We’ve shifted the ZoomIn website from our hosting provider in the US to NZ.
In the lead up to Xmas, we had a number of issues with our hosting provider in the US, and we made the decision to move the site back to NZ. The site has been up since the weekend, and is noticeably faster 🙂
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We’ve created a fun Xmas game Santa vs the Grinch using ZoomIn maps – santa.projectx.co.nz . Find out who will win this Xmas showdown, Santa or the Ginch? Collect more gifts than the Grinch to win the game. Complete the 10 levels and put your name on the high score table.
Have fun!
Kudo’s to Tim who created the game.
Everyone at ProjectX would like to wish you a Merry Xmas and a Happy New Year!
Amazon has expanded their webservices to include a database – SimpleDB. (I’ve been predicting it ever since ec2 arrived) From first glance it looks like a simple spreadsheet where you can lookup values. The API has CREATE, GET, PUT, DELETE, QUERY and you pay for the data being stored and bytes transferred in and out.
Data Transfer
$0.10 per GB – all data transfer in
$0.18 per GB – first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.16 per GB – next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.13 per GB – data transfer out / month over 50 TB
Data transfer “in” and “out” refers to transfer into and out of Amazon SimpleDB. Data transferred between Amazon SimpleDB and other Amazon Web Services is free of charge (i.e., $0.00 per GB).
Structured Data Storage – $1.50 per GB-month
It’s simple system, but would fulfil the needs of basic e-commerce sites. SimpleDB is limted beta, so you’d better sign up now if you want to play.
I wonder if it will it ever be extended to offer full-text search abilities or spatial querying?
Here’s some of buzz about SimpleDB.
Here’s my wishlist for Xmas:
Google have announced a new programme to encourage students to get involved in coding – Highly Open Participation contest. They’re offering cash and a trip to the Googleplex for contributions to open source projects. New Zealand’s own Silverstripe are offering projects for the competition.
Kudo’s to Google and Silverstripe more encouraging students into IT. We’re looking after the next step of providing students with substantial work experience.
More info on the Google Highly Open Participation Contest and Silverstripe’s projects – GHOP project page
I’m really looking forward to this week’s seminar. Henry Maddocks is going to talk about “How to be a professional developer”. Henry has developed a wealth of experience over the years and is going to offer some insights about software development and the industry. The seminar is free, RSVP on the forum.
Title: How to be a professional developer by Henry Maddocks
Summary:
Software development has a bad reputation when it comes to delivering value to users and it is a reputation that is well deserved. Considering we call ourselves engineers and scientists the systems we inflict on our users are generally appalling. That is if we manage to ship anything at all.
Henry Maddocks has spent ten years studying the software development process and knows it doesn’t have to be that way. This presentation will give you insight into what is broken in the software development field and how to avoid becoming part of the problem.
When: 11th December 2007
Time: 12:00pm
Place: Rutherford House LT2
Map: ZoomIn
We moved office over the weekend. We’re now located on Willis St above Roti restaurant. (Across the road from Catalyst and Ascent. Hi Guys !)
Our new contact details are as follows:
ProjectX Technology Ltd.
Address:
149A Willis Street
Wellington
Phone / FAX:
+64 4 910 3100Postal Address:
PO BOX 155
Wellington
Today’s Digital Future Summit 2.0 saw the launch of The National Broadband Map, built with ProjectX technology. Its purpose is to help improve access to broadband, especially in the regions, through “demand aggregation”: pooling the demand for telecommunications services in a specific geographic location.
Individual users might find it hard to convince a telco to roll out services in their area, but when those users combine, they can often reach the critical mass required to attract investment in the provision of new services. For instance, if you’re a graphic design business in a small provincial town, you might struggle to convince a provider to extend their infrastructure to reach you; but if there is also a school, medical centre and library down your street, plus several other businesses and private residents who are also interested, then the telcos might sit up and take notice.
To this end, the map shows existing state sector locations, as well as allowing businesses and private residences to enter their own locations and describe their level of demand. It also shows existing network infrastructure, and includes all the address search, autocomplete, zooming and panning functionality that is familiar to ZoomIn users.
The system was developed by ProjectX together with the State Services Commission, and involved the collation, geocoding and checking of thousands of state sector locations, and the conversion of network data from all sorts of formats and projections, as well as building on existing ZoomIn Mapping System API functionality. For instance, the ZMS has always had the ability to display vector layers (polylines and polygons) as overlays on the maps, but the size and complexity of the network infrastructures required some hard work from our developers to optimise the performance of these layers, as well as dealing with the inevitable curly cross-browser compatibility issues.
In keeping with the Web 2.0 theme, the Map is labelled “Beta”, and it will evolve over time. Partly that will be due to the growing information base, from user-added places and as we receive more state sector locations and existing network data. There will also be functionality and usability improvements over time, and we encourage user feedback so that we can make this as comprehensive and easy-to-use as possible.
Techcrunch have posted about some of the user numbers behind facebook. Paul Francis compiled a spreadsheet of the numbers.
NZ has 250,760 users – 71,600 male (28.55%) and 179,160 female (71.45%) ! Women outnumber men more than 2 to 1!
Looking at those numbers I would guess that we have a lot of ex-pats still calling NZ home. That’s a lot of people using face book! If what they say is true that more than 50% of facebookers log on once a day. That should put it squarely behind Trade me in terms of visits (althought bebo is more popular in NZ than facebook).
So if you’re looking for a captive NZ audience, then launching a facebook app to that audience is very very appealing. I’m not convinced that people pay any attention to the advertising!
We installed a forum for Summer of Code . Unfortunately, we been receiving a constant stream of fake registration advertising chinese and russian porn sites. 🙁 I would if we’re been hit by beating captcha by using porn.
We’re using phpbb and its been great, I suppose we’re suffering from its popularity. We’ve had to turn more security which mean every registration has to be manually approved. The interface in phpbb is not that to deal with bulk spam.
Is there a better way, or are we going to succumb to 3rd world spammers????
