A9 -- You can now see shop fronts and street furniture on A9 when searching for merchants located in 10 US cities. You could do much the same thing with similar technology already paid for and in use by local governments in Ireland. I wonder if there's a way to convince the 26 GIS experts in local county councils to bring the same capability to bear with Irish maps. At A9.com, viewers see a “Block View,” which shows a street view of millions of businesses and their surroundings. They construct the view by using trucks equipped with digital cameras, global positioning system (GPS) receivers, and proprietary software and hardware, A9.com drove tens of thousands of miles capturing images and matching them with businesses and the way they look from the street.