Stray Hawkeye

If you’ve ever been in downtown Minneapolis, you’ve probably walked around in the Skyways.  And if you’ve walked around in the Skyways, you’ve probably gotten lost in the Skyways.  Each building built their own, with no central planning that I can discern.  If you look at a map of the Skyways, it basically looks like a two year old scribbled on a map of downtown with a crayon.  And the signs and maps in the Skyways are few and far between, and not all that helpful if you don’t know the official names of each building.  Aside from that, I would say more than half of the businesses and restaurants downtown are on the second level instead of the ground level.  So, I would like to see an app for phones that would help navigate the Skyways.  I was all gung-ho on making this myself a while ago, but as I’ve yet to get around to even starting it, I’m passing it on.  Some potential features:

• At the most basic, it would have a map of the Skyways, and a “You are here” dot showing where you are in them based on the gps in your phone.
• Ideally, it would have some sort of description of each Skyway and building’s interior, so if your phone doesn’t have gps you could figure out where you are based on what it looks like (super ideally, you could take a picture of the Skyway in front of you and it would show you where you are).
• Be able to find routes between places.  Include the times that each Skyway is open and find the shortest / fasted route between two points in the Skyway.  Be able to have some parameters like how far you’re willing to walk outside (maybe 5 blocks if it’s nice, 2 if it’s okay, none at all if it’s really cold – maybe even tie this to a weather service so it can decide this automatically).  If you’re going outside, it should show you pictures of where on which building you need to go back in to get to where you’re going.
• Tell you how long it will take to walk from here to there (in case you have a meeting in 10 minutes and need to grab lunch quick).
• Have the locations and, super ideally, menus, prices, specials, and hours of restaurants in the Skyways.  Do this with bars too.
• Have locations of businesses, both retail and corporate.
• Have things around getting to and from downtown.  Have location of parking ramps, their rates, average time they fill up, specials, etc.  Integrate it with the app they have for city buses.  Show bike racks.
• List upcoming events downtown at the Target Center, First Ave, Orchestra Hall, movies, etc.

• Tetris brownies.  If you eat enough of them just right, you’ll clear a line in your stomach.
• Someone made an incredibly high resolution version of tetris, proving that not everything is better in high resolution.  Someone else then decided to let it run until they finally lost, and posted the results as it went, here. If you click through that one, I would point out that the other tabs that are open and the text in the search bar in the screen shots are equally interesting to the actual content.
• Good at geography and like Tetris?  Try Statetris.  Okay, now try one that’s not the USA.  Makes you kind of sad for your self doesn’t it?  Or is that just me?

Zappos is an online shoe retailer with a mind-blowingly good reputation for great customer service.  I’ve never actually bought anything from them, but I’ve read many, many articles about how good their customer service is, and how great of a company they are to work for.

They now have a map online that shows in real time what is being bought on their site, and roughly where it’s being shipped to.  It’s strangely fascinating.  You can also click on the images of shoes that pop up and see more details about that specific shoe.