Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 918

Welcome to 2019.

I am currently in transit and catching up on some internet reading and email on my way back to Toronto.

At this time of year it is, of course, common to reminisce (or lament) about what happened over the last year, as well prognosticate what may come.

Over the last few years, I have done a bit of that on the blog. But I clearly didn’t do that this year while in Brazil (and away from any semblance of a workspace).

So here’s what others have been writing and thinking about over the holidays:

- 2018’s tech trends and tribulations in 14 charts. Recode .  Link

- 2018 was the year of the YIMBY. CityLab . Link

- A cool girl’s guide to Toronto. Vogue . Link

- Amazon’s annual Christmas press release. Link

- Best travel posts of 2018. Design Milk . Link

- Here’s (Almost) Everything Wall Street Expects in 2019. Bloomberg . Link

- Here’s what to expect in cybersecurity in 2019. TechCrunch . Link

- Naive to hope Toronto can change in 2019? That means we have work to do. Shawn Micallef . Link  

- The 10 largest US venture rounds of 2019. TechCrunch . Link

- What is going to happen in 2019. Fred Wilson . Link

- Will a recession hit in 2019? Alan Murray . Link

- Year in search 2018. Google . Link

Starting in the late 1930s, New York City began hiring photographers to document each and every building in the city. It did this to improve the accuracy of its tax assessments, and so every photo was taken with a sign board indicating the building’s block and lot number. The photos looked like this (taken from here ):

The initiative produced over 700,000 black and white photos, all of which have been recently digitized according to the New York Times. The Times also recently published this interactive piece where they go back to these archival photos to see how the city has and hasn’t changed. 

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, documenting a city and its buildings was clearly a manual endeavor. Today we have Google Street View (launched in 2007), which has now photographed much of the world. Many countries, including all of North America, are reported as having “ mostly full coverage .”

But already autonomous vehicles (and their supporting services) are starting to scan and map our cities in new ways. So it will be interesting to see what ends up getting built on top of this data. I am certain it will empower much more than just better tax assessments.

Happy New Year, friends. Thanks for reading over the last year.

I have been using Google Translate a lot on this trip. Few people here in Rio de Janeiro speak English.

It is an incredible app that also works without cell service. You just download whatever language(s) you need to your phone.

There’s a conversation feature that allows you to go back and forth with someone in real time (almost). 

There’s a camera feature that is invaluable for translating restaurant menus.

And there are a number of smaller features that I have also found really useful. 

For example, if you rotate your phone into landscape mode, it will show you your translation in big text like a flash card.

It looks like this (trust me it is useful):

I also just learned that, since November 2016, the Translate app has been using a neural machine translation system developed by Google.

It is capable of understanding and translating complete sentences, and that has reduced translation errors by about 60% compared to the previous system.

Rather than translate word-by-word or phrase-by-phrase, Google’s NMT network encodes the “ semantics of sentences .”

To learn more about GNMT, click here .