It may not be unanimous the opinion that people are mostly good - I know some of you are skeptical about it. However from time to time we learn stories that remind us that goodwill exists and people will help strangers without expecting a payoff.
I took a cab last night to Grand Central Terminal and as I enter the car I notice there’s a laptop on the back seat. I show it to the driver and he asks me to give it to him because he would drive back to 54th street - where he had dropped off the unlucky owner - and return it. I asked if he knew exactly where the person went and as he assured me I handed him the computer.
First reaction I had was to tweet it, and the tweet ended up on Facebook where some commenters were skeptical the owner would ever recover the laptop. To the skepticals here’s some good stuff.
NYC cabbie drives 200 miles to return $21,000 left in taxi by tourist.
The cabbie drove about 50 miles to a Long Island address he found in Mrs Lettieri’s handbag. No one answered the door at the house in Patchougue, so he left his phone number and drove back to the city. Hours later, he received a call from the family, turned around and drove back with the money.
The Guardian is running a reader poll - “If you found a large wedge of cash, would you return it or keep it?” Here are the results so far.
LIRR conductor lauded for returning lost wallet containing $2,800
Pinkham was humble about his heroic deed, and isn’t even allowed to collect reward money as an LIRR employee.
“We’re here for the customers,” he said.
(cross posted at blog.tigertag.com)
Augmented-reality is catching up and everyday we see a new ‘demo’ that promises to change the way you will see the world. AR, in the hype cycle that Gartner plots is right on ascension getting close the the apex - which in their analisys is when a technology is 2 to 5 years to reaching mainstream.
Right on the bleeding edge - more than 10 years to mainstream adoption - is human-augmentation, which is not related to some spam you normally get. I still prefer Tim O’Reilly’s term body hacking.
Hype Cycle 2009: Augmented Reality on the Rise
Tokyo Cabinet is cool name. I think of some 80’s punk band every time I hear it - specially because it’s always associated with the NoSQL movement. In fact there’s a number of key/value stores out there that are really interesting for a large number of particular applications. Don’t think that RDBMS will die or get replaced by this approach. It’s almost like there’s a new way of doing things that weren’t thought or possible in the relational world (like Map/Reduce has introduced us to a new paradigm).
To the question on whether non-relational stores scale, don’t scale or scale easier than relational ones I’ll leave up to the blogosphere to debate. Here’s a good starting point.
Just a couple quick updates at YellowPin that we wanted you to know about:
First, our new Buzz feature was launched last week! Buzz gives you the ability to automatically receive text messages about your favorite places or friends, giving you real-time updates as to what’s going on around you so you’re never left wondering what to do. For instance, you can set Buzz to get a text message whenever 2 (or 5 or 10) of your friends are at your favorite bar or restaurant (or any other place). You can learn more and manage all your Buzz settings on the “my buzz” tab on YellowPin.
Also, YellowPin is now integrated with Twitter, so if you want your YellowPin updates to hit your Twitter feed, you can set that up on the “my settings” tab of YellowPin. And if you haven’t gotten a chance to sign up for YellowPin yet, these new features make now the perfect time:
Sign up for YellowPin now!
After months of preparation - countless hours of development, strategy, messaging and meetings with partners like Amazon, Motorola and FedEx - we’re thrilled to announce the launch of our private beta version of TigerTag!
As friends and family of TigerTag, we’d like you to be the first to try out the site and the service - simply go to www.tigertag.com to get started. If you already signed up at our old site, please re-register at the new TigerTag.com.
Once you sign up as a member, make sure and order your tags. We’ll then send them out, so you can register all your valuables - mobile phones, iPods, digital cameras - anything at all you’d like to tag and hate to lose.
TigerTag works by harnessing the power of goodwill from folks like you. If your item should go missing, anyone who finds it can easily help get it back to you by simply going to TigerTag.com and entering the unique code on your item’s tag. You’re then instantly alerted of the good news, and we take it from there.
Over the coming months, the site’s functionality, usability, and overall experience will continue to evolve. As you explore the site, we’d love your suggestions - feel free to click on the feedback tab on the left side of every page as you see things we need to fix.
Enjoy!
YellowPin 
