WOW again. Saw this on Google's blog and was blown away from a software development perspective. Brilliant. Your Apartment hunting just got THAT much easier thanks to a fusion of Craiglist real estate & Google Maps both of which are brilliant on their own.
well that is ofcourse..if ur in North America. Kenya needs to get its act together in a Adressing system that WORKS and gets them on the same page as everyone else!! So our streets and avenues werent built with this in mind, but theres thou innovative minds out there to cook somehting up! Urban planners what are you so busy doing??? I feel like even with the wave of Technology hitting growth markets such as Asia and Africa, we will miss out on most useful technologies as we have no infrastructure to build on!
All this talk about roads is great, but an infrastucture is more than just interconnecting barabaras. Postage system and Real-estaate stand to gain the most out of a redefined metric/standard for the purposes mapping out the layout of Nairobi (begin with the most daunting city?). However think of how Business to Consumer Commerce will BOOM if there exists a neat way to LOCATE consumers at minimal costs. Even with all the Software and ICT magic in the world, if this chasm is not bridged - reaching the consumer will remain a task that will continue to keep Markets in africa at snail speed since there will be no marginal utility achievable by the 'goods economy'.
So in as much as ICT is hailed as the future of Africa, i still think there are a lot of fundamental steps needed for us to reap the true benefits of such technologies. At the same time ICT is rendering some of these infrastuctures useless (fixed line telephones for example), but this is not the case for ALL infrastructures.
These steps are not impossile, I think they've just been ignored. Any urban planners (or wannabe urban planners) care to comment?
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