Update #2: It would seem as though the original “proposed Starbucks” is now a proposed Second Cup. Disappointing. I can’t remember the last time I’ve had particularly great service at a Second Cup. The proposed Moxies is also now missing from the updated site plan. Yangtse has been added in the new plan as well.

With a little googling I’ve discovered what other stores will be opening in the new retail plaza on the south-east side of Huntclub Rd. at Riverside Drive. According to a recent siteplan, we’ll see the following join T&T:

• Starbucks
• Moxie’s Classic Grill
• Harvey’s
• PC Cyber
• Noir Spa (now open)
• Dentist
• Andalos Shwarma
• a First Choice Haircutters
• and additional two proposed restaurants (or banks) – one of which I’ve heard rumblings may be a Royal Oak Heart and Crown. *this may have been superceded by Moxies.

This will certainly be a welcome addition to the neighbourhood for those working out of the nearby IBM/Cognos building and for those in the office buildings at Prince of Wales and Antares Drive. I for one can’t wait to be within biking distance of a massive asian grocery store, Starbucks, and PC Cyber (although I probably would have preferred a Canada Computers!).

Although some online forums have indicated T&T would be opening in October, the site plan/leasing package indicates late summer ’09.
You can download the site plan here from Brentcom.

Designed by Studio HiMom, the Heklucht pump was originally developed for an art project in Ypenburg, a newly built Dutch neighbourhood. With the goal of stimulating neighbourhood interaction, eight of the stainless-steel units—available in multiple colours—were placed in front of eight Ypenburg houses. The Heklucht won a Dutch Design Award back in 2006 in the category of public space products, and has since been installed also in Gent, Vienna and Leeds, Studio HiMom says.
via Springwise

The other cycling-related innovation I saw recently (also on Springwise) was a vending machine for bicycle parts, interactive maps, how-to videos, as well as free air. This one was sponsored by Trek, a bike manufacturer, but could easily be sponsored by Trek and a local bike shop perhaps near a cycling hub somewhere in the city.

“Motorists have it easy,” says Hammond. “Gas stations, convenience stores, auto parts stores, tow trucks—you name it. The support network for cars far outclasses cyclists. The Trek Stop aims to change that by breaking down some of the ‘worries’ attached to cycling.” While the Trek Stop is currently just in prototype form and slated to run for only another month or so, Seattle-based Aaron’s Bicycle Repair has actually had a similar vending machine in place since 2005. With items like inner tubes, flat repair items, energy bars and gel, the machine is located just outside Aaron’s for after-hours service.
via Springwise.

What do you think? I can think of a couple of times when I’ve been out cycling some of the paths in the city when I realized I could do with a little more air in my tires. I think a few well placed public pumps at some of the larger path hubs would be pretty handy.

You can read up on it at http://ottawa.taskforcereport.ca/blogs/threefunda/openaccess/.

What are your thoughts? I realize the importance of assigning a nominal fee to disseminate data so that city staff aren’t wasting their time fulfilling superfluous requests, but publishing some basic sets of data that can be used for publicly accessible tools and mashups would go a long way in  jumpstarting innovation around community tools and services. The potential value derived from the resulting tools would supercede the negigible costs associated with providing the data to begin with.  I’m getting too far ahead of myself, but perhaps even a documented CityAPI?

• RSS Feeds
  The News feed on the main page, as well as other sections should all be available in a subscribable syndication format. I don’t neccsarily want to check the city’s website everyday, but if its streamed in with my other feeds, I might see something I would not have otherwise noticed.
  
  
• iCal Syndication
  Provide iCal or XML data for any calendars or events such as waste disposal schedules, Council meeting schedules, Arts and recreational events (Swimming schedules, etc). People can then subscribe to these calendars directly from within their Calendar software, or to enable third parties to build interesting tools on top of them.
• Raw XML Data
  Provide raw XML data for things like Outdoor Skating rink locations, municipal offices, transit schedules, and recreational facilities. Geotag it. Allow people to consume the data and build things on top of this data. Scraping and cleansing the data from the website is painful and unnceesary when all the underlying data already exists.
• Podcasts
  Not everyone has time to watch City Council webcasts at their computer, but if you’re taking the bus in from Orléans, you might throw it on your iPod and watch on the way to work. Assuming the City (not Rogers) maintains the rights to these meetings, syndicate it to iTunes and let people watch it where and when they want.

As an example, and mostly because I wanted to find the closest outdoor skating rink to my house without going through a list of 230 locations and trying to figure out which ones sounded like they might be close – I scraped, geo-tagged, and mapped all of the City’s outdoor skating rink locations. I also tried to make the legend of what is on-site at each rink little easier to understand. At first glance, I had no clue what W, L,S,B was and thought I couldn’t be alone in this.  All told, it probably took me about an hour and a half to clean and geotag the data, and a couple more hours to drop it into Google Maps and determine the layout. The most paunful part though, was cleaning the data. If we had clean data like this from the City, they’d have a ton of great mashups.

Features I thought about adding might be the ability to upload photos of each rink, comments on the latest conditions,  etc. But for now, I wanted to get it out there so that other people don’t have to suffer through the pain of guessing which rink might be closest.

While the City seems to be moving in the right direction with their online consultation process, allowing people to comment directly on whitepapers is hardly revolutionary, it is a small step in the right direction.

Old: New:

I like the old one better, but I guess its not as close to the standard RSS icons.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/177470827/

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Collected Works on Wellington
Street decided this week to sell books at their listed U.S. prices,
said co-owner Chris Smith. He described the cut as a promotion that
will end Dec. 31.

“A lot of people have been appalled by the
spread between U.S. and Canadian prices,” Mr. Smith added. “The
industry has been quite slow in responding to changes in pricing.”

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