3 Reasons Google Street View Is Amazing

Google Street View is old news by now. It launched back in May. For those of you not familiar with the product, it's a new spin on maps similar to the satellite imagery already available. Except, with Street View, instead of just seeing the tops of buildings zoomed in from outer space, you can actually see the fronts of buildings as if you were walking down the street. And the photos are threaded together fairly seamlessly so that you can get a 360 degree sense of what someplace looks like while sitting in front of your computer.



Here are 3 reasons why Google Street View is amazing:

1. It revolutionizes how people use maps.

Maps have been around for a long time, even long before Christopher Columbus wondered "hmmm, what's beyond the edge of this map?" And while they've gotten more detailed and more accurate over time, they've never been able to replace the experience of knowing a location from first-hand experience. Let's face it, even reading a conventional map takes some degree of skill (ask any married couple on a roadtrip.) But when you've already been somewhere, you know the lay of the land. Other times, you ask for directions and people respond using locations. "Turn left at the Shell station, then cross the railroad tracks and go right on the street before McDonalds." These are often the most accurate directions but until now maps didn't include the Shell station or the McDonalds.

But with Google Street View, you can see it all. You know where things are and what landmarks to look for near your destination. Even better, you know what your destination looks like. No more hunting around for address numbers....you can pull up and say, "We're here!"

2. You can find places you've been but don't remember the names of.

The other day my wife and I went out to this great little Italian restaurant near our apartment in Burlingame. When a friend asked me the name of the place, I drew a blank. Then, I opened Google maps and pointed it to the general location of the restaurant. Sure, Google maps lists some businesses in the regular map view with little icons, but not all of them. When I couldn't find it, I clicked the Street View button and pointed it towards the front door of the Italian restaurant. Sure enough, they had a sign prominently displayed and Street View was high enough resolution to zoom in and read the name.

3. You can see places that you're never going to go.

I'm not suggesting you take a vacation to New York by surfing Google Street View but you could check out places that you'd otherwise never see. For example, we have friends who live in New Zealand and chances are they may never come see our place in California. I could send them a picture of our building, or even our street but Street View does a better job of this. A single photo doesn't give you a true sense of a place; it's just one snapshot. But a string of photos with a nifty navigational interface provides a pretty accurate description of what the whole environment is like, not just that one slice captured in a photo.


What do you like about Google Street View? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

Marshall Goldsmith's "What Got You Here Won't Get You There"

Marshall Goldsmith gave this talk at Google and is the author of the New York Times bestseller, "What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful." This is very relevant to any aspiring MBA student, manager, or leader.

Some of the key messages are surprisingly simple (these are just a couple):

• Be nice to people
  
• Don't try to change the past, you can only change the future
  
• Focus on improving only one thing
  
• Follow up

All of his materials are available for free on his website www.marshallgoldsmithlibrary.com

Audi understands experiential marketing

According to Wikipedia, experiential marketing "presents an experience that people choose to attend and participate in after identifying the relevance of a brand or product to their needs." This seems pretty accurate of the Audi event I attended two weeks ago. (For details of the event, check out The Audi Driving Experience on my personal blog.)

While experiential marketing is one of the most expensive forms of advertising, I believe it'll continue to gain importance during the coming years. Let's face it, people are becoming immune to advertisements. They've got Tivo to skip TV commercials, pop-up and banner blockers to skip internet ads, satellite radio without commercials, spam filters for email ads, and the national "do not call" registry to avoid telemarketers. How will companies continue to reach their audiences in the future? I say it'll be experiential marketing.

Experiential marketing is similar to public relations in that the goal of good PR is that other people (editors, journalists, bloggers) say something good about your company or product. Therefore, you feel that you're getting an unbiased recommendation regarding the product. It's even better if the recommendation comes from a trusted source or a friend. This is exactly what Facebook's new Beacon advertising platform is capitalizing on. (For reference, Beacon broadcasts your Facebook friend's actions to you through the site. For example you might see something like "Vince bought Nine Inch Nails - Year Zero at Amazon.com" if I was your Facebook friend.)

Experiential marketing lets you test the product yourself and form your own opinion. This is good because you don't feel that you're being subjected to advertising, even though you are. After all, you are putting the product through it's paces and you'll form your own opinion, right? But there are all sorts of ways to bias you from the beginning.

There's also a halo effect when you tell your friends about how impressed you were with the product, as I did after driving Audi's fleet of cars. But the hard part as a company is getting the right people at your experiential marketing event. It's important to target the right folks with the right message, just like in any form of marketing but due to the high cost, it's especially important in experiential marketing.

Audi did a great job of this with their driving event at Infineon Raceway. I'm not sure how they selected people (I registered on their website) but the event was first-class from beginning to end. I, and many others at the event, left feeling great about the Audi brand and it's products. The event was so fun that I'm sure Audi enjoyed having more people as converted brand evangelists.

The danger with experiential marketing is in creating a bad experience. But this wasn't a problem for Audi. Starting with registration, we were greeted promptly and registered quickly. Following that I received a nice little lanyard and badge with my name on it and was directed to the pristine, stainless steel, Scandinavian designed lounge for complimentary coffee and breakfast snacks while awaiting my turn to drive. In the lounge were beautiful B&O plasma TVs and sound systems playing, of course, Audi infomercials. The experience started to set positive impressions before I'd even sat in one of the cars, thus pre-disposing me for a good time and a good image of the Audi products.



Driving the cars was the icing on the cake thanks to an overall great experience. For successful experiential marketing you've got to have a great product too since schmoozing will only get you so far. Had the cars been pieces of junk, the whole experience would've fallen apart. But with experiential marketing always remember the details. If people have to wait in line too long, or the staff isn't friendly, it'll set the stage for failure.

Remember the dot com bubble?

This video makes some good points about the current state of affairs in Silicon Valley. What do you think? Are we headed for another dot com bubble?

I've been saying for awhile that Facebook is a fad. Maybe I'll be proven wrong. I certainly think social networking is here to stay but seeing how it leaps from one hot site to another every couple years concerns me. Awhile back it was Friendster, then LinkedIn, then MySpace.com, and now Facebook. Who's next?

I'm working on another blog post regarding Facebook but it may be worth sharing one thought with you now. I simply don't understand the messaging portion of Facebook. Here's how it works: someone sends me a message on Facebook. I get an email in my Gmail account saying "Jeremy sent you a message on Facebook, click here to view it." Then I go sign in to Facebook to retrieve my message. Hey Jeremy, why not just send me the message to me via email in the first place? Why use Facebook to send it?

Retiring in your 40s without striking it rich

Even though I'm still far away from retirement, I'm already looking forward to the day when I can work because I want to rather than because I need money. Undoubtedly, others are in the same boat no matter how old you are currently. This is the first year that Danielle and I maxed out our 401k contributions (though we've been aggressively contributing before that, just not to the max) in the hopes that early savings can lead to early retirement.

And apparently it can work! MSN Money has an interesting article titled, "Retired by 50: What it really takes." Granted, they aren't talking about retiring and traveling the world or spending every day on the golf course. But they do point out that making some sacrifices and saving diligently early in life will reap rewards later. (Thank you compound interest!) Another key piece of advice from the article is eliminate all debt. How can you save when you still owe others?

I'm not advocating giving up stuff you enjoy so that you can retire early at all costs, but just use reason and moderation when making decisions and pocket the extra money. Some of the examples in the article are a bit extreme, like living in a van while working as an engineer at Sun Microsystems but others make perfect sense such as living a minimal life. "It's not about what you have, it's about how little you need."

I've found that living in a one-bedroom apartment with my wife not only saves us rent money each month, it also saves us from buying things we don't need because we simply don't have space for more "stuff". We'll be at the store and see some new gizmo and get all excited about it. Then we ask ourselves "Where will we put it?" and 95% of the time we walk out empty handed.

Anyway, check out the article for some good stories about saving money early on and getting out of the rat-race while you're still young.

MSN Money - Retire by 50: What it really takes