Walk / Don't Walk

Walk / Don't Walk
Originally uploaded by oHoTos.

Saw this while walking around in Barcelona on saturday - pretty confusing!

Writely now part of Google

Well, when this day started I thought this was a nice rumour, I didn't expect this to happen that fast. Google announced on their official blog that they have just acquired Writely, my favorite online word processor:

Official Google Blog: Writely so
For the last five months, I've been part of a Silicon Valley startup called Upstartle, which makes Writely, a collaborative word processor that runs in a web browser. Well, as of Monday, I'm happy to say that I, and the rest of the Writely team, are now part of Google.
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To be clear, Writely is still in beta, and it's far from perfect. Upholding our great user experience means everything to us, so we're not accepting new registrations until we've moved Writely to Google's software architecture. If you're interested in giving us a try, we hope you'll get on the waitlist so we can let you know when you'll be able to try out Writely.

Google, Writely In Talks?

A nice rumor to start the day. Hopefully this will turn out to be true, I would prefer to have more of the services I regularly use under my Google account and Writely is one of them:

Google, Writely In Talks?: So you all know that Google’s got designs for a G:Drive and doing an end run around Microsoft? Now what if you can simply store and save data on that drive, but that’s not clearly as much fun. What if you could write a document in a browser, much like you write on Microsoft Word, but then save it directly to the G:Drive? That would increase the utility of G:Drive tremendously. Maybe that explains why Google is rumored to be in talks with Writely, a browser-based document processing application, for a possible acqusition. Writely, is the first product of Upstartle, LLC. (More on them here.) Writely is one of the Business 2.0 Next Net 25 companies. The pending deal has been making the rounds in the Valley today. I picked up this very strong rumor from fairly reliable sources, when visiting the money corridor (aka Sand Hill Road) this morning. Now I am still waiting to hear from Google and Writely about the rumors, and will treat this chatter as just that, unless of course I hear otherwise from the two companies. Now buying Writely is in line with Google thinking of using browser for everything. I mean an online word processor, and online excel spread sheet make a lot more sense than making people switch to OpenOffice. Anyway will update the story later when I hear from the two respective companies.

Now is the Google calendar coming or not?

TechCrunch has some exclusive screenshots of Google Calendar . I really hope that I won't be disappointed and that "CL2" will be available soon (...April 1st???). Currently I am still using 30Boxes but I am missing the tight Gmail integration that Google will probably offer.

Theee Simpsooons... dü dü dü di dü...

Now this is really, really cool. The Simpsons intro as live action recreation, they must have put a lot of work into this, it's so true to the original! Found this through one of the better blogs out there WWdN

Speed limit

This experiment with the speed limit makes a good point, see for yourself:

What if Microsoft designed the iPod's packaging?

Yesterday I watched this cool video:

Schmap city guides

Schmap, apparently a new online city guide service just contacted me through Flickr because one of my CC-licensed photos was shortlisted for inclusion in one of their guides. I previewed their San Francisco guide after downloading their small viewer and it doesn't look bad but if Google would come up with something similar integrated into Google Earth it would beat them. Their service is going live by the end of March it seems.