If you think Google News is cool, check out Topix - News organized by topic and location (XML, too)

If you think Google Local Search is cool, check out Yahoos! new SmartView. Just go to Maps on Yahoo! and enter a location — then you get a wonderful map with areas of interest highlighted with great metadata.

Look at all the Mexican restaurants near Stanford!

Keep Innovating!

More cool blender furniture:
http://www.memoryfoamfactory.com/everyday_comfort.html

As you probably know Josh, Bob and I were designing/hacking away on the Blender blogs last Friday. Our plan is to have one blog for each group and then group called the Blend (for now) that will basically an aggregation of all these other blogs, so that people can see what everyone else is doing.
In addition to this we will have a BlenderBlog where people can post important notices, so that everyone in the blender knows about them.
The URLs are http://isisteam.stanford.edu/blenderblog and http://isisteam.stanford.edu/blend
We still have a lot do, as these are still pretty basic and without the actual design template that Bob was working on. We should get together and hack on these again some time, but the end of the quarter is probably a bad time for most of us.

Ok, there’s not much more I can say about this…Wavemarket…it’s epic, it uses cell phones to both recommend things to you and to allow you to rate and recommend things to others. It’s a company based in Emeryville, and we should use them. Or beat them. Something…

Oh, and they use maps…

So, once again, I have been contacted to help develop a new non-profit directed at seniors and aging called Smart Silvers Alliance — whose mission is to advocate for technologies that will allow the aging population to live safely and independently longer in their homes as they age. This will eventually be directed toward the 78 million baby boomers that will be a crushing blow on the existing infrastructure of managed care, nursing homes and caregivers in the future. The founder’s name is Susan Ayers-Walker, President of the MIT-Stanford Venture Labs. Her husband is Rob Walker, co-founder LSI Logic Corporation. Their private consulting firm is Walker Research.

The aim for this non-profit is to work with Intel, SUN, GE, HP and other technology companies to developing technology to aid and assist the elderly, perhaps through a consortium. This is similar to the field of telemedicine and has applicability in this regard. If you are interested, please review the SmartSilvers PowerPoint presentation and send me an email. The people on their team include, Prof. Alex (Sandy) Pentland (co-founder of the MIT Media Lab), Joe Blank (President and COO of Virsalent), and Ron Lichty (Journalist and Software Developer).

The larger goal is to create a West Coast version of the MIT Age Lab or the University of Rochester’s Center for Future Health. It’s unbelievable to me that so many other institutions are addressing this concern, but the only “Aging” research unit on campus I am aware of is the Life-span Development Laboratory — Prof. Carstensen in Psychology. I mean, wouldn’t this be a great idea for Clark Center — combining gerontology, information technology, and engineering???

Hi guys, I thought you would be interested to learn that the first IM company is now expanding into the social networking area. Will be interesting to see how/whether they will leverage the advantage of being client and peer based vs. the Orkuts and Friendsters of the world.

Here is the link to the article