Haven’t really seen the city before – it’s nice to go for a lakefront walk on a sunny day and then enjoy a stroll through the narrow alleys down town. Can’t believe how many shoe shops and jewellery stores there are. I guess it’s one of the more wealthier cities in Europe and I think I heard about Zürich being one of the best cities in terms of quality of life. Google chose the city for their European development headquater – or at least one of their many headquaters. Wonder where they have their office – I reckon it would be cool to have it on an artifical island in the lake, connected with a giant fibre network cable. Then they could have an underwater creativity room with glass windows, watching fish getting hooked and sparking ideas about how to increase the immersive experience for people using Google Maps and Google Earth. I still love the phrase „dive into the map“ – thought it is a great metaphor for the new kinds of digital earth applications or earth browsers or virtual globes or whatever else they are called these days. Yeah, dive into the map. So Google could have a giant water gate with a virtual world map in that underwater think tank and in one of their many creativity breaks, the engineers that form our future could zoom the map to their favourite place and dive right in… Hmm. – it would work great as long as their favourite place was the peer to their office – if it wasn’t… hmm probably another few years to go for the Google Labs thing until they figure out how to teleport you – until then, a virtual cave like thing – holodeck you may call it – will have to do the trick. I will need to keep working on my dive into the map metaphor. It’s far from perfect and even farther from working. Wonder if the city of Zürich would let them set up an island – imagine they possibly would since they plan all sorts of crazy things in Switzerland now, like that hotel on the Jungfraujoch. I’m getting worried…