I awoke at 5 am this morning to scramble to pull together my list of clothes for my trip to Las Vegas for the PTC partner coference. At about 2 am I had watched David Ortiz hit a two run homer in the bottom of the twelth to finally beat the Yankees in a playoff game this year. I never saw the actual ball because I was watching the game while drifting in and out of sleep over the Internet.

Since I freeload television and there is no reception for television in Brookline I am a second class citizen when it comes to watching baseball. Normally I watch on GameDay, which shows where the pitches went and no real people. Luckily Fox buried a camera somewhere between the pitcher and the batter and they provide a free stream of it on the Internet. It comes with the sound of the game and is eerily commercial free. That's because in the commercial breaks you see the catcher taking warmuip pitches and hear the ambient ballpark noise.

I called a taxi to take me to the airport and being at a dead hour of the night it reminded me of the many times I have looked for but couldn't find a cab. I thought of two new applications of GPS. The first would be a tool to find cabs near you that are unoccupied and looking for fares. By reading you GPS the system focuses around you. The taxis have GPS built-in and radio their positions to the dispatcher computers. The phone uses a web request to send the current phone gps and receive a map of cabs in the area including direction of motion. Then boom I get to an empty cab in no time.

Another neat application is inspired by the videogame Taxi Driver. It has great background music by Offspring but that is irrelevant. In the game you can see what people want from your taxi before you pick them up. So why not have a beacon for people to turn on with their phone/pda that announces that they need a taxi and where they are going. That way if they are a good fare they will get picked-up quickly.

I like the idea of people using information technology to become more insect-like, using silent communication tools to inform each other of wants and needs to maximize efficiency and operate in a buzzing hive. The japanese are way ahead of us in this regard. They create inventions like lights to inform other people that you are attracted to them and have made better giant insect movies than we have.

Long live Mothra!