There are many things I've learnt through staying in hotels in Berlin. Firstly and most importantly, I miss my family terribly. Secondly, whenever you see a hotel described as boutique it seems to mean interesting interior design that you might like to see in a magazine but which you probably wouldn't want to live with and bathrooms where the key feature seems to be that they don't need walls and you can literally roll out of your bed and straight into the shower; literally and hopefully not by accident. Thirdly, I never seem to tire of the sight of Berlin's Fernsehturm or TV Tower.

After a year's break, I'm back at O'Reilly's Where 2.0 conference, now rebranded as simply the Where Conference. This year, the conference has slipped north from its Valley roots and taken up residence in the Marriott Marquis hotel in the heart of downtown San Francisco. The view from the window of my room on the hotel's 25th. floor is simply ...

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... geographically stunning.

More on Where, plus a write up of my session's talk in a later post.

This is the ninth "through the window" type of post I've written and is definitely the last for the year. It's the view of Atlanta's Midtown skyline, from the Palomar Kimpton hotel, late at night, after everyone's gone home and just the buildings and lights remain. There's something completely compelling to me about these night time scenes; maybe it's because you just don't tend to see views like this in and around London.

But this isn't the main reason for this post. This post is about hotel bath robes. You know the sort of thing, a generally white, toweling affair that nice hotels provide for you, together with a helpful notice that a large sum of money will be added to your hotel bill should you feel compelled to take the robe home with you. The Palomar, which is a nice boutique sort of hotel, has these bath robes. But in no way can they be classified as white or in any way ordinary. Oh no ...

.. there's also a tiger skin effect number hanging up in the wardrobe in case fake zebra skin isn't your style. You'll hopefully be relieved to hear that I just couldn't bring myself to put either of them on.

By my reckoning, this is the eighth "through the window" post I've written. Mostly the view through the window is the same, day in, day out, but sometimes it gets interesting. Like this night-time view of Chicago's Magnificent Mile.

Taken from the window of my room on the 17th. floor of Chicago's Intercontinental Hotel, this is high rise, downtown America at its best. America is always a culture clash to me and no more so than my room in the Historic Tower of the Intercontinental. This wing of the hotel is a 42 story rework of the Medinah Athletic Club, built in 1929 just before the Stock Market crash later that year. When the building was converted into a hotel, most of the original floor plans had been lost, resulting in over 175 different room layouts and sizes over the 42 floors of the building.

Of course, a building built in 1929 wouldn't really class as historic by European standards, but walking through the hotel is like stepping back in time and given the building's checkered history, I think for once the "historic" appellation is well and truly merited.

Photo Credits: Gary Gale on Flickr.

At the weekend myself and the rest of the Ovi Places team found ourselves re-geolocated from the Nokia office in Invalidenstraße in the Mitte district of Berlin to a new office in Schönhauser Allee in the Prenzlauer Berg district. While the office coffee hasn't improved, the view from my desk certainly has.

From left to right the view takes in the Fernsehturm, (East) Berlin's TV tower, Schönhauser Allee, looking towards Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz U-Bahn station on the U2 line and the dome of the Berlin Cathedral, better known as the Berliner Dom. I could get used to this view.

And in a change from my normal bloggage, I'm forsaking the usual posts about matters geo, location and maps and briefly returning to my occasional "through the window" series of posts.

I'm back in Berlin at the Radisson Blu hotel in the Mitte district. It's not every day you get to look through your hotel room window and see 900,000 litres of sea water and around 2600 fish swimming around, 6 floors up, without a care in the world.

The Berlin Aquadom even has its own team of cleaners, who clean the tank the hard way, from the inside, whilst wearing a wetsuit and SCUBA gear.

Normal geo related bloggage will return in the next post.

... and I'm here in the capital and largest city of the Netherlands for the first Location Business Summit with Walter Andrag and Bob Upham from Yahoo! Geo Technologies and Anil Patel and Chris Heilmann from YDN, the Yahoo! Developer Network. Another city, another hotel so this would be a good time for the obligatory through the window shot.

I'll be giving a talk on Hyperlocal or Hype (and Local)? later on this morning and will also be on a panel tomorrow morning, discussing how to try and monetize the growing geospatial web. This is the first Location Business Summit, so here's hoping it'll be geotastic.

Photo Credits: Foxgrrl and Kaptain Kobold on Flickr.

The week before last I was in downtown San Jose for the annual geofest that is O'Reilly's Where 2.0 conference and the view from the hotel window wasn't that dramatic by any stretch of the imagination.

Last week I was on holiday in Turkey and the view from the window of the Xanadu Resort Hotel was pretty damn spectacular, both in the evening ...

... and in the first light of the day.

The view from the window has changed again. Last week I was deep in the Silicon Valley suburbia staying with good friends in Campbell, where the sunrises were gorgeous.

This week I'm deep in the heart of the city nicknamed The Capital of Silicon Valley, San Jose. The view from the window isn't nearly as appealing but it shows that the annual Geo industry extravaganza that is Where 2.0 is only a few days away.

The view from my window has changed a lot of recent. Through my office window there's been St. Giles and Covent Garden in the snow ...

... and Hanger One on Moffett Field, one of the world's largest free-standing structures.

Through my hotel window I've seen the Chrysler Building in New York at sunrise ...

...  and Silicon Valley on a cold, foggy and damp morning ...

But of all the view I've seen through my window, I think I prefer this one most of all, because it's home.