SPIEGEL Surfs the Web Hamburg: Pixel Perfect
Normal postcards are so yesterday. Cool people buy vintage postcards, hand-drawn postcards, sewn postcards or even holographic postcards. But our favorite trend these days are pixel post cards -- crude Commodore 64-era renditions of our favorite world cities. Today in links, we look to Postertronic, a small company in Spiegel Online's home city of Hamburg. Postertronic's homepage includes animated pixel postcards of some of our favorite spots -- from the fish market and harbour to the spectacular neo-Renaissance city hall. (A tip of the hat goes to Heiko Hebig for the link.)
A World Cup for Robots
The modern day battle is no longer man against man or man against machine. The ultimate battle of today is machine fighting machine. Next year, top soccer players will meet on the pitch across Germany to battle it out for the World Cup. But in Bremen, armies of robots will be testing their endurance at the Robocup 2006 . You can find out more about the cup's teams -- from fantasy to Aibo league -- on the Cup's official Web site.
Do You Yagoohoogle?
It is merely a small step for a programmer -- but what an impact on the World Wide Web! Norwegian Asgeir Nilsen was tired of having to go through the cumbersome procedure of first searching Google, then Yahoo and shuffling between windows. So he combined the two to create Yagoohoogle. Why not just stick to one search engine or the other? Google, with its thorough search, is the established market leader, but also produces many meaningless and often annoying results. Yahoo, in contrast, filters out a lot of the junk clogging up the Google results, but can hold back important information if you are looking for anything specific. By simply combining the two search engines, Nilsen, has made the world a whole lot simpler -- except, of course, for that complicated word.
