Archive for February, 2009

The ultimate mobile search experience (a.k.a Foodfinder lives)

Monday, February 9th, 2009

The folks at Yahoo oneSearch just announced the new oneSearch Shortcut application with a new auto-locate feature that determines the users location using cell-tower positioning and wi-fi triangulation. This combines with the existing voice search and oneSearch clusters to create what is in my opinion the best mobile search experience in the business (especially on Nokia S60 devices). Read on for a quick description of the user experience:

oneSearch Shortcut
The Shortcut application starts off by showing you a small text entry field on the idle-screen of you mobile phone. The text field has a small note telling you to hold down the “Call” button and speak. I think I’ll give Slumdog Millionaire a try.

oneSearch Shortcut Voice Search
Once you have said the search term the app “thinks” for a couple of seconds before showing you the search term for confirmation. Just hit the “Search” button to start the search.

Auto-located oneSearch results
Which results in a search results page that automatically determines your current location (Sunnyvale, CA in my case) using cell-tower and wi-fi beacon positioning. Additionally since oneSearch knows that “Slumdog Millionaire” refers to a movie, it automatically displays the movie information along with the showtimes from the nearest theaters. You can even use the “Buy Tickets” link to buy your tickets so you wont have to wait in line when you get to the theater. Click through on the image above to see the full search results page which includes things like the trailer, official website, movie reviews, etc…

And of course movies aren’t the only thing you can search for this way, Shortcut helps you find any local content (restaurants, stores, etc…) based on your auto-locate location, as well as regular web content. And for those of you who prefer typing it also has search assist which allows you to auto-complete your search terms. In my opinion this integrated solution that allows users to find information (local and otherwise) by just saying what they want is the ultimate mobile search experience. Get it on your Nokia S60, Blackberry or Windows Mobile phone by visiting http://mobile.yahoo.com/onesearch/shortcut.

P.S.: For those of you who remember my Foodfinder hack from YRB – yes that’s exactly what auto-locate does :-)

P.S.S.: I do work at Yahoo! but these are as usual my personal opinions and do not reflect on the views of Yahoo!

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Lotus Elise on a Go-Kart track

Sunday, February 8th, 2009

I’ve just helped the Golden Gate Lotus Club launch the new GGLC blog and as the guest editor I’ve had the honor of making the following first post.

One of the highlights of the 2008 West Coast Lotus meet were the time trials that were held at the go-kart track of Jackson County Parks facilities. You often hear that the Lotus handles like a go-kart but this was the first time that I got to drive my Elise on an actual go-kart course. Our run format consisted of running 3 back to back laps on the outside of the track to count as one single timed run. It was an interesting day and we got to to run the first session in the dry before the rain came down creating a very wet second session.The following video combines in-car and external footage of my first wet run of the afternoon. Major thanks to Rob and Jen from Dietsch Werks for taping the run from the outside.


Lotus Elise on a Go-Kart track from rnair on Vimeo.

Since my R-compound tires were completely slick I had to swap to my AD-07 street tires for the first time in six months. The combination of skinny tires, street compound and wet surface meant that I had no grip and I almost went off while braking for turn 1 (I was later riding with someone who shall not be named when we actually went off at the same spot :-) ). I make the turn with about six inches to spare and am pretty cautious and slow waaaay down for turn two only to find the rear end wants to fishtail on the exit. Turn 3 went much better but the lack of front-end bite at turn 4 lead to a few NSFW comments. At this point I slowed down even further and tiptoed my way around the course for the rest of the run. We later found out that the county had repaved about half the track which meant that the course had sections with both old and new asphalt which account for the wide variance in the grip levels at the turns. Turns 1 through 4 had the lowest grip and you had to tiptoe through them before getting on the throttle for the rest of the course.

The next video is incar from my final run in the dry. The lap is much better and doesnt have too many mistakes apart from a missed shift on the start of lap 3 – I believe it ended up being the second fastest Lotus time of the morning.


West Coast Lotus Meet: Time Trials from rnair on Vimeo.

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