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The use of Google Maps was frustratingly demonstrated at Thursday’s workshop on applications for the technology in SA wine. For the event was held at the Protea Fire & Ice! Hotel located at 198 Bree Street in the Bo-Kaap and a Google enabled iPad was necessary to find the place. When Bree Street was laid out, street numbers got out of sync with the one side displaced several blocks in relation to the other. Even 198 is opposite the odd 220s, making navigation by common sense problematic. Enter Google Maps.

Who flew in a Czech software engineer called Yada (or was that a hologram?) to gee-whizz their apps to assorted bloggers, nerds and hotel guests who got lost looking for the breakfast buffet. Yada’s homesick European mouse kept flipping up Street Views of Prague with the least intuitive moment Yada searching for his own fine art print store downtown and a Chinese restaurant being thrown up by the “latitude” tool.

“Ah, there is a Chinese restaurant across the street” explained Yada gnomically, but how Google Maps knew that remains a cloak-and-dagger mystery from the ancient craft of cartography and necromancy. The company does send trikes crawling all over the planet (pedal-powered tricycles bristling with cameras and antennas like something the Stasi – secret police in the GDR – may have used in the fifties) collecting information for Street View, so perhaps Jozka Bond ordered Chow Mein while recording the photogravures of Karel Klic in Yada’s window.

Yada

Yada

The applications for SA wine and tourism are obvious: three dimensional walk-throughs of tasting rooms and vineyards and the price is right: free. Which must have sent a shiver of future unemployment among the assembled winery webhosting community. For even notoriously slow wine farmers will realize that paying for a service Google can provide for free, is as ridiculous as asking a world famous artist to pimp-up the labels of your old vine Chenin, as Eben $adie did recently.

As to a business model for all this programming, Google communications manager Julie Taylor admitted there isn’t one. “We just do all this cool stuff and hope to cash in later” seems to be the algorithm. In this, Google and SA wine are perfectly in sync.

Jane Taylor

Julie Taylor

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Comments

 

Mike Ratcliffe

August 29, 2010 at 7:49 am

Neil, this not really an objective report on the event. Acceptable for a personal non-influential blog, but given that you are blogging for the extremely influential Sunday Times I would expect to see at least something about the event itself.
Sure, the Google Streetview software has some glitches many of which are associate with SA broadband, but the upside is phenomenally cool and needs to be reported.
Will you actually be reporting on the event?
The Marketing lady from Google is called Julie Taylor, not Jane.

 

Neil Pendock

August 29, 2010 at 8:30 am

Thanks for the proof-reading Mike, have corrected Jane Taylor to Julie Taylor.

PS. This is a personal, non-influential blog. I do not get paid to blog – it is independent. For paid blogs, check out the WOSA blog Cape Chatter.

 

tom robbins

August 30, 2010 at 10:09 am

For a start google would do well to actually start mapping the Winelands properly. According to the google map in order to dine at Overture Restaurant at Hidden Valley Wines one needs to park on the R44 and then walk a couple of kilometres through farmland to access the restaurant. However it does indicate there is a hiking/MBT (sic) trail somewhere in the vicinity without mapping the trail. A Hidden Valley indeed! The map does not even show Annandale Road as can be viewed at http://maps.google.co.za/maps?hl=en&tab=wl
Tom Robbins http://www.eatcapetown.co.za

 

tom robbins

August 30, 2010 at 2:12 pm

For a start google should begin to map the Winelands properly. The google map to Overture restaurant at HIdden Valley Wines shows road ends a couple of kilometres before the restaurant. A Hidden Valley indeed! If you follow their map you will park your car on the R44 and then walk the rest of the way over farmland. Google does indicate the existence of a hiking/MBT (sic) trail but even this doesn’t help as it doesn’t even show the route of it. The Allandale Road to Overture is considered to minor to appear on their map. Best to buy an old fashioned map book until the jack it up. Tom Robbins eatcapetown

 

Jon

August 30, 2010 at 10:22 pm

Mike, stop being such a school teacher! Talking about objectivity, why didn’t you mention that you were a presenter at this function?

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  • About

    Called "South Africa's most influential wine writer" by DrinksBiz, a "wijngoeroe" by De Telegraaf, a "Master of SA Writing" by Ernst Gouws and voted “most trusted palate” by readers of WINE magazine, Neil Pendock is South Africa’s leading Indie drinks commentator.

    An "enthusiastic amateur", he owns a small farm on the Paarderg which used to supply a few grapes to Swartland Winery, a producer he never wrote about. After two decades in the spittoon, he retains a healthy disregard for the anoraks, bowties and Emperors of drink and their new clothes.
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