very thoughtful service due to high traffic in the cities. If you can hop onto a free ride and relax, surf on the Internet and get off right in front of your office, it s kinda nice isn t it Anyway, the article says, Google owns 32 buses, their routes cover over 10 cities and 6 counties around SF area. The buses provide free transportation to over 25% of the employees around 1200 people. They even have their own department of transportation I googled Google Bus, but only could find the Korean version of Google Bus, but I have to say this is a great idea to keep their employees and great advertisement

Beside free transportation, Google is doing the best to keep the employees: free cafeteria, free GYM, free rock climbing facilities, free swimming pool, free car wash, and free spa I need to forward this to my Microsoft friends

Best Laptop: Apple MacBook Pro, Popular Science Top 100 Innovations of 2009

Popular Science recently named an Apple computer as the best laptop of 2009 in the Best of What s New 2009: The Year s 100 Greatest Innovations article. What makes Apple laptop the best in the field Apple s unique, patented technology on battery life, included with every MacBook Pro.Due to Apple s design and technology flat lithium-polymer batteries MacBook Pros carry more power than similarly sized Windows PC machines with the same processor.

The uniquely efficient FLAT lithium-polymer batteries allows much longer run times without increasing the size or weight of Apple s laptop.

Advanced chemistry and Adaptive Charging in Apple s MacBook Pro notebooks is said to allows the battery to maintain charging capabilities longer. The battery in the MacBook Pro is designed and built with additional Apple technology to last five years or 1000 recharges, multiple times typical PC battery life span

Transforming Paper and Plastic into a 3D Interactive Experience

The Google Earth API was used as a foundation for StrataLogica to make use of its sophisticated image rendering logic, satellite imagery and access to built-in tools and navigation controls. As an enterprise scale application, we faced some interesting challenges and gained many insights along the way that we d like to share.

Our first task was to prove we could wrap Nystrom s existing educationally focused maps and globes onto Google Earth while retaining the same high quality resolution delivered in their print products.

Achieving acceptable image resolution resulted in file sizes which were much too large. In addition, we needed to deliver an increased level of map content and granularity of images as the user zoomed into the earth. To address these two issues, we created a custom process that takes an Adobe Illustrator file and outputs Superoverlays in accordance with KML 2.1 standards. Using open source Python frameworks, we created a customized solution that outputs Superoverlays with various levels of content.

Our next challenge was to provide support for authoring and maintaining content, in the browser using the Google Earth plugin. All content is authored and maintained in a content management system CMS in much the same way as any dynamic website. One unique difference is that some of the content elements are geo-referenced coordinates that specify the location of content on earth. In the case of placemark balloons, the geo-referenced coordinates identify hotspots on the Nystrom maps which become clickable when the user turns on a setting. The placemark balloons provide supplementary audio, image, video and descriptive content such as the example shown above for the Appalachian Mountains.

Go Mobile with Master Accuracy

Given the rise of Mobile Internet users in past few years it has become quite important to have mobile or lite version of your blog. Mobile users generally do not like to download relatively heavy blog that are made for normal internet connections and web browsers.

There are number of solutions for bloggers for both WordPress & Blogger platforms and I have personally tried a few of them, but I have not been too satisfied Either they are too complex to setup or they are not exactly mobile-friendly.Here at trak.in, we had been using custom mobile blogger solution for past couple of months from Mobstac and were quite satisfied with what they had to offer. However, now Mobstac has gone ahead and launched a platform which allows bloggers to create mobile version of their blog. I got trak.in s mobile version up and running on the new platform in under 5 minutes.