July 10th, 2008
The net is ablaze with all the iPhone pricing rip off.(Although that haven’t stopped some from queuing up already)
My 2c on the whole pricing thing is Vodafone have set the prices so that they don’t marginalise the rest of their smart phone line up.
If you sell a iPhone 3Gfor $500 or $199, then why would you buy a Nokia N95 at $1399 ?
Steve Jobs set the pricing in US so that iPhone would blow away the competition. The pricing here doesn’t reflect that 🙁
Unfortunately, NZ’s probably not big enough to invoke Apple pulling the iPhone from the Canadian marketplace.
Posted in Technology | No Comments »
July 8th, 2008
We’ve just completed an update to the underlying data on ZoomIn. We’ve just switched to a new suburb set on ZoomIn base onto the “New Zealand Fire Service” (NZFS) suburb set.
Why?
Its about accuracy, we want to provide the most up to date map service around. The NZFS suburb set is being used by all of New Zealand emergency services ie. Police, Ambulance and Fire Service. This update will better represent the way that you think and use addresses in your neighbourhood. The update adds another 1500 suburbs to ZoomIn. We’ve now got a total of 2986 suburbs in our address database.
We’ve completely rebuilt our address system from scratch, which gives us a chance to get all of the address cobwebs out of the system.
Changes to ZoomIn urls
The new address data means changes to the ZoomIn URL’s. Don’t worry, all of the old URL’s will still work, they’ll automatically redirect to the new address url.
Here are some examples:
OLD: http://www.zoomin.co.nz/map/nz/wellington/wellington+wharf/waterloo+quay/28/
NEW: http://www.zoomin.co.nz/map/nz/wellington/pipitea/waterloo+quay/28/
OLD: http://www.zoomin.co.nz/map/nz/auckland/auckland/queen+street/
NEW: http://www.zoomin.co.nz/map/nz/auckland/auckland+central/queen+street/
Posted in zoomin_nz_motd | No Comments »
July 7th, 2008
We’ve just completed the update to the map imagery on ZoomIn. It’s now live on ZoomIn maps API. (There’s no need to change any code, its an seemless update)
We’re in the process of completing the update to the addressing backend and geocoders.
Posted in ZoomIn | No Comments »
July 7th, 2008
ZoomIn will be down from 6pm today (7th July 2008). We will be performing several data maintenance tasks, including updated addresses and suburbs. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.
The site should be back up within the night, after the tasks have been completed.
Posted in zoomin_nz_motd | No Comments »
July 4th, 2008
It seems that 37 signals are dropping IE6 support. (I wish!)
Our usage on ZoomIn as follows:
IE6 24%
IE7 43%
Firefox 21%
Safari 4.5%
So we have a ways to go before IE6 support is dropped from ZoomIn !
Posted in Technology | No Comments »
July 3rd, 2008
This morning I added Grow Wellington to ZoomIn and within 2 hours its has already crawled the page and added it the Google Index ! Wow thats fast. We’re used to Google indexing in about 24 hours .
Update: I’ve just noticed that Google has indexed a place Occhali Optical New Market in just over 30 minutes! Go Google Go !
Posted in ZoomIn | No Comments »
July 2nd, 2008
Startup Magazine issue #2 is out on the stand.
Posted in Technology | 2 Comments »
July 2nd, 2008
Posted in Links | No Comments »
July 2nd, 2008
Here’s another awesome slide deck from the Velocity conference – Image Optimisation, 7 mistakes and how to correct them (PPT) by Stoyan Stefanov.
In his audit he has found 45.6% of the total page download size of the top 10 websites homepages are images. Here is the list of 7 tips for improving image optimisation from the slides.
- Use PNG’s over GIF’s – The big sites (Yahoo / Google /Blogger / MySpace / Live.com etc) could save 20% image size by using PNG’s over GIF’s.
- Not crushing PNG’s – Default PNG setting are not the most optimal. Using pngcrush can reduce the size of PNG’s even more.
- Not stripping JPEG meta data – Jpeg contain lots of meta data including in some cases thumbnails of the image and audio inside the EXIF information. (Remember thumbnails should be 3-4K in size) Strip out all non critcial exif information using tools like jpegtrans
- Use Palette PNG’s instead of True colour PNGs.
- Avoid AlphaImageLoader, try PNG8 or at least _filter
- Crush generated images – GD and Imagemagick don’t always do the best job in optmising images.
- Use CSS sprites!
Finally Stoyan says if you optimise your images you can save 10-30% of the download size.
Posted in Speed Up NZ Internet | 1 Comment »
July 2nd, 2008
We’ve recently added bigger pictures to search results page when viewing a single place. Now you can see the pictures that have been added to ZoomIn. We’ve got over 5700 photos of different places.
Remember adding photos to your business or favourite place is good way of getting noticed.
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