On holidays...

Off on vacation for a couple of weeks... back at the end of August...

Tech start-ups in the UK and Ireland

This is worth a read on the current state of start-ups in the UK and Ireland, in comparison with the US (thanks Justin!). The article is good, and the comments excellent. Having worked for several I can sympathise with many of the views expressed. I note a few ex-colleagues have joined the fray...

FoundCity

I like this... FoundCity:

a social mapping tool for creating a personalized map of your life on-the-fly. Using your mobile phone, you "tag" or capture photos throughout the day, label them with any words you want, and send them to your map. At home, you access and customize your map, which you can share with friends, keep private, or publish openly.

So you can see what other people have noted about the city, and learn about new places or experiences. It's a great idea, and the tool could be used for other projects as well as the obvious one of labelling one's own trajectories and favourite restaurants. Similar idea to Social Tapestries, but less annotation.

For example, there's a project called the Chicago Sound Tapes-- the idea is that tapes are hidden around Chicago for other people to find. They've also been mapped using Foundcity. Could also be used for bookcrossing. Seems like there is a lot of potential. I guess you would discover other uses for it through using it.

I wonder what the possibilities are for aggregating information once they have more users... would they use the restaurant tags to publish lists of favourite restaurants (to use a very mundane example)? or do a 'people like you liked x' recommendations? Would this be useful or interesting? I suppose it depends on the kind of information and tags that people add.