Jonathan Hedley » news

Hyper-inflation: Zimbabwe introduces $100 billion note

Jonathan Hedley — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 06:25:26 +0000

Zimbabwe, grappling with a record 2.2 million per cent inflation, has introduced a new $Z100 billion ($5.50) bank note to tackle cash shortages.

Shops track customers via mobile phone

Jonathan Hedley — Mon, 19 May 2008 09:52:40 +0000

This system from Path Intelligence tracks people in a shopping mall by triangulating on their mobile phone. It can uniquely (but anonymously) identify people by the IMEI (a unique serial number) of their phone.

It would be a fascinating source of data to mine: paths through malls, shopping habits, how people behave differently on their own or when in a group; all kinds of things. But it does seem quite invasive; I think I would feel quite uncomfortable being under such close a gaze. Perhaps if they dropped the IMEI identification and only looked and aggregated trends.

Seems to be quite excitingly priced at around £20,000 a month to rent.

Truckload of concrete dumped into sewer

Jonathan Hedley — Mon, 19 May 2008 09:37:43 +0000

This is weird: some bozo dumped 13 tonnes of concrete into the sewer that runs under the Sydney Football Stadium, the Sydney Cricket Ground, and the Hordern Pavilion, causing a blockage that runs 140 metres.

Sydney Water have installed a temporary bypass and have spent the past 10 weeks trying to unblock it, but they may have to run a new permanent line. The blockage very nearly caused the Mardi Gras party at the Hordern to be abandoned (18,000 people produce a lot of material for a sewer, one assumes).

It would have cost only $2,275 to be dumped legally.

Hordern hard rock on nose, Sydney Morning Herald

MetaCarta GeoSearch News

Jonathan Hedley — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 23:31:35 +0000

MetaCarta’s GeoSearch News is a newly launched service that indexes news articles from a bunch of sources (the wires and masthead news sites primarily), mines the content for location data, and then plots those on a searchable Google map.

Nifty!