Burning Man '09
February 1, 2010 is here. The stock market is better. New projects are in swing. What are you working on these days? Are you fine tuning your existing application and adding new features? Is your day spent building something new? Are you using a new hardware platform? Have you entered a new arena?

Looking forward, the things that I find interesting are ideas like Kiva, which lets you make micro investments with entrepreneurs in emerging countries. I love how GPS and Web2.0 are changing our lives. No more paper maps! I still have to think twice when I hop in the car and ask myself if I have a local map. Then, I remember I have Google Maps. How cool is that? I love Street View on Google Maps. I love flying through a virtual canyon in Google Earth.

The face of media will never be the same. Thank goodness. How long will it take us to get over the insult to our trust and intelligence that old time media was? All the lies and hype. Now, we have blogs, podcasts, comments, forums, streaming media, text messages, social networks, Wikipedia, instant access to information so we can make sense of things right away.

Those are some ideas that excite me. What excites you? It may very well be working on an existing app and being excited about something that's not work related. My friend Graham loves GPS enabling his dog and mapping dog walks through the snow. In fact, I just bought a Bow-Lingual, and I don't even own a dog! That's fine. You may work to live or live to work. What I am curious about, and I think the community will be interested in hearing is what you're doing that involves technology that you think is exciting. Even what you think would be exciting.

I love great enterprises. Here's an example. I love a business called The Parking Spot. What's the big deal? It's so well run I look forward to using their parking service. I pat myself on the back for being so clever. I use their service and my life is easier. I pull in, take a ticket and park. Minutes later, I get picked up by a comfortable bus that takes me to the airport without any drama. When I get back from a trip, I walk out to a quiet parking space at the airport and minutes later, a bus takes me right back to my car. They give me a bottle of water as I leave and they have a customer loyalty program. What's the big deal? Nothing, really. It's just a parking lot. But, they do it right. It's so easy to do a bad job. But, look at how happy it makes me to enjoy good service.

You don't have to invent the next big thing. You can just build a better mousetrap. But, whatever you're doing or dreaming, would you please take a minute to let us know here with a comment? Some people like specifics, but don't feel constrained to answer these questions:

1) what are you working on or dreaming of?
2) what's language/platform/industry?
3) what's the business model (product sales, service, support, advertising, marketing, etc)?
4) what are the threats and opportunities?

Thanks for your input - and, stay tuned!

Views: 113

Comment

You need to be a member of Codetown to add comments!

Join Codetown

Comment by Eric kovar on February 1, 2010 at 9:04pm
The Parking Spot is a brilliant real estate play. They needed very little expensive road frontage, but acquired huge amounts of inexpensive land for parking for pennies on the dollar.

Happy 10th year, JCertif!

Notes

Welcome to Codetown!

Codetown is a social network. It's got blogs, forums, groups, personal pages and more! You might think of Codetown as a funky camper van with lots of compartments for your stuff and a great multimedia system, too! Best of all, Codetown has room for all of your friends.

When you create a profile for yourself you get a personal page automatically. That's where you can be creative and do your own thing. People who want to get to know you will click on your name or picture and…
Continue

Created by Michael Levin Dec 18, 2008 at 6:56pm. Last updated by Michael Levin May 4, 2018.

Looking for Jobs or Staff?

Check out the Codetown Jobs group.

 

Enjoy the site? Support Codetown with your donation.



InfoQ Reading List

European Initiative for Data Sovereignty Released a Trust Framework

The Danube release of the Gaia-X trust framework provides mechanisms for the automation of compliance and supports interoperability across sectors and geographies to ensure trusted data transactions and service interactions. The Gaia-X Summit 2025 hosted facilitated discussions on AI and data sovereignty, and presented data space solutions that support innovation across Europe and beyond.

By Ben Linders

AWS Launches European Sovereign Cloud amid Questions about U.S. Legal Jurisdiction

AWS has launched its European Sovereign Cloud with a €7.8 billion investment, designed to meet EU regulatory demands and address data privacy concerns amid geopolitical tensions. Despite its operational separation from global regions, questions linger about legal protections against U.S. data access. Competitors like Microsoft and local providers may present stronger sovereignty options.

By Steef-Jan Wiggers

Presentation: How to Unlock Insights and Enable Discovery Within Petabytes of Autonomous Driving Data

Kyra Mozley discusses the evolution of autonomous vehicle perception, moving beyond expensive manual labeling to an embedding-first architecture. She explains how to leverage foundation models like CLIP and SAM for auto-labeling, RAG-inspired search, and few-shot adapters. This talk provides engineering leaders a blueprint for building modular, scalable vision systems that thrive on edge cases.

By Kyra Mozley

Article Series - AI Assisted Development: Real World Patterns, Pitfalls, and Production Readiness

In this series, we examine what happens after the proof of concept and how AI becomes part of the software delivery pipeline. As AI transitions from proof of concept to production, teams are discovering that the challenge extends beyond model performance to include architecture, process, and accountability. This transition is redefining what constitutes good software engineering.

By Arthur Casals

How CyberArk Protects AI Agents with Instruction Detectors and History-Aware Validation

To prevent agents from obeying malicious instructions hidden in external data, all text entering an agent's context must be treated as untrusted, says Niv Rabin, principal software architect at AI-security firm CyberArk. His team developed an approach based on instruction detection and history-aware validation to protect against both malicious input data and context-history poisoning.

By Sergio De Simone

© 2026   Created by Michael Levin.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service