A little more than a year ago, ESRI’s Bill Davenhall delivered a thought-provoking talk at TEDMED about the importance of including a “place history”—a record of the places where a person has lived (and the nearby environmental risks)—as part of that person’s medical history. (Watch a video of Davenhall’s talk here.)

ESRI, based in Redlands, CA, is the world’s largest developer of geographic information system (GIS) software, and at its annual conference in July, ESRI unveiled its first GIS mobile mapping app for the iPhone and iPad, which is free. ESRI also highlighted related “crowdsourcing” initiatives that extend its mapping technology beyond its usual Windows-based market.

Last week, ESRI added a new app to the Apple iStore and to its Web-based offerings that begins to fulfill the vision that Davenhall outlined at the 2009 TEDMED conference in San Diego. (ESRI used its proprietary ArcGIS technology to develop the mapping API for mobile devices running Apple’s operating system.)

The app, which also is available on ESRI’s website, is pretty simple to use. You can enter the address, zip code, or even just a city name for every place you’ve lived, and the system responds with information about public health and environmental hazards for each location. The app draws upon publicly available data concerning the incidence of heart attacks (per 100,000 Medicare enrollees) from the Dartmouth Atlas Project, and lists of chemicals within three miles, according to data drawn from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Toxics Release Inventory and the National Institutes of Health’s known chemical database. ESRI spokesman Bob Ruschman says, “Future versions will include additional databases for water quality, lead contamination, cancer, mortality, and poverty.”

Bill Davenhall

As ESRI’s global marketing manager for health and human services, Davenhall contends that a patient’s place history is just as important in assessing human health risks as genetics and lifestyle. In a medical evaluation, Davenhall says physicians will ask a lot of questions about a patient’s medical history: Any allergies? Taking any medications? How about illicit drugs? Drink alcohol? Smoke tobacco? Any previous hospitalizations? Davenhall says doctors never … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

[Corrected 7/19/10, 1:05 pm. See below.] Some 13,000 developers of geographic information systems (GIS) gathered at the San Diego Convention Center last week as ESRI, the Redlands, CA-based GIS software developer, moved to address the market for mobile and other users. We’ve got that and the rest of our BizTech News all mapped out for you.

—Verenium (NASDAQ: VRNM), the Cambridge, MA-based company formed in the 2006 merger of San Diego-based Diversa and Cambridge-based Celunol, decided to sell its cellulosic biofuels business for $98.3 million to BP. The global energy giant at the center of the oil spill crisis in the Gulf of Mexico gets Verenium’s San Diego-based R&D sites, as well as its demonstration-scale facility and pilot plant in Jennings, LA.

—J. Craig Venter, the human genome pioneer and founding CEO of San Diego’s Synthetic Genomics, said the algal biofuels company is growing its algae in saltwater at its new greenhouse near the company’s La Jolla headquarters. In remarks that might have been aimed at the corn ethanol industry, Venter said his algae biofuels company should not be diverting resources from agriculture. “Fuel cannot compete with agriculture if this is going to be successful,” he said.

—Japan’s Sony Corp. named one of its European executives, Phil Molyneux, as the new president and chief operating officer of Sony Electronics in San Diego, the North American headquarters for the company’s consumer electronics business. Sony Electronics’ current president and COO, Stan Glasgow, is moving to a newly created position—senior advisor of  entrepreneurship and innovation—at Sony Corp. of America.

—[Corrected to refer to open-API software, instead of open-source software.] Free and open-API software was a prevailing theme last week at the 2010 ESRI International User Conference. ESRI, the private developer of geographic information systems based in Redlands, CA, demonstrated some of the map-making tools available at its recently launched … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

In the plenary session that kicked off the ESRI International User Conference this week in downtown San Diego, ESRI founder and president Jack Dangermond demonstrated the features of ArcGIS.com, a free website the company recently launched that allows ordinary folks to create their own maps.

Dangermond also highlighted a free mobile app that the private, Redlands, CA-based company created for the iPhone and iPad, as well as various community “crowdsourcing” initiatives that are making use of other free resources to create “intelligent” maps of city parks. With its new ArcGIS for Apple iOS and the new website, which can be accessed using Safari and Firefox, ESRI has now extended its mapping technology well beyond its traditional Windows-based market. ESRI’s David Cardella tells me they also are working on an Android app, and just started work on an app for Windows 7 Mobile.

ESRI conference displays

“Our initiatives here are to access services and to bring community resources back to the user,” Dangermond told the audience.

Even while ESRI released the tenth version of its proprietary ArcGIS program, a prominent theme of the conference this week was the democratization of its geographic information systems (GIS) technology. Since 1969, when Dangermond founded the business initially known as Environmental Systems Research Institute, the technology has evolved from proprietary systems that customers purchased and loaded onto their own computers into technology that’s also now available in free and open-source forms, like so much else on the Internet.

At ArcGIS.com, anyone can use the free online resources to create a map, starting with a base map (topographic, aerial view, street view, etc.) and adding layers of information (crime incident reports, real estate valuations, public transit routes, and other data). The result could be a map for a neighborhood watch group that shows crime hotspots along local bus routes or a realtor’s list of mountain homes adjacent to a ski area.

Much like an online wiki, the maps created on the ArcGIS.com website also can be … Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

At the U.S. Census Bureau, where the World POPClock is ticking, the total population of the world (as of July 10) is estimated at 6.85 billion. But what does that mean, really?

Today, our understanding of what that means comes from the sort of knowledge that only information technology delivers. Now just about anyone with Internet access can zoom in to a satellite-based map of their city, neighborhood, and even their home. Today, with 13,000 people from 110 countries in San Diego set to attend the 2010 ESRI International User Conference, that knowledge is accelerating through advances in geographic information systems (GIS), the mapping technology that integrates hardware, software, and data for specific places—and has the capability of displaying it in layers of information.

As an example of how GIS technology has advanced just from last year’s conference, a free GIS application for the Apple iPhone and iPad released on July 5 had more than 13,000 downloads from the Apple Store by the end of the week, according to ESRI product manager David Cardella. The “ArcGIS for iOS,” which can be found here, is a GIS field-mapping tool for viewing and accessing U.S. topographical maps published by National Geographic, as well as aerial, road and hybrid street maps, custom fire maps, geological maps, land use maps, and others, according to Cardella. The app even enables users to create maps using authoring tools from ArcGIS.com (the portal to its online GIS system). Cardella says developers can download a beta version from ESRI’s iOS Resource Center .

ESRI is the Redlands, CA-based developer of GIS modeling and mapping software and technology, and to Richard Saul Wurman, this year’s conference represents an opportunity for people with different interests to come together and focus on the map as a means for explaining themselves.

Wurman, the peripatetic author (he’s written 82 books on topics ranging from football to healthcare) and TED conference founder, is scheduled to give a keynote talk this afternoon to announce something he calls the “19.20.21 project.” As Wurman explained it to me, it is a five-year, multi-media project to use GIS technology to create databases on the 19 cities of the world that each have 20 million people in the 21st Century. Wurman says he’s working on the project in partnership with Jon Kamen, the chairman and CEO of @Radical.media and Jack Dangermond, founding president of the Environmental Systems Research Institute, now known as ESRI.

“In 1800 [when the total population of the world was just 1 billion], less than 3 percent of the world lived in cities,” Wurman told me. “Today, more than half the population of the world lives … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

TEDMED had Martha, Goldie, and other celebrity speakers, but San Diego-based Amylin Pharmaceuticals broke this week’s big news when it signed up a big Japanese partner to develop its line of obesity drugs. It’s all part of your regular dose of San Diego biotech news, and it’s ready now:

—Amylin Pharmaceuticals, the San Diego-based diabetes drug specialist, announced that it has formed a partnership with Japan’s Takeda Pharmaceuticals, which agreed to carry most of the development costs for Amylin’s weight-loss drugs. In return, Takeda gets a worldwide exclusive license to eventually commercialize Amylin’s experimental obesity drugs, including the combination of pramlintide and metreleptin, and davalintide.

—After a five-year hiatus, TEDMED founder Richard Saul Wurman, and president, Marc Hodosh (who also is an Xconomist), brought the conference on medical technology, entertainment and design to San Diego’s Hotel del Coronado. TEDMED announced during the conference, which included presentations by Boston Scientific co-founder (and Xconomist) John Abele, Martha Stewart, and Goldie Hawn, that the conference will return to the same location next October.

—I only had time to attend a fraction of the presentations at TEDMED last week. One of my favorites talks, though, was delivered by Bill Davenhall, who leads the health and human services marketing team at ESRI, the Redlands, CA, giant in geographic information systems. Davenhall talked about the importance of including patients’ “place histories” as part of their medical records and raised an interesting question: Will the electronic health record systems being created today have the capability to add data in new categories—such as “geo-medicine”–that aren’t typically included in today’s patient records?

—New York-based Xenomics filed a lawsuit against San Diego-based Sequenom that alleges Sequenom misrepresented the progress in its development of a prenatal test for Downs syndrome. Xenomix says it would not have licensed its patents to Sequenom had it known the truth.

—Denise profiled San Diego-based Sirigen, an early stage medical diagnostic company that is developing technology that uses light-emitting polymers to detect bits of DNA. Sirigen founder Brent Gaylord developed the technology at UC Santa Barbara, extending the significance of UCSB physicist and Nobel laureate Alan Heeger’s discovery of conductive polymers.

—The FDA told San Diego-based Amylin Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: AMLN) and its partner Eli Lilly the companies can now market exenatide (Byetta) as a frontline, standalone therapy for diabetes. The drug was previously approved for use with other drugs, or as a fallback option when other tretments failed.

—Vertex (NASDAQ: VRTX), the Cambridge, MA, biotech with operations in San Diego, said the latest trial of its telaprevir treatment for hepatitis C was able to attain the clinical definition of a cure in more than 80 percent of patients who got the drug. The finding is part of the mounting evidence Vertex is gathering on its quest to develop the first-of-its-kind protease inhibitor for the chronic liver disease.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

It may be that TEDMED founder Richard Saul Wurman is the Brett Favre of emcees, or perhaps he’s like Al Pacino in Godfather III, who proclaims in exasperation, “Just when I thought I was out—they pull me back in!”

But after a five-year hiatus, TEDMED has returned this week (opening last night at San Diego’s Hotel del Coronado), and Wurman, who is both the TEDMED chairman emeritus and lead master of ceremonies, stepped back onstage for what must be a familiar role. He is the folksy glue that brings the sometimes-esoteric show back to Earth as leading thinkers in medicine, health care, and life sciences deliver 15- to 20-minute talks about their work and big ideas.

So, for example, after J. Craig Venter, a leader in genomic sequencing and synthetic biology, ended his presentation last night, Wurman took the stage and reassured the crowd by saying, “I’ve heard Craig speak a number of times. And I don’t understand it all…”

The four-day TEDMED symposium, which costs $4,000 per person to attend (and is sold out), follows a format similar to the first conference in Technology, Entertainment, and Design (TED) that Wurman established in 1984. Chris Anderson acquired rights to that TED business in 2001 and Boston entrepreneur (and Xconomist) Marc Hodosh got rights earlier this year to TEDMED and its focus on health care. Wurman told us he had agreed to help Hodosh out this year, and between sessions he often helped the audience by identifying themes they would likely see emerging in presentations to come.

“Maps are also patterns, and patterns are the threads that run through this conference,” Wurman said. “They are the constructive tissue that holds ideas together.” Those emerging ideas include:

—J. Craig Venter, the co-founder and CEO of San Diego-based Synthetic Genomics, said about 21 million genes have been discovered since the first genome was sequenced in 1995—“and over 20 million have been taken from the deck of my sailboat.” (Venter’s sailboat, the Sorcerer II, embarked from San Diego in March on an expedition to collect and sequence marine organisms.) Venter also outlined synthetic biology research that aims to transplant a chromosome from one cell into another cell—and turn it into a different species. Venter says, “I think it’s possible we’ll have the first species powered by a synthetic chromosome by the end of this year, although that’s something I’ve been saying now for two years.”

—Anthony Atala, a urologist and director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, showed how researchers are using “smart biomaterials” to patch damaged organs and grow new heart valves, blood vessels, liver, muscle, skin, ears, and even fingers. Still, Atala said, “90 percent of patients on transplantation waiting lists are waiting for kidneys.” He also noted that the organs with lots of blood vessels—the heart, liver, and kidney—are the hardest to grow.

—Bill Davenhall, who leads the health and human services marketing team at ESRI, the Redlands, CA, company that specializes in geographic information systems, argued for the creation of new programs and training in “geo-medicine”—and for ensuring that GIS data can be included in electronic health records. He demonstrated his point with a map that shows geographical areas in mid-Atlantic and Midwestern states where heart attacks occur far more frequently than other parts of the country. Davenhall, who said he suffered a heart attack in 2001, associates environmental factors in the places where he has lived with the higher incidence rate. He grew up with high levels of sulfur dioxide in Scranton, PA, before moving to Louisville, KY, with high levels of chloropene and benzene. He now lives east of Los Angeles in Redlands, CA, which has high levels of airborne particulates, carbon dioxide, and ozone. He told the audience, “Doctors never ask me about my place history. But if I wanted to have a heart attack, I’ve lived in the right places.”

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

The biggest news by far last week was ExxonMobil’s decision to invest $600 million in biofuels, with half of that going to San Diego’s Synthetic Genomics. A number of companies also launched new technology iniatives. To find out what’s happening, just keep reading.

—ExxonMobil, the world’s largest oil company, said last week it plans to invest $600 million to develop algae-based biofuels, with least $300 million going to fund fundamental work at Synthetic Genomics, the startup co-founded by J. Craig Venter, the human genome pioneer. Venter said Synthetic Genomics plans to begin construction soon on a research and test facility in San Diego. Venter’s wife, Synthetic Genomics spokeswoman Heather Kowalski, told me the ExxonMobil deal won’t affect the startup’s joint venture with BP, where the initial focus has been on coal. Kowalski also said that BP is an equity investor in Synthetic Genomics, but ExxonMobil is not.

—Covario, the San Diego-based software analytics startup, said it has developed a new software-as-a-service program that automates the process of analyzing Web traffic on a customer’s corporate website. Covario says its “D3″ product for search engine optimization replaces the time-consuming work often performed by Web marketing agencies.

—San Diego wireless giant Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) said it is “reviewing its options” for LifeComm, its virtual mobile network focused on healthcare services. Qualcomm said LifeComm has been unable to raise enough capital from third parties to fully develop its initial launch product. Mobihealthnews, a Boston website focused on the wireless healthcare industry, said Qualcom has decided to pull the plug on LifeComm.

—Aculon, a San Diego startup specializing in nanocoatings for use in a variety of industries, said its proprietary technology replaces hexavalent chromium in paint primers applied to stainless steel, titanium, aluminum, and other metal surfaces. Hexavalent chromium is a toxic, cancer-causing heavy metal used to make anti-corrosion coatings. Aculon CEO Ed Hughes told me Aculon’s technology forms a coating that is just one molecule thick, or 2 to 4 nanometers.

—San Diego’s TelCentris said it is upgrading its VoxOx universal communicator service to include an automated “personal assistant” that can answer your phone calls and route them according to your preferences. A VoxOx user can combine his or her existing phone number with their e-mail service provider, instant messaging service, and social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter.

—Simon Thompson, ESRI’s director of commercial marketing, mapped out some of the innovative trends in Geographic Information Systems, or GIS, when we met amid the hubbub of the 2009 ESRI International User Conference in downtown San Diego. Thompson said one trend stems from creating GIS mapping “masks,” or layers of mapped information, so you can change the underlying data set on your iPhone app from a map of gas stations to a map of restaurants or schools. Another key trend he discussed involves the convergence of GIS mapping technologies with software analytics.

—Quasar Geophysical Technologies of San Diego has developed a new type of electromagnetic sensor that is sensitive enough to detect tiny electrical currents flowing through subsea rock—and variations in the conductivity among different types of geological formations. The company says its technology is sensitive enough to help the oil and gas exploration industry increase its chances of discovering offshore oil and gas deposits. Quasar has designed its sensors to be deployed on the ocean bottom, as deep as 2.5 miles below the surface, for weeks at a time.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

As the unemployment rate climbed to 11.5 percent statewide in California, and 9.4 percent in San Diego County, two local industry groups announced major initiatives to encourage and support innovation in the region. Read up on that and the rest of San Diego’s business and technology news:

—San Diego’s software industry, which already hosts a cluster of developers that specialize in predictive analytics, is organizing a business networking group for geographic information systems, or GIS. Organizer Yash Talreja says a combination of mapping, GPS, and Internet technologies are making GIS a hot sector. Next month, some 14,000 people are expected to attend the conference held each year in San Diego by Redlands, CA-based ESRI, a leader in GIS mapping and modeling technology.

—With the recession opening a void in local startup activity, San Diego’s wireless industry is creating a non-profit incubator to provide free office space and business support for up to two years to communications-based startups. Rory Moore, who heads the industry group CommNexus, says the new EvoNexus incubator is intended to help a new generation of companies get started.

—San Diego DivX (NASDAQ: DIVX) CEO Kevin Hell says managing the video codec developer depends on anticipating the next step in the evolution of consumer media. That means enabling any online content to play on any device, according to the DivX boss. He views “video freedom” as being able to seamlessly move a video among a computer, TV, and wireless mobile device.

—The former chairman and CEO of San Diego Gas & Electric gave an endorsement of sorts to EcoDog, a Vista, CA-based startup, by allowing the company to announce that he is the first angel investor in an early stage round that aims to raise $5.6 million. EcoDog founder Ron Pitt told me he has developed a device that encourages conservation by helping homeowners monitor their electricity.

—San Diego’s Accelrys (NASDAQ: ACCL), which specializes in scientific software used in computation, simulation, and the management and mining of scientific data, named former Interwoven president Scipio “Max” Carnecchia as CEO. The company later said Carnecchia will be entitled to purchase up to 800,000 shares of the Accelrys common stock at an exercise price per share equal to $5.38. Carnecchia, also is joining the board.

—The era of employee ownership came to an end Friday at San Diego defense contractor SAIC, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune. When nuclear physicist (and San Diego Xconomist) J. Robert Beyster founded SAIC 40 years ago to provide high-technology research and engineering services, he viewed employee ownership as crucial to the startup’s entrepreneurial culture. The defense conglomerate has become a more conventional public company since Beyster left the company in 2004. He wrote in his blog that the battle to preserve employee control at SAIC was lost years ago.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Yash Talreja says most people don’t know that cell phones were around for 30 years before they became affordable, useful, and prevalent devices for ordinary consumers. Now he says the same thing is happening with geographic information systems, or GIS. “For 30 years, it was a very specialized area,” Talreja says. “It was used by the very few.”

Nowadays, however, a confluence of forces is making GIS technology far more powerful, appealing, and pervasive—and San Diego’s resident expertise in software development and related technologies is putting the city near the center of the GIS development map. As a result, the San Diego Software Industry Council is organizing a GIS interest group to focus on various aspects of geospatial information processing, including geo-coding, location-based services, analysis, and visualization. Talreja, who is the group’s designated chair, says the combination of mapping technology, precise global positioning satellite technology, and the Internet with its search engine capabilities has made GIS one of the industry’s hottest sectors in the past two or three years.

Finding something on Google Maps is one thing, Talreja says. But the problem becomes more interesting when you get hungry while driving around, and the map interface on your phone or GPS device identifies and locates five restaurants within a six-block radius. Talreja says the spread of such location-based services means “The time will soon come when you’re gas tank indicator light comes up, and the map shows you where the nearest gas station is located.”

“There is a massive amount of data lying around that is related to a spot on the map, (environmental, traffic, health),” Bob Slapin, executive director of the software industry council, tells me by e-mail. “This data is often in different silos and in most cases making sense of it requires running around, finding it and mapping it somehow. The data is often structured and unstructured,” meaning software with a certain versatility is required to process it.

Slapin says he’s involved with EcoLayers, a San Diego GIS company developing interesting applications for watershed management. “This may sound boring but there is a realization that the control of water quality has a significant impact on the available water resources. Present management of this data is a nightmare.”

While San Diego’s software industry has about 10 active special interest groups (Slapin says, “we call them BIGS, Business Interest Groups”), there seems to be a special regional strength in geospatial systems. “We noticed … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Marlborough, MA-based Netezza (NYSE: NZ) will today unveil a feature for which users of its data warehouse appliances have long been clamoring: location.

The firm raised more than $100 million in a July 2007 IPO, based largely on the perceived strength of its appliances, which are designed to speed up the complex queries that business managers often need to run against their historical business data. Traditional data warehouses are sundry contraptions, consisting of storage hardware from the likes of EMC or Hitachi, servers from IBM, Sun, HP, or Teradata, and database software from Oracle, IBM, or Microsoft. But Netezza combines all of these elements into one box. And using a combination of technical tricks—such as running queries in parallel against hundreds of segments of a database, and filtering and pre-analyzing data using processors placed directly on storage disks rather than moving it all to main memory first—its devices can complete many types of business-intelligence (BI) queries 10 to 100 times as fast as competitors’ systems.

But until this week, there was one type of data that Netezza’s appliances couldn’t handle at all: spatial information such as latitudes and longitudes. That was a key shortcoming, since more and more business decisions have a location-based component. Cellular providers, for example, need to know where customers have the most trouble with dropped calls before they can decide where to build new cell towers. But for the most part, solving the geospatial parts of such riddles has fallen to specialized geographic information systems (GIS), which evolved separately from most other business software and are set apart by very different ways of storing data—using formats that Netezza’s database couldn’t even read.

So Netezza was, in effect, ceding the spatial information management business—which is expected to generate $5.1 billion in IT revenues per year by 2012, according to research firm IDC—to Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and other competitors whose database programs offer support for geospatial data types. But at a user conference in Orlando, FL, today, Netezza will announce a software extension that allows its data warehouse appliances not only to handle location-based information, but to do it at the same accelerated rate that they can execute standard business queries.

It’s a feature that Netezza customers have been requesting for years, according to Jonathan Shepherd, the company’s general manager of location based solutions. “What we saw was that in insurance, financial services, telecommunications, retail, online, advertising, and government, customers were primarily using Oracle, which has the largest share of the spatial data market. And they were saying ‘If you could do in our spatial data warehouse what you’ve done in our BI warehouse, we’d be thrilled.’ So we saw an opportunity to merge the two.”

But following through on that opportunity required some help from another local startup, Boston-based Intelligent Integration Systems, Inc., or IISi. A year ago, says Shepherd, Netezza launched a program giving outside software developers the technical details they needed to write applications that would run inside the massively parallel architecture of Netezza’s appliances. IISi was one of the companies that took up this challenge, creating a geospatial toolkit that allowed Netezza’s built-in database to handle data encoded using specifications from the Open Geospatial Consortium, the leading standards body in the GIS field. “We saw IISi’s effort as being applicable across our customer base, so we acquired the technology from them,” says Shepherd.

That’s what the company is unveiling today, under the name Netezza Spatial. It’s also working with other vendors, such as PitneyBowes’ MapInfo location intelligence division and spatial data conversion specialist Safe Software, to make sure that the new technology works with existing BI and GIS software.

Already, at least one Netezza customer is using the spatial extension: New York-based Guy Carpenter, which helps insurance companies balance risks and obtain reinsurance. The company must frequently answer questions such as how many of a client’s subscribers live within a given floodplain or earthquake zone or are likely to suffer storm damage in an approaching hurricane. “Providing real-time, predictive data to our insurance customers is critical when it comes to natural disasters,” Shajy Mathai, a Guy Carpenter managing director, said in a statement. “The combined solution of Netezza, MapInfo and Safe Software provides us the critical tool we need to ensure our customers are getting the most up-to-date information.”

Shepherd couldn’t say exactly how much faster Guy Carpenter can run geospatial queries now that it’s using Netezza’s appliances. “What we’re comfortable saying is that we’re seeing the same order-of-magnitude improvement—meaning 10 to 100 times faster than our customers’ legacy systems,” he says. “We’ll have more case studies as we announce more customers. But the issue Netezza is seeing is that our 200-plus [existing] customers want to capture this data, but it has not been easy to query and derive meaningful analytics. That was really the motivation for us to acquire this technology and make it available.”

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

One of my goals with this column—which is now in its third week—is to tell you about new stuff on the Web that’s so delicious you just have to taste it. Here are three morsels to tide you over until next time.

The first is a quick appetizer: Very Short List, an e-mail newsletter funded by IAC/Interactive Corp. VSL has been around since mid-2006, but I just discovered a couple of weeks ago. If you sign up, every day they’ll send you one—exactly one—nugget of entertainment or media content that, in the site’s words, hasn’t already been hyped to within an inch of its life. So far, every item I’ve received has been intriguing at least (an amazing TV ad for a soccer video game), and often utterly engrossing (an online museum of online museums).

For the main course: I suggest Google Earth 4.3. This week Google rolled out the latest version of its free geographic browser for Windows and Mac, which lets you tour a 3-D simulation of the entire planet built on the company’s database of real satellite and aerial photographs.

Like its competitors, Microsoft Virtual Earth and NASA’s Worldwind, Google Earth started out as a digital atlas, showing huge amounts of classical map and photographic data that was itself 2-D but happened to be draped over a spherical globe, which mainly made it easier to shift between top-down views of different locations. As the product has evolved, however, the sphere forming the scaffolding for the map data has gained realistic 3-D topography, followed by other real-world touches such as 3-D buildings and even clouds based on real-time reports from the National Weather Service. In other words, it’s gradually becoming what Yale computer scientist David Gelernter first termed a “mirror world”—a software model that tries to recreate the human environment as accurately as possible.

The latest version provides improvements in both content and navigation that nudge it even farther in this direction—which is a blessing for people like me who are intrigued by virtual worlds and all the possibilities they offer for new kinds of learning and interaction (though it should be noted that some traditional map mavens like Stefan Geens, the author of the Ogle Earth blog, feel that the profusion of cosmetic improvements in Google Earth is diminishing its information value as an atlas).

The most visible addition to Google Earth 4.3 is an expanded crop of 3-D buildings for dozens of cities around the world, along with extremely realistic textures or “skins” for those buildings. In past versions of Google Earth, most 3-D buildings were represented by gray boxes of the appropriate shape and height. In 4.3, most of the 3-D models, including hundreds of Boston buildings, are now clothed with photographs of the actual structures. (Don’t ask me how Google pulled this off: The process of creating photorealistic 3-D models of buildings was, until recently, a tedious one tackled mainly by enthusiastic amateurs, who used Google’s SketchUp 3-D modeling program and uploaded their finished models to Google’s open-source 3-D Warehouse. Clearly Google has found a way to automate the whole process.)

The program’s 3-D buildings are now so detailed that it’s possible to “fly” to a given location in the Google Earth landscape and get a view that’s astonishingly close to actually being there. To see what I mean, compare the two images here: one is a photograph I took yesterday from the roof of the building in Cambridge, MA, where Xconomy is headquartered. The other is a screenshot from Google Earth with the imaginary “camera” positioned in roughly the same spot.

When comparing these two images, keep in mind what makes the Google Earth version so remarkable: It’s entirely synthetic. No one from Google went out and took a picture from that perspective (although Google’s vast collection of Street View photographs is now integrated into Google Earth—but that’s a different story). Rather, it’s a reconstructed view based entirely on 3-D modeling, pasted-on photographic skins, Google’s map data, and some very sophisticated computer graphics algorithms.

Google Earth 4.3 contains a ton of other great improvements, but I’ll just mention two more. One is the sun. Now you can turn on a feature that puts a simulated sun into the proper spot in the simulated sky and lets you adjust the time of day with a slider, generating realistic shadows on buildings and landforms. Finally, the Google Earth team has completely revamped the program’s navigation controls to make panning, zooming, tilting, and otherwise moving around inside the 3-D environment much more intuitive—which is to say, much more like a videogame or a Second Life-style virtual world. If you’re a longtime user of Google Earth, the new controls might take some getting used to, but ultimately you’ll appreciate the added flexibility. Meanwhile, if you’ve never downloaded Google Earth before, there’s never been a better time to start exploring.

And now for dessert: Go check out MyLOC, the newest online resource from the Library of Congress. Launched April 12, the site is a history buff’s dream, containing a digital collection of historic books, maps, and other resources from the Library’s vast archives. The site—the online counterpart of an exhibit at the Library’s Jefferson Building in Washington, D.C.—provides some clever Flash and Microsoft Silverlight multimedia tools for browsing individual books, including a Gutenberg Bible and several volumes from Thomas Jefferson’s personal library. Bon appetit.

You can subscribe to World Wide Wade via RSS or e-mail.

Comments | Reprints | Share: