Sree's Thoughts on Vindigo
Thursday, March 1, 2001

Have you ever been on the street in Manhattan and found yourself trying to figure where a particular restaurant is? Or have you been out and about and wished you knew which movie was playing nearby? Or wondered where the nearest drugstore is? One option is to pull out a cellphone or find a pay phone, but I have found those options cumbersome. There is better technology that helps deal with those situations: It's called Vindigo.

It's a great way to find information while you are away from your PC and the Internet. There are plenty of sites and ways you can get, say, restaurant listings, movie reviews, shopping directory and such while you are sitting at your desk, or at home, but this is a way to access those details on the road. When you need it most.

So what exactly is it and how does this work?

Vindigo is a small, free piece of software that works on the Palm operating system for personal digital assistants. So if you have one of those Palms or Visors, you can easily download Vindigo from the Web via your PC or Mac. Then every time you sync or backup your handheld device, Vindigo updates itself. When you take the Palm on th road, all the data is on it, and you need not connect wirelessly to access the information.

Once you have Vindigo on your Palm, it opens a world of information to you. For example, you have access in the New York guide to the Zagat listings to over 2,400 restaurants and to over 2,000 stores. You tell the program which cross street you are on and what you are looking for and it will suggest the closest matches.

One way I use it often is to find a place for a meal with a friend in a neighborhood neither of us knows well. So, if I am coming down from my Morningside Heights office to Times Square to meet someone coming in from Brooklyn -- and we want to eat Japanese -- I put in the parameters into the Vindigo and get instantaneous suggestions sortable by distance, price and name of the establishment.

Vindigo has about 350,000 users now and works in 19 different cities (see list below). The newly introduced subway directions feature (for New York and London) is especially useful.

Above: a look at two Vindigo screens.

If you already own a Palm device and live in one of the 19 coverage cities, Vindigo is a must-have. If you don't yet own a personal digital assistant, Vindigo in itself may make a Palm purchase worthwhile.

Resources:

 

Sree's Site of The Week


BJPinchbeck.com
http://www.bjpinchbeck.com

Here's a site I wish I had access to when I was in school (of course, the Internet as we know it didn't exist then, but that's not the point). "If you can't find it here, you just can't find it," is the slogan of this homework help guide. And it's a pretty good claim.

B.J.Pinchbeck is a 13-year-old that's had a Web site since 1996 (his dad got him started, but it's now all BJ). He's built a site that covers a range of topics and provides starting points for researching a topic.

And because it's such a good place to start your research, not just young students will benefit -- anyone new to a subject will.

I especially like his simple annotations next to each link, they tell you whether it's worth clicking on.

How successful is this kid? His site has been absorbed into Discovery.com, though he continues to update it.

BJPinchbeck.com
http://www.bjpinchbeck.com

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