June 22, 2009

Trading private parking spaces

Filed under: Architecture,Automobiles by Branko Collin @ 9:32 am

In such a densely populated country as the Netherlands, it may appear strange that many private parking spaces are empty during the day, when their owners are off to work. Wannapark.nl tries to fill this ‘gap in the market,’ as the Dutch say, by bringing together the owners of both cars and private parking spaces.

A quick look at the Amsterdam section of the website shows that the recently started company hasn’t attracted many users yet—although to be fair, there is fairly little usable private parking space in Amsterdam. The spaces on offer in the old docklands, on IJburg and in West all seem to be in the parking garages of new buildings, with spaces smack in the city center going for 300 euro a month.

(Via press release aggregator Dagelinks.nl.)

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May 30, 2009

Optimize websites, lose lawsuits

Filed under: Automobiles,Online by Branko Collin @ 12:18 am

Remember that story about the website that lost a lawsuit due to how Google summarized its contents in search results? Well, the judge’s opinion came in yesterday, and it gets even crazier.

What went on before? Miljoenhuizen.nl had a web page on which the words “Zwartepoorte” and “failliet” (bankrupt) appeared together, although totally unrelated. According to Zwartepoorte the Google summary of that page caused people to conclude that the company had gone bankrupt, and so it asked Miljoenhuizen.nl to change the webpage to undo that impression. The latter refused and the former sued.

Miljoenhuizen.nl’s owner had—let me quote the court—“organized his website in such a manner that it scored “high” in Google, [so] the defendant has a responsibility in this matter.” In other words because the defendant ranked high in the search engine, he lost the case. He probably never helped himself by telling the judge how easy and trivial it is to change the page in a way that Google would no longer produce the damaging text.

Some good news for Miljoenhuizen.nl though is that it managed to net Solv (Dutch), the respectable internet law firm of amongst others Christiaan Alberdingk Thijm—he who once convinced a court that Kazaa was legal, although by then the filesharing company had fled to Australia only to be convicted there, perhaps because lesser legal minds roam the steppe of Southland.

(Full verdict here (Dutch, PDF). Link: Iusmentis. Joris van Hoboken, expert on the confluence of law and search engines, has an opinion in English.)

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May 17, 2009

Site convicted for Google’s automatic abstracts

Filed under: Automobiles,Online by Orangemaster @ 1:44 pm

If the case of car dealer Zwartepoort against website Miljoenhuizen.nl has been in the news before, it can only have been as the sort of easily mocked example of how some folks start lawsuits over really anything and everything, no matter how trivial and unwinnable their cases are. But now Zwartepoorte have gone and won theirs. When you searched Google for the company name, you would get amongst others a result from Miljoenhuizen.nl seemingly explaining the car dealer had gone bankrupt. You know the type:

Full name: Zwartepoorte. Specialty: BMW … This company has gone bankrupt.

These abstracts are machine generated. Google takes disparate phrases from a website and combines them into an abstract. Miljoenhuizen.nl obviously feels that the wrong people have been sued. Miljoenhuizen.nl told De Telegraaf (Dutch): “If the search result were to imply or insinuate that Zwartepoorte has gone bust, it would be Google’s responsibility, not ours.” I would take that a step further and say that nobody should have been sued in the first place.

It will be interesting to see what reasoning judge Sj. A. Rullman will come up with to explain her judgment. Meanwhile, I am waiting with trepidation to be sued by BMW car dealers, as I have my own story of the power of Google to tell. The last few weeks of December I got a constant stream of phone calls from people wishing to buy a nice shiny Beamer. My initials are B.M.W., and as it turns out I used to be the first link people would find when they googled for “BMW Amsterdam,” displayed prominently as part of Google Business with a map and a phone number. It got so bad that I stopped answering the phone, and started the message on my machine with the statement that “I am not a BMW dealer.” I must has cost some poor sod a lot of lost business that way.

Update: fixed type “Miljoenenhuizen.nl” to “Miljoenhuizen.nl.” Thanks, Nico.

Link: Iusmentis (Dutch). Photo by Gyver Chang, some rights reserved.

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April 21, 2009

Open Source car

Filed under: Automobiles,Design,Technology by Branko Collin @ 10:14 am

In 2005 the well-known Stichting Natuur en Milieu foundation (Foundation for Nature and Environment) asked students of the three technological universities (Delft, Eindhoven, Twente) to invent the car for the year 2020. This is what they came up with, called the c’mm’n, and the first thing you will notice is that it doesn’t fly. The car that is, not or not necessarily the concept.

So, for the car geeks out there, here are the dirty details (Dutch):

  • Thermoplastic exterior
  • Aerodynamic shape
  • Mega-iPhone-like dashboard that lets you play GTA IV while the auto-pilot drives the car
  • Configurable driver’s seat that makes it impossible for other drivers to seek eye contact
  • Memory foam back seat
  • Active suspension (makes the car stick to the road better)
  • Frame that doubles as a shockabsorber
  • Fully electrical powertrain
  • Optional diesel range extender (the so-called engineering booth makes it possible for you to compose your own car and calculate the effects of your choices)

They seem to have put more thought into the ‘car of the future’ bit than into the ‘open source’ bit—the c’mm’n people still have to decide on the license. I understand that can be a tricky thing but on the other hand even Ford, which isn’t in the business of giving away its products, at least opened up its press photography.

(Link: Springwise.com. Source photo: cmmn.org.)

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April 1, 2009

Woman takes driving exam at age 74

Filed under: Automobiles by Orangemaster @ 10:10 am
rijbewijs

Why bother taking your driving exam at that age? Because you’re a widow and need to get around, which is why Miep Derks from the town of Wijchen near Nijmegen is taking hers. Next Tuesday on her birthday at age 74, the energetic senior hopes to get her driving licence. In 2008 only 19 seniors above age 60 attempted to do so. The oldest candidate in Nijmegen was 64.

It took me three and half years (!) to get my Dutch driving licence (nine flippin’ tries and a hel-lu-va-lot of money). Driving in Amsterdam is tough, with all those bikes and trams, but driving in Nijmegen on the Keizer Karelplein roundabout from hell deserves a prize. It was modelled after the Place Charles-de-Gaulle in Paris, the huge roundabout around the Arc de Triomphe, which is really nasty, too.

(Link: gelderlander.nl, Photo dennismartijn.nl)

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February 23, 2009

Driver gets money back for not driving over cat

Filed under: Animals,Automobiles by Orangemaster @ 8:58 pm

Little over a year ago, we reported on a driver in Schiedam who was fined EUR 75 for not driving over a cat, or technically, ignoring a green light. The man was trying to avoid running over the cat by waiting until it got out of the way.

The story goes on telly that after going to court over the matter, the driver got his money back, as he was given the benefit of the doubt. The police’s argument is that they did not see a cat crossing the road.

I can’t imagine someone making that up and purposely stopping at a green light. Good news.

(Photo of Cat crossing the street by ll_browneyes_ll, some rights reserved)

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February 22, 2009

Ball, bikes and bridges

Filed under: Architecture,Automobiles,Bicycles,Sports by Branko Collin @ 7:54 pm

No news this weekend about the record attempts of Edwin van der Sar, the Dutch keeper playing for Manchester United who hasn’t conceded a goal for more than 1,300 hours. There’s nothing to report, because Van der Sar was rested during yesterday’s league game. His replacement promptly let a ball past, so that if Van der Sar keeps his net clean for at least one more minute he no longer has to share his league record with the rest of his defense.

The Flyswatter bridge we wrote about has been getting quite some attention in the blogosphere. Popular Mechanics talked a bit longer with architect Van Driel than we did and discovered some more flyswatter bridges in the Netherlands and France. But why, when mentioning in passing Dutch bicycle paths, do they link to a website about biking in Copenhagen?

Speaking of bikes in the Netherlands: people from Amsterdam use their bicycles more often than their cars. Worldchanging.com reports:

Between 2005 and 2007, Amsterdam residents rode their bicycle 0.87 times a day on average, compared to 0.84 trips by car. It was the first time on record that average bike trips surpassed cars, the research group FietsBeraad reported last month.

The ‘box of pixels’ at the top of this posting is not the lazy work of a photoshopper, but an actual office building made in 2007 by Dutch-Austrian architects Splitterwerk, and forms the headquarters for a firm called Prisma Engineering in Graz, Austria. Link: Bright.nl.

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January 31, 2009

Spyker going strong in spite of global recession

Filed under: Automobiles by Eric @ 11:48 am

While other car manufacturers world-wide are struggling to survive and hoping on governmental support to help them through the current recession, Dutch car manufacturer Spyker puts out a press release stating that in 2008 they almost doubled their production compared to 2007. And it doesn’t stop here: “Overall, we are optimistic that we will see a further increase in production and our distribution network this year”, says Victor R. Muller, Spyker’s Chief Executive Officer.

There aren’t too many Dutch car manufacturers and despite its historical background, Spyker is a relative newcomer. Establishing these results in a very competitive niche market, in which even Porsche and Ferrari are considered to be cars for the common people, is definitely a feat that calls for a big thumbs up!

Photo of a Spyker C12 Zagato by Joosthug, some rights reserved.

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January 30, 2009

Renovate a bridge, win half a million euro

Filed under: Architecture,Automobiles by Branko Collin @ 10:56 am

Building bridges well is one thing, but how to maintain them? Rijkswaterstaat, the governmental entity concerned with building and maintaining roads and such, has offered a grand prize of 500,000 euro for the person coming up with the best scheme to renovate a bridge. Rijkswaterstaat isn’t satisfied with its own procedures. They especially don’t like the way their current methods hinder traffic.

According to the rules, anybody can participate, although if you read on you’ll discover that with anybody they mean anybody who is registered at a Dutch chamber of commerce. Another rule states that you must speak sufficient English and Dutch to be able to explain your plan. The ten best ideas will net their creators up to 100,000 euro to further develop their plans, and only one winner will get the grand prize of half a mil.

The deadline for the first round is April 10.

Link: Z24 (Dutch). Photo of the bridge to IJburg, Amsterdam by me.

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January 23, 2009

Bomb wreck jewellery exhibition in Groningen

Filed under: Art,Automobiles by Orangemaster @ 11:17 am
ring

The pieces of a bomb wreck in Baghdad that killed 38 people and that were collected and presented at the exhibition Autobomb III in September 2007 in Rotterdam have now been turned into jewellery, says Bright.nl. For this project artist Jonas Staal worked together with Jiska Hartog and Michiel Henneman, better known as Wanted Jewellery (see pics). The trio used glass and metal slivers from the bomb wreckage to produce a series of unique pieces of jewellery (more pics). The jewellery is on display in Groningen as of this evening.

And yes, the whole idea is not about producing jewellery out of people’s misery (the jewellery is not meant to be worn), but discussing the bombings and the idea of jewellery being used as a means of questioning social issues.

(Link: bright.nl, Photo: Hartog, Henneman and Staal)

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