Alize Blogazine: March 2006

The Big Chinese Wall was an early messenger… that the Chinese people can do everything. Maybe the Great Silk Way would be even more illustrating. Yes, China had so much to offer to the world since Antiquity… from the earl green tea to the royal purple.
You enter in a shopping market somewhere on the European or the American continent and buy a product… (such as textile or electronics or a toy) and you will often see that is manufactured in China. The Great Silk Way was as profitable as it is nowadays the Chinese export. Impressive! In my hometown, when the Chinese products entered on the local market, the local textile factory was in short time closed because it could not face the Chinese products… the price criteria was the strongest. In the last years, something interesting happened… I started to see again on the market the “Made in ” label. I started to hear people saying “I am to poor to afford something cheap. I rather buy something to put in the washing machine more than once.” Then, the Chinese products adapted and started to grow a little in price… diversifying their customer targets.
Well… the boom passed. People started to have preferences, opinions and… just more products to choose from. I must admit that the textile industry that I choose as example is a “light industry”. Things are much more complicated and SLOW in metallurgy or navy industry.
I think the product exchange starts… Some European merchandise does get to China. I am thinking about the luxury products. Yes, there are very rich people now in China. Step by step, various merchandise will start to move in both directions.
It is true that the economical analysts fear of something else. Big fashion houses have the manufacturing lines in China. If I would start talking about the computer industry… I should write a separate post. Thanks to the cheap Chinese computer manufacturing, the computers became affordable almost all over the world... And yes, this made a huge educational and technological difference. As such, the software industry developed much easier all over the world.
Yes, HP moved the divisions in China and IBM sold to Lenovo its hardware division.
Is it good is it bad, is it progress? Does the world depend now on the Chinese manufacturing? Or maybe is China dependent on the external consumers? Who depends more on who? I think the global market environment is far from reaching maturity. All this globalization thing and the huge role that China is playing is for me just an example of what the Great Silk Way became: a ramification in each store :).

The invention of the paper machine or of the magnetic compass, were just some premonitions of what nowadays China means for the world. Big hi-tech companies like Microsoft and Intel opened R&D centers in China in the last years. This means a lot more than manufacturing and yes I see in this trend the possibility for China to become one of the innovation leaders of the world. It is not anymore about manufacturing or hi-tech… but further about a country highly increasing the number of bright people. This is a healthy sign of economical growth.

I’ve tasted recently a pretty pretty map navigation. Well, it is only a preview for two cities… but since I live close to one of them… I can totally enjoy it.
Long story short… I shall show what you can obtain with some online maps services inserting the same address: 100 Pine ST, Seattle WA 98101.
I have chosen this place as I think the view towards the “Public market” is simply charming: the water, the sloped street, the market… all so cute.

First, some years ago… I was into yahoo maps.
Classic, old fashioned, sweaty navigation.

Then it was Google Maps. Total revolution. Sattelite/hybrid image, and could drag the map with the mouse… and all the local search results…yammy.

I was also impressed by amazon's A9 maps. I’ve found the both street sides pictures as an useful thing. If you need to get to totally unfamiliar place, it can prove more useful then the satellite image.

Then, then I saw birds eye with two levels of zoom on local.live.com.
I found very pleasant to rotate around the target from nord to south and from east to west.

It is cool to be a bird but I still was dreaming to see things also just like walking or driving along the street. And here it is:

The chance to walk / drive on the streets of Seattle with preview.local.live.com.

Quite amazing… isn’t it? Well, what next? I know what I want.
I want multi touch interaction on our hardware to use it for map navigation. It might take some years but I am patient… though eager. :)