If you’re in the Faneuil Hall area of Boston today, look out for the trike. That would be the Google Street View Trike, a pedicab-like contraption mounted with a camera and computer equipment. It’s meant to capture 360-degree, street-level images of places where Google’s fleet of Street View cars can’t go—pedestrian malls, university campuses, parks, hiking trails, and so forth.

As my colleague Wade reported last November, Faneuil Hall was a finalist for the trike treatment, competing against Chicago’s Navy Pier and San Francisco’s Pier 39 in the pedestrian mall category (via online voting). Well, the cradle of liberty won out, and today, Google is showing up to take the pictures. They should be viewable in Google Maps sometime in the coming months, the company says. (You can read more about the nuts and bolts of the trike project in Wade’s interview with senior mechanical engineer Dan Ratner.)

Of course, it’s all great marketing for Google. But it’s also a really interesting step in the evolution of digital imaging technology, and how consumers can experience the richer details of the real world while online. And it could eventually tie into Google’s local search business.

So I decided to do a deeper dive into Google Street View, which is an ongoing project in all 50 U.S. states and dozens of countries around the world. Yesterday I spoke with the mastermind of the Street View project, engineering director Luc Vincent, who’s based in Silicon Valley.

Vincent is a renowned expert in image processing and computer vision. A native of France, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Robotics Laboratory in the early 1990s before developing his career at Xerox Imaging Systems in Peabody, MA. From there, he moved out west and spent time at ScanSoft, Xerox PARC, and LizardTech, before joining Google in 2004, originally to work on Google book search.

We talked about the genesis and history of Google Street View, as well as the future of geo-search and imaging—its significance to the company, how far Google wants to go (hint: everywhere), and how it deals with privacy issues. Here are some edited highlights from our chat.

Xconomy: So how did Street View originally come about?

Luc Vincent: I worked mostly on books for the first two years. But the same day I joined Google, I was put in meetings about collaborations with Stanford to do research [on gathering images]. I turned this into a Google “20 percent” project, and found some more people to work on it. Pretty soon I was herding cats.

Larry Page himself was interested in this when I joined Google. We were not really motivated by money originally—just building compelling services. We focused on the scale. We were really willing to spend money and engineering [resources] because we thought it would be useful to people. At Google, we start small, we show demos, and we iterate.

X: What was the biggest challenge in getting the project going?

LV: There were tons of challenges. Early on, we had no funding per se. We got people to help with time and equipment. When we started with Stanford, we were working with the DARPA Grand Challenge [robotic car] team. We used [one of their cars, with a driver] to collect our first test imagery. These cars were too fancy and automated, so we drained the battery multiple times. If you drain the battery, the A/C stopped working. It was summer and we were trying to collect data, and we had … Next Page »

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EvoNexus, the non-profit incubator launched in San Diego three months ago, has selected its inaugural group of new technology companies to be hatched.

Cathy Pucher, the incubator’s executive director, tells me the first clutch of startups getting support from EvoNexus were culled from about 45 applicants. The contenders came from a surprisingly diverse number of industries, including software, cleantech, wireless health, semiconductor, communications, and other technologies. “We really didn’t know how many applications or what kind of applications we would get,” Pucher says. Most of the applications came from “brand new” startups, she adds, including several started by individuals who had taken early retirement offers or had been laid off in the recession.

EvoNexus, which plans to move by the end of this month into commercial office space recently vacated by San Diego-based Leap Wireless (NASDAQ: LEAP), also has begun reviewing its second round of applications. (More on that below). Pucher says the three startups are:

—San Diego-based Medipacs is commercializing non-mechanical intravenous infusion technology that uses polymer pumps instead of electric motors and pump mechanisms. The company is initially targeting delivery of pain medications and already has developed wearable, programmable, and disposable infusion technology. It is looking for wireless industry expertise to add remote monitoring capabilities (and expand into the wireless health market).

CEO Mark McWilliams has extensive experience in the medical devices industry and in early stage companies. He has worked previously at Beckman Coulter, Q3DM, and Baxter Healthcare.

—IO Semiconductor is a fabless semiconductor startup that is focused on applying new technologies to RF (radio frequency) devices for the cellular industry. “They don’t give out a lot of detail about what they’re doing because … Next Page »

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Lee Corkran has spent most of his life working in photography, graphic design, and online media. He’s participated in changes that have transformed his industry as he moved from jobs at the former Sigma photo agency, a news photo provider, to Kodak, Yahoo, and Hewlett-Packard’s San Diego-based Imaging and Printing Group.

Based on the insights he collected along the way, Corkran told me he concluded a few years ago “that no real innovation” had been applied to the way stock photographs are provided online. So he started BrightQube, a Web site with a proprietary method of displaying stock photos and other images as if they were arranged on a photographer’s light table. Corkran launched BrightQube early last, before the teeth of the recession really took hold, in a fiercely competitive market of Web-based stock photo providers. Yet the number of BrightQube users has grown, and the business is generating enough revenue for Corkran to begin looking for venture capital.

Lee Corkran

Stock photos and images have long been the meat-and-potatoes staple of advertising agencies, graphic artists, and the publishing industry. Agencies typically license images on a photographer’s behalf, and the image catalogs they once published on glossy paper to display their inventory are now increasingly available online at sites such as GettyImages.com, iStockphoto.com, and fotosearch.com.

Corkran contends, however, “going to a digital stock photography site is like going through a Google search, with 300 pages of results.” Users have to click through pages of images, which can make it difficult to select and compare photos.

“This paginated approach becomes kind of an obstacle,” Corkran says. “The existing stock photography sites have pretty much taken a print catalog and put it online. It’s not necessarily what the buyer is looking for. It’s more about what the seller wants to promote,” because favored images tend to be placed on the Web site’s first few pages.

BrightQube offers a different approach by providing … Next Page »

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Waltham, MA- and San Mateo, CA-based Greylock Partners is the leader in a $250,000 Series A financing round for Refocus Imaging, according to regulatory filings cited today by PE Week Wire. The Mountain View, CA, startup is pursuing “computational photography” techniques developed by Stanford researcher Ren Ng that, among other things, allow photographers to adjust the focus of a digital image after it’s been taken. The technology is similar in spirit to techniques developed by Ramesh Raskar, a former researcher at the Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory in Cambridge, MA, who is now at the MIT Media Lab.

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