Google street view in Australia

I love google maps.  I would be lost with out them so I was very happy to see that at last google has added street view for Australia! See if you can find your house.

The iPhone has killer apps

With the launch of the iPhone in Australia at midnight last night, tech crunch kindly deliver me a break down some of the apps available… Here are my favorite two so far:

Urbanspoon – Urbanspoon brings a fun solution to choosing a restaurant for dinner. Using the phone’s GPS to detect restaurants in the area, Urbanspoon presents you with a slot machine-like listing of cuisine types and price. To activate the slot machine, you give the phone a hard shake (the accelerometers inside the phone will measure the movement). The dials will spin around a few times, and you’ll be presented with a suggested restaurant (you can shake again if you’re not satisfied)… And the best part is this app is free.

Cocktails is a well designed reference for “potent potables” that will put traditional bar-tending guides to shame. Users can browse through a large index of drinks, search by ingredient or drink name, and label drinks as favorites for future reference. The app also includes information about the type of serving glass to use, as well as the date that each recipe was created (there are often multiple recipes available for each drink). Its not free but looks like a $9.99 well spent!

P2P Cash

Fosik, a peer-to-peer lending service, is currently beta-testing in the Australian market. When launched, it will take the principles of social networking into a loan marketplace. If you have money you can offer it online under particular interest and repayment conditions, and you can bid on loans you want to fund under certain conditions; likewise, if you need money, you can extend your options through the online community rather than a bank. It’s also seen as a way to formalise lending between people known to each other, family members or the like.

Fosik is currently positioning it’s peer to peer loaning at potentially undercutting traditional localised financial institutions such as the ANZ, NAB, ANZ or St George by an average of approximately 5% on interest conditions.