Minnesota Bridge Collapse

I received a link containing closeup pictures of the I-35W bridge collapse, courtesy of the Minnesota Society of Professional Engineers. Keeping the victims in our thoughts and prayers, we need to ask the question, "How can we prevent similar tragedies in the future ?". The transportation infrastructure in the US faces enormous challenges everyday. Of the 597,340 highway bridges in the US, a significant number, 73,784 (12.35%) are listed as structrually deficient. (Bureau of Transportation Statistics). I hope the powers-in-question pay some serious attention to this issue.

The future of Real Estate searches

I have come across two interesting websites, Trulia and Zillow in the last two weeks. Both websites have taken upon themselves the task of collecting, organizing, presenting and analyzing real estate data in the United States. Both seem to be at the startup phase and the end users will benefit from the competition. Trulia has been started by two MBA grads from Stanford and uses the Google Maps API to spatially display the results of searches. Zillow relies upon MSN Virtual Earth for the same. Both websites maintain blogs as well. I will be blogging about the good and bad of each in my future posts.

Check out the offical blogs at

www.zillowblog.com
www.truliablog.com