In William Gibson’s 1984 cyberpunk masterpiece Neuromancer, the hero Case lives in a near-future place called BAMA—the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis, aka the Sprawl, a giant city that has spread Coruscant-like across the whole eastern seaboard. (If it had extended to Orlando, maybe Gibson could have called it OBAMA.) But while this part of Gibson’s sci-fi dystopia may have seemed plausible in the 1980s, it’s a little less so today. Yes, cities are still dealing with the consequences of the mid-20th-century’s automobile-driven sprawl—but if anything, the big metropolitan regions in the U.S. today are contracting around the edges, not blurring into one another.

And once the cheap oil runs out, analysts like James Howard Kunstler argue, cities will have to get smaller yet. The future “will be much more about staying where you are than about being mobile,” Kunstler predicts. Unless there’s a miraculous advance in solar-electric vehicle technology, or the government suddenly decides to invest a couple trillion dollars to build a serious passenger rail network, it’s hard to see how he might be wrong.

But that’s just one side of the picture—the physical reality of freeways and suburbs and Wal-Marts. There’s another trend at work that’s erasing what I would call the mental boundaries between cities. That trend, obviously, is digital networking.

It’s a tired cliché to say that telecommunications technology is breaking down the meaning of geographical distance. People have been pointing this out since the advent of telegraphy in the 1840s. What I’m saying is a little more radical. Given today’s work styles and networking tools, information workers can be anywhere. It makes very little difference whether your software engineers or QA testers or telesales representatives are in Boston or Burlingame or Bangalore. In fact, it’s easier to send an e-mail or an instant message to a colleague 3,000 miles away than it is to get up and walk a hundred feet across your office.

Which means distributed teams can get the same amount of work done as concentrated ones—probably more, thanks to the planet’s rotation and the single most important invention of 1883-84, the division of the globe into 24 standard time zones based on Greenwich Mean Time. In effect, the world’s information workers all live in one giant city—a mental space where Gmail and Twitter are more important than parking garages and subway tunnels.

Which makes one particular strain of inter-city bickering all the more inane. Over the last few years, I’ve listened to endless arguments about whether New York or Silicon Valley or Boston or insert-your-favorite-city- here is the best place to be an innovator, find investors, hire engineers and salespeople, and grow a technology company. In Boston, people still wring their hands over why Mark Zuckerberg moved Facebook to Palo Alto. In Silicon Valley, meanwhile, people glance nervously over their shoulders at New York. Recently, in fact, there’s been an extended and entertaining kerfuffle over New York’s merits as a startup hub, involving, at various points, SpeakerText CEO Matt Mireles, Hunch and Founder Collective co-founder Chris Dixon, Flickr and Hunch co-founder Caterina Fake, Y Combinator founder Paul Graham (see 2:30 in this video), and AdGrok co-founder Antonio Garcia-Martinez. Dixon, Fake, and Graham think New York’s tech scene is exploding with cool startups and “ambitious ass-kickers,” and that it’s becoming an easier place to find angel or venture financing and engineering talent. Mireles and Garcia-Martinez, on the other hand, think that New York is expensive and elitist, that the angels and tech-focused venture firms are still few and far between, that Wall Street sucks up all the talent, that the city lacks decent engineering schools, and that New Yorkers are generally hustlers rather than builders.

It’s all beside the point. Regions have their distinct flavors, of course, but in the end, none of this affects the global pace of innovation, which depends on people and their ideas much more than their locations. Does anyone seriously want to argue that Google would not exist if … Next Page »

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Location, Inc., a provider of online real estate research tools, launched in 2002 with the intent to objectively measure which neighborhoods are the best fit for a particular customer, based on criteria such as school quality, crime rates, home appreciation values, and the prominence of upwardly mobile singles. The housing matchmaker service has been available on the Woonsocket, RI-based company’s website, NeighborhoodScout.com, since then, to help consumers determine which pockets around the country best fit with their lifestyles. Its search engine also helps people find neighborhoods most similar to the ones they already know they like.

Last week the company launched a new service, hosted at NeighborhoodScoutReports.com, to produce neighborhood-specific documents akin to the vehicle history reports offered by the Web service Carfax. “There isn’t any comparable product for what is obviously and vastly the largest purchase for most Americans,” says Andrew Schiller, the company’s founder, CEO, and chief scientist. “The largest risk for people buying a home is rarely the condition of the house, but the location of the house.”

The aim of Location’s new product is to provide information on the surroundings of a particular house or property that has already caught your eye. “It isn’t about showing me the best neighborhoods for this criteria, but rather showing me a detailed report for the neighborhood that contains this property,” says Schiller.

He says the website’s data-crawling algorithms scan multiple, disparate sources of information to create one comprehensive report, which sells for $19.99. The reports pull data from roughly 70 sources, and use patented or patent-pending data engines built by the company’s in-house geographer-statisticians. The product is also fully available on mobile browsers. That way customers can get on-the-spot neighborhood information on a property with their iPads or iPhones when … Next Page »

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Why are some metropolitan areas so much more entrepreneurial than others? Silicon Valley seems almost magically entrepreneurial, with a new startup on every street corner, but in declining Rust Belt cities such startups are far and few between.

In a new Policy Brief published by Harvard’s Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston, which is sponsoring a series of talks on geography and entrepreneurship, economists Edward Glaeser and William Kerr report that high levels of entrepreneurship are closely correlated with regional economic growth, which means that local policy makers who are looking for ways to rev the economic engines of their cities often are interested in policies that can generate more entrepreneurship.

Glaeser and Kerr use the presence of small firms as a proxy for entrepreneurship and find, that all else being equal, regional economic growth is highly correlated with an abundance of smaller firms. Specifically, they found that a 10 percent increase in the number of firms per worker in a metropolitan region in 1977 was associated with a nine percent increase in employment growth in that region between 1977 and 2000. Looking more closely at the connection between small independent firms and subsequent growth, they report that a 10 percent increase in average establishment size in 1992 was associated with a 7 percent decline in subsequent employment growth due to new startups. Regions with lots of small firms, in other words, tend to experience faster job growth than those with a few big ones.

If the relationship between an abundance of smaller firms and urban success is real, Glaeser and Kerr ask, then why are some regions more entrepreneurial than others? One possibility is that there might be particularly high returns for entrepreneurs in particular places and in particular industries. However, data on the value of shipments per worker does not support this hypothesis.

In contrast, they report, the data do support the idea—put forward in earlier work by both AnnaLee Saxenian (on the computer industry in the early 1990s) and by the late Ben Chinitz (on why New York City was outperforming Pittsburgh in the late 1950s)—that the presence of many small firms creates an infrastructure that makes it easier for new firms to enter the local marketplace.

They add that the data also seem to support a third explanation: that for a variety of reasons, some areas may have a greater supply of entrepreneurs. For example, places with more educated workforces generally have more startup growth, especially in industries that depend upon college-educated workers. Such industries, moreover, are more likely to locate in higher-amenity regions, particularly those with favorable climates.

Recognizing the powerful correlations between entrepreneurship and regional economic growth, state and local policymakers may want to do more to … Next Page »

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[Updated 9:20 p.m. EDT 7/10/09 with responses from Google; see the sections marked "Update" below]

Yesterday Google announced that the “My Location” feature familiar to anyone who’s used Google Maps on a mobile device—the little blue button that shows you your position on a map—is now available to people accessing Google Maps from their laptop or desktop computers as well (as long as they’re using the latest versions of the Firefox or Chrome browsers). But there’s a problem: Users are reporting in large numbers today that the My Location feature is erratic, placing them in the wrong city and occasionally on the wrong continent.

Behind this phenomenon, it turns out, is a story about competing ideas on the best way to endow Web-based applications like mapping programs with an awareness of their location—and about the race between companies like Google, Microsoft, and Boston’s Skyhook Wireless to control the way location information is fed to these applications. Skyhook’s CEO, Ted Morgan, gave me his perspective on the Google Maps development in an interview this morning. (See below for our Q&A.)

You might think that all browsers would handle location-finding in the same way. And that’s the ideal—the Cambridge, MA-based World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has a draft Geolocation API (application programming interface) specification that spells out how browsers should pass the details about a computer’s location from the computer itself to the Web applications running inside the browser. But as Morgan explains, the W3C standard doesn’t specify where or how the browser should get this information from the computer—which leaves room open for competing approaches, and potentially for back-room deals.

Several years ago, Skyhook developed a browser plugin called Loki that taps into a computer’s Wi-Fi chip, takes a reading of all nearby Wi-Fi access points, and uses Skyhook’s proprietary database of access point locations around the world to triangulate the device’s location. The Apple iPhone uses this Skyhook technology whenever its Safari browser or its built-in Google Maps application request location data.

But when Google rolled out the “My Location” feature for laptop and desktop computers, the company decided to use its own geolocation algorithms rather than Skyhook’s. That was possible because the Mozilla Foundation built Google’s algorithms into the latest version of its open-source browser, Firefox 3.5, which was released on June 30. (Google also built the algorithms, not surprisingly, into its own Chrome browser.)

Google’s geolocation technology is similar in principle to Skyhook’s—it also depends largely on information about nearby Wi-Fi access points—but the accuracy of the locations actually produced by the new “My Location” feature seems to vary wildly, as users have been discovering over the last day and half. Judging from posts on Twitter, the Google system is placing some people thousands of miles away from their actual locations.

An unusual number of people, for example, report that the My Location feature shows them as being in downtown Austin, TX, even if they’re half a continent away. “Google Maps’ new ‘Show My Location’ feature puts me in the middle of Austin, TX. I’m actually downtown Manhattan,’ PhoneTag.com co-founder Mark Dillon tweeted today.

While Austin may be the center of the tech world for some South by Southwest addicts, it clearly hasn’t experienced any actual jump in population since Thursday. The problem, according to Skyhook CEO Ted Morgan, lies in the way Google collects the data behind its Wi-Fi-based positioning system. For information about the locations of access points, Google relies on crowdsourcing—it quietly gathers local readings every time someone uses a Google app on an iPhone or a Blackberry, or some other mobile device.

Crowdsourcing is an inherently sloppy approach, according to Morgan. Skyhook’s own approach is to send Wi-Fi-sensing vehicles down every highway, street, and alley, methodically establishing the position and strength of every access point they pass (most are broadband routers owned by local businesses and residents). Morgan says Skyhook has also developed ways of correcting for the fact that access points sometimes move—for example, when someone relocates their home from Austin to Manhattan.

[UPDATE: Google offers a different reason for the inaccuracies. Reached by e-mail this evening, Google communications officer Elaine Filadelfo said users having issues with accuracy "are likely users who are not using Wi-Fi, for which we can generally provide a more accurate location. Without Wi-Fi, we base location on IP address, which can be inaccurate depending on your ISP and its location."]

Morgan would like to give every developer working on location-aware Web applications the opportunity to tap into Skyhook’s more accurate database through Loki. The problem is that … Next Page »

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The conventional wisdom used to be that technology startups should be located as close to their venture investors’ main offices as possible. That way, it’s easier to call on your venture partners’ experience and networks, get them to attend your board meetings, and so forth.

But the conventional wisdom may be dead wrong. Private equity industry news site PE Hub is calling attention today to a new study showing that startups located far away from their venture investors’ offices actually perform better than those headquartered closer to the mother ship. That finding may come as solace to entrepreneurs in cities such as San Diego and Seattle that are slightly off the beaten venture path, or that are losing homegrown firms.

The study, by a group of researchers from Harvard Business School, the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, focused on venture firms in the nations’ three largest clusters of venture activity—Boston, New York, and the San Francisco Bay Area—and asked which of their portfolio companies outperformed the firms’ averages. “Surprisingly, much of the VC outperformance in these venture centers arises from their non-local investments,” the authors report. (PE Hub has put the full paper online here.)

The reason for this counterintuitive finding, the researchers speculate, is that there’s a higher “monitoring cost” to investing in a far-away company—because of the expense of traveling to those locations, among other things—and that venture firms therefore have a higher bar for making those investments. In other words, they only bet on companies that they expect to have a higher rate of return, and to the extent that they bet right, they get that higher rate.

This “hurdle rate” effect is so strong, in fact, that the researchers found that outperformance rates actually go down if a venture firm opens a branch office in the same city with once-distant portfolio companies. Harvard Business School professor Josh Lerner told PE Hub’s Dan Primack that the results ought to cause venture firms to rethink their assumptions about geography. Focusing on local investments because they’re less costly might be a “mental trap,” Lerner said, if it leads investors to relax their standards.

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Documents filed today with the Securities and Exchange Commission indicate that Cambridge, MA-based MetaCarta, whose software plots Web news items on digital maps by extracting metadata about locations mentioned in the items, has raised $910,000 in convertible debt. Sevin Rosen Funds, FA Technology, and Hunt Ventures were listed as participants in the financing. MetaCarta raised $10 million in Series C funding in 2005, and previously received funding from In-Q-Tel, the venture wing of the U.S. intelligence community. We wrote about the company’s GeoSearch service in March 2008.

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When you open the Google Maps application on the Apple iPhone and click the “target” button, the device pulls up a local map and shows your current position as a blue dot. You could easily do the same thing on your laptop—if, that is, your Web browser could communicate with a location-sensing device in your computer, such as its Wi-Fi chip.

And soon it will. Mozilla, the Mountain View, CA-based organization behind the Firefox browser, revealed yesterday that future versions of Firefox will be location-aware—meaning they’ll have built-in software that taps into a computer’s Wi-Fi chip or other wireless sensors, figures out the machine’s current latitude and longitude, and feeds that information (with the user’s consent) to any website that requests it. And to test the idea, Mozilla released an experimental Firefox plugin called Geode that does exactly that, using the Loki location-finding system developed by Boston’s Skyhook Wireless. Skyhook says the Mozilla deal could foreshadow a time when Loki is built into all browsers.

Loki, which determines a machine’s location by comparing the IDs of nearby Wi-Fi access points to Skyhook’s national database of Wi-Fi networks, was already available as a free download for Firefox and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser. For Geode, according to Skyhook co-founder and vice president of business development Mike Shean, the company made some minor tweaks to comply with the World Wide Web Consortium’s draft geolocation specification and to add privacy-protection features requested by Mozilla. Loki also comes with a toolbar and a logo, whereas Geode, once installed, runs invisibly. But “under the covers it’s the same system,” Shean says.

Shean said talks between Skyhook and Mozilla began shortly after last January’s announcement of the deal between Skyhook and Apple that put Skyhook’s proprietary Wi-Fi Positioning System on the iPhone. “Since the launch of the iPhone and the ability that Apple has given to developers to leverage location, the market around location-based services has been on a pretty aggressive upswing, and that has also manifested itself in the browser world,” Shean says. “The browser folks and the laptop folks are looking at ways to incorporate location into what they do, and that’s the reason that Mozilla approached us—because we obviously are the only ones really offering Wi-Fi-based location in the Web world for laptops and other Wi-Fi devices.”

In its blog, Mozilla Labs, the organization’s R&D wing, said yesterday that Geode is intended to give Web developers an opportunity to experiment with “location-aware experiences” ahead of the official implementation of geolocation capabilities in Firefox 3.1, which is expected to be released in beta form later this year. So far, there are only three examples of websites that grab location information from Geode: a “Food Finder” page, developed by Mozilla Labs’ head of user experience Aza Raskin, that plots a user’s location on a Google map and shows nearby eateries; Fire Eagle, a Yahoo service that acts as a central registry for users’ locations; and the Pownce file-sharing/social-networking service, which can show members’ locations on their profiles by checking in with Geode or Fire Eagle.

But more examples are on the way, according to Shean. “We’re working with literally dozens of content providers and other companies that use maps,” he says. “Over the next several weeks you’ll see a whole slew of different websites rolling out with this technology.”

And in the long run, Skyhook would like to see the Loki technology built into all Web browsers, Shean says: “We’re very pleased to see Mozilla leading the way around location in the browser, but we are actually working with all of the browser providers to discuss opportunities to bundle our technology into their software.”

Update 10/8/08 2:00 pm: I just learned of another website using Geode for location-based customization: Outside.in Radar, a section of Brooklyn, NY-based hyperlocal news site Outside.in where users can see news, discussions, and alerts specific to their location.

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MetaCarta, a Cambridge, MA-based MIT spinoff funded in part by the CIA’s venture wing, In-Q-Tel, said today that a new software product called the MetaCarta Geographic Search and Referencing Platform (GSRP) is ready for sale. The software takes text content that contains place names in English, French, Spanish, Russian, or Arabic and tags it so that it can be displayed on a map. GSRP appears to be essentially a commercial version of the same system that powers MetaCarta’s own GeoSearch News service, a demonstration system that we wrote about back in March.

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Having written an appreciative column a few weeks ago about the endangered Pacific Northwest tree octopus, a tongue-in-cheek hoax site, I am not about to denounce the Internet as a cesspool of misinformation. But I’m still puzzled by the way certain salacious memes persist on the Internet, even though they’re easily disproved—for example, the myth often repeated in e-mail chain letters that Barack Obama is secretly a practicing Muslim (the most discouraging element here, of course, being that anyone cares).

Another meme that keeps popping up and that deserves to be discounted once and for all is the idea that Google widely and deliberately censors aerial and satellite imagery at the behest of governments and other organizations. This idea was reinvigorated most recently by a July IT Security feature article called “Blurred Out: 51 Things You Aren’t Allowed to See on Google Maps.” The article, which was picked up by Digg and widely republished, was of special interest to readers in Boston, since six out of the 51 locations were in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. But as one of my favorite bloggers, Stefan Geens, pointed out on his Ogle Earth blog a couple of weeks ago, there’s only one case out of the 51 purported examples of “blurring out” where it can be verified that Google itself modified an image; it was in Basra, Iraq, where imagery showing bomb damage and military construction was replaced by older pictures, taken before the Second Gulf War. Geens’ post prompted me to look into the Boston-area locations listed in the IT Security article, and as I illustrate below, the reports of alleged blurring appear to be completely spurious.

That’s not to say that the all of the images in Google Maps and Google Earth are as detailed as they could be. As Google has acknowledged in the past, there are spots, such as the U.S. Naval Observatory—home for another 116 days to Vice President Dick Cheney—that have been deliberately blurred or pixelated by the companies that sell aerial imagery to Google. (See image at left. You can click on this image and all of the images in this article to see larger versions.)

Presumably, the companies do this to make life a little harder for terrorists who might be planning an airborne attack. Interestingly, though, the White House and the Capitol building are crystal-clear in Google Earth’s images. (I admit to some curiosity about who decided that Cheney’s house was more worthy of obscuration than President Bush’s. If you’re interested, there’s a long discussion of that particular question over at Wired‘s Danger Room national security blog.) Since Google doesn’t own its own fleet of satellites, its only recourse in these cases of deliberate pixelation is to buy more imagery from other sources, which it sometimes does.

More often, though, allegations that certain areas are “off-limits” in Google Earth are just wrong. One rumor making its way around the Web right now is that Google blurred out images of Wasilla, AK, after Alaska governor and former Wasilla mayor Sarah Palin was named John McCain’s running mate. If you look up Wasilla in Google Earth (or examine the screen grab at right), you’ll see that Google’s images of the Anchorage suburb are indeed blurry—but only for the northern half. Google is constantly updating its imagery, and for many areas it doesn’t yet have the kind of super-clear pictures where you can see individual houses, cars, and even the shadows of people (or cows). Wasilla is just one of the many places in Google Earth where old and new datasets are juxtaposed.

No such excuse is available, however, for the writers of the IT Security article. I remember reading the article’s provocative introduction when it first came out: “Whether it’s due to government restrictions, personal-privacy lawsuits or mistakes, Google Maps has slapped a ‘Prohibited’ sign on the following 51 places,” it said. And I remember being surprised that so many of the spots listed were in and around Boston.

But upon examining those six locations in Google Maps and Google Earth, I can see absolutely no sign of the alleged blurring. Here are Google Earth screenshots of the listed locations:

1. PAVE PAWS, a missile-warning and space surveillance radar maintained by the U.S. Air Force Space Command in Cape Cod, MA.

2. Seabrook Nuclear Power Station, Seabrook, NH.

Click on “next page” to continue … Next Page »

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So, you’re at the corner of Harrison Street and Union Park Street in Boston. Are you in the South End, or in the trendier but less widely recognized SoWa (South of Washington) district? Both, technically—and if you’ve got a location-sensitive mobile device, it can be tricky for mobile data providers to know which neighborhood’s information to send you.

That’s the problem that San Francisco-based Urban Mapping purports to solve. The company’s neighborhood database contains the geographic boundaries of 60,000 neighborhoods in 2,700 municipalities in the United States, Canada, and Europe. Often, these boundaries overlap—and for those cases, the company knows which neighborhood is historically and culturally dominant, which can be very helpful to providers of location-based information and marketing services.

Today Boston-based Skyhook Wireless said that it’s integrating Urban Mapping’s neighborhood data into its Loki location-based search service, which tailors content based on the user’s location, and its MyLoki location-sharing service, which broadcasts a user’s geographic position to friends and family. That means Loki users will have access to “contextually appropriate and socially accepted neighborhood information,” in the words of an announcement from the two companies today.

“The Urban Mapping neighborhood data adds a richness and more context to social connections than just a city-level message or plot on a map,” said Ryan Sarver, director of consumer products for Skyhook Wireless, in the announcement. “For example, when our MyLoki service messages out that a user has changed locations, we can say that the user has ‘just checked into Back Bay in Boston’ instead of just indicating that the user is in Boston, Mass.” And if a Loki user is at Harrison and Union Park, I’m guessing the system is probably going to send them information related to the South End—the more established (if less fashionable) of the two overlapping neighborhoods.

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The folks at EveryScape in Waltham, MA, have been busy trying to live up to their company’s ambitious tag line, “The Real World Online.” At the Where 2.0 conference in Burlingame, CA, today, the startup plans to announce several useful upgrades to its online catalog of street-level views of 14 world cities, including a social annotation feature allowing users to mark up its images with personalized memos to other users. The company also has a new scheme for recruiting “Destination Ambassadors” and “Local Business Ambassadors”—photographers it will pay for their help documenting more cities and interior spaces.

If you’ve followed our previous pieces about EveryScape, you’ll recall that the company sends cars mounted with digital cameras down the streets of towns and cities, capturing several 360-degree views per block. These views are then assembled into an online database that allows Web surfers to browse any specific location, or to move from view to view, as if they were reenacting the drive.

On the whole, the service is similar to the Street View feature of Google Maps. But EveryScape, much more than Google, sees its collection of street images as the gateway to many kinds of geographically organized information, ranging from Yellow Pages-style business listings to Yelp restaurant reviews, Flickr photos, and YouTube videos. In some cities, EveryScape has even photographed the interiors of specific properties such as hotels and art studios and strung them together with convincing animated transitions, allowing users to zoom into the spaces almost as if they were part of a true 3D virtual world in the style of Second Life or Google Earth.

And today EveryScape is rolling out two major improvements to its site. One is simply a bigger, prettier view. The map formerly stuck on the right side of the screen can now be turned off, leaving more space for the photos. (That means EveryScape’s pictures are now much larger than Google’s.) The other is a new system that lets users annotate the images with their own information, from advertising and marketing messages to personal notes—say, between two people picking a place to meet for dinner.

One category of annotations, called World Tags, allow businesses to upload photos, videos, links, and other information. Say you went to EveryScape’s image for the corner of Rogers Street and Edwin Land Boulevard in Cambridge, MA, site of Xconomy’s offices. First you’d notice the big Waste Management garbage truck that happened to be parked outside my window the day the EveryScape cameras went by (see image at upper right). But we could also create a World Tag for that location, and if you clicked on it, a box would pop up containing, for example, links to stories, videos, or podcasts on Xconomy.

Only businesses can create World Tags at the moment, and they have to work with EveryScape to do so. But there’s another category of annotations, called Scape Memos, than anyone can create and share. Attaching a Scape Memo to an EveryScape image is easy: you just click on the “Create New Memo” link, position the pointer over the right spot in the image, and type in a header and some content. You then get a unique URL that you can share with others via e-mail or instant message or publish in your blog. Anyone who clicks on the URL will be taken to a version of that image with your Scape Memo superimposed. You can even create a series of linked Scape Memos with “previous” and “next” buttons that will take you from one location to another.

My bet is that EveryScape users will find some imaginative uses for Scape Memos. For example, I’m a huge fan of the 1958 Alfred Hitchcock film Vertigo. It’d be fairly easy to create a series of Scape Memos showing the places in San Francisco where Hitchcock did on-location shoots. The next step, of course, would be to … Next Page »

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“Geotagging”—a geeks-only term as recently as a year ago—is moving quickly into the mainstream. And Boston’s Skyhook Wireless is doing as much as any company to make that happen.

Back in February I wrote about a collaboration between Skyhook and Locr, a German photo-sharing community designed especially for pictures that have been geotagged—that is, assigned a latitude and longitude, either automatically at the moment they were taken, or manually, by the photographer. Geotagging, one of the latest features sweeping the world of digital photography, makes it easy to organize and browse pictures through map-based interfaces, which are now a built-in part of Locr, Flickr, and many other photo-sharing sites. Skyhook was working with Locr to put its positioning system—which determines longitude and latitude by scanning for the IDs of nearby Wi-Fi networks—into Locr’s geotagging software for Wi-Fi-capable mobile phones.

That was cool, as far as it went. But while billions of pictures are taken every year with camera phones, the Locr system is no good for regular digital cameras, which take much better pictures than phones, and only a handful of which come with built-in Wi-Fi networking.

Now, for years, I’ve been saying to anyone who will listen that what the consumer digital photography market really needs is a camera with built-in Global Positioning System capability for automatic geotagging. And a few such cameras have appeared, including the Ricoh 500SE, but they’re generally very expensive and are aimed at professionals in the geographic information systems (GIS) business rather than consumers. It turns out that cameras and GPS aren’t a great combination. The signals from GPS satellites are so weak that they don’t reach inside buildings (where many pictures are taken, obviously). And if you’ve ever used a GPS unit, you know that you can’t just turn it on and get your location instantly: it can take several minutes to acquire the signals from three or four satellites needed to fix a position. On top of all that, GPS is a battery hog.

But Skyhook is again coming to the rescue, partnering this time with a Mountain View, CA, startup called Eye-Fi. Eye-Fi’s SD memory cards for digital cameras contain tiny Wi-Fi radios. By sending your pictures from your camera to your home Windows PC or Mac wirelessly, the Eye-Fi cards save you from having to drag out the usual cradles or USB cables. What’s more, Eye-Fi’s software automatically uploads your pictures to the photo-sharing site of your choice.

At the Where 2.0 conference in Burlingame, CA, today, Skyhook and Eye-Fi plan to announce that Skyhook’s Wi-Fi Positioning System (WPS) software will be incorporated into a new, 2-gigabyte Eye-Fi card called the Eye-Fi Explore. The result: automatic geotagging.

The actual method behind the Eye-Fi/Skyhook geotagging process is quite clever. At the moment each picture is saved to the card, the Skyhook software … Next Page »

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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.

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Mix one cup of Wikipedia with one cup of Google Maps, add a generous dollop of MIT-bred geekdom, and bake for about 14 months. Serves 600,000.

The confection in question is Povo.com, a user-editable online community directory that debuted in Boston last week. A project of Boston-based Arts Alliance Labs, a combination venture capital firm and technology platform company led by MIT Media Lab alum Max Metral, Povo is essentially a giant, geographically organized blank slate: a template beckoning Boston residents to upload information, reviews, photos, and other content, block by city block.

It’s far from the first user-driven directory of geographically organized local information; other examples include Outside.in, Platial, and Wikimapia. Wikipedia itself has extensive user-generated and user-edited listings on places of interest (including a thorough article on Boston), and there are several services that make it easier to browse Wikipedia’s content by location, including Placeopedia and a new iPhone application called GeoPedia.

But Povo (the name is Portuguese for “people” or “folk”) is more stylish and inviting than a typical Wikipedia-style wiki. People who add information to Povo are recognized for their contributions on their profile pages, which could help encourage Bostonians to pitch in the free labor required to build the directory. (As with most user-generated sites, users aren’t paid for their material.) The site also has some unique features that may appeal to power users, including strangely beautiful “heat maps” that show the greatest concentrations of local resources such as brunch places or clubs with live music, and a simple Ruby-like scripting language that allows users to modify the functionality of the pages they create. And all of the site’s content is available under a Creative Commons license—meaning that heat maps and anything else you or others create on Povo can be embedded in outside blogs or other non-commercial sites.

Metral says the idea for Povo was born when his colleague at Arts Alliance Labs, Hasty Granbery, was walking down a street in San Francisco looking for a dry cleaner that could clean a suit in an hour. “That’s not something you can find in a typical local search,” says Metral. “You might find a dry cleaner in the same zip code, but not something two blocks away. And the search results won’t have details about whether they can do it in an hour.” But that’s exactly the type of detail residents are likely to possess—and if Metral and Granbery can get them to feed it into Povo, it could eventually become much richer than a typical local search site such as Yahoo Local. “The big differentiator over time is going to be the user-generated content and functionality” Metral says.

Metral has a bit of experience with the wisdom of crowds: in 1996, with Media Lab professor (and Xconomist) Pattie Maes, he co-founded Firefly Network, a pioneer in the area of collaborative filtering algorithms that matched people with others with similar tastes and directed them to music content they might like. In a $40 million deal just two years later, Firefly became part of Microsoft, where the technology evolved into Microsoft Passport. Metral went on to become CTO at PeoplePC, which bundled brand-name PCs with dialup Internet service for a $24.95 monthly payment; Earthlink bought PeoplePC in 2002 for about $10 million.

Arts Alliance, Metral’s current gig, funds an electric range of interactive media startups. It was an investor in Spinner (now part of AOL) and Atom Entertainment (now part of Viacom), and its current portfolio includes viral TV clip service BlinkBox, European DVD rental service LOVEFiLM, and mobile games and video distributor Player X. Povo is the first platform the company has decided to develop on its own.

Metral and Granbery have seeded the site with information from sources such as Boston city park directories and Starbucks’ online store finder. But in the end, Metral says, the site will only become useful if … Next Page »

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For a long time, it looked like the real flowering of location-based services and geo-aware computing would have to wait until more people owned phones with Global Positioning System (GPS) chips inside. And frustratingly for fans of location technology, U.S. manufacturers and cellular carriers have been very slow to a) bring out such phones in the first place, and b) open up their operating systems to developers of third-party applications that use the GPS data. But now a newer technology, Wi-Fi-based positioning, is loosening the logjam—and Boston’s Skyhook Wireless is at the center of the movement. Next week, Skyhook will officially launch its latest product, a WiFi-based location-sharing service that owners of any Wi-Fi-enabled phone or computer can use to automatically update their blog visitors or social-networking pals about their whereabouts.

If that sounds a lot like Buddy Beacon, the friend-finding service from Boston-based uLocate that I wrote about in mid-February, it is. The main difference is that Buddy Beacon only works with GPS-enabled phones, whereas Skyhook’s new service, called MyLoki, will work on almost any laptop or mobile device with a Wi-Fi connection. (Buddy Beacon does have a Web interface, but updating your buddies that way requires you to type in your location manually.)

MyLoki is based on a free piece of software called Loki that you can download to any Windows or Macintosh computer or to any Wi-Fi-capable Windows Mobile or Symbian Series 60 mobile phone. Once it’s running on your device, Loki searches for nearby Wi-Fi signals, compares the IDs of the signals it detects to Skyhook’s global database of Wi-Fi network locations, calculates your position (the more signals it can find, the more accurate its fix), and feeds that information to your Firefox Web browser (sorry, IE users). MyLoki takes it from there, automatically updating people about your location by publishing it to the public my.loki website, your Facebook profile, your blog (via easily embedded text or map widgets), or a personal RSS location feed. (You can check out the MyLoki map widget in action at my personal blog.)

“What we’re doing is very similar to Buddy Beacon, but we’re appealing to a much wider set of devices,” says Ted Morgan, Skyhook’s CEO. “Any device that has Wi-Fi can add Loki and share its location.”

Skyhook originally rolled out Loki as a tool for personalizing Web searches. If you have Loki running in your Firefox toolbar, you can tell it to locate you on a map; then you can consult “channels” linking you to location-based information from other Web pages, such as the Starbucks store locator, Fandango’s local movie listings, or Weather.com’s local weather reports. Loki will feed your location directly to these external sites, saving you the step of typing in an address, city, or zip code.

MyLoki takes the same location information and makes it part of your online persona—updating your blog, your Facebook profile, or other outlets with your coordinates every 30 minutes. “We think that location adds a whole new element to social networking,” says Morgan. “A lot of what you’re trying to do [on a social network] is represent your real-world relationships online. And a lot of those relationships are generated by your real location. As you move around, that is interesting information that MyLoki can publish to your Facebook news feed, your blog, your website, or even your e-mail signature line. That sparks interactions and allows you to meet new people.”

MyLoki doesn’t work on the Apple iPhone yet. But I would expect the application to arrive on that platform within a matter of months, since Skyhook already provides the Wi-Fi positioning system behind the iPhone’s native Google Maps application, and Apple recently made it easier for outside developers to create third-party applications by releasing a long-promised software development kit.

And as followers of location-based technology will remember, we published a story just two weeks ago about Skyhook’s collaboration with German photo-sharing website Locr, in which Skyhook’s Wi-Fi positioning system will be built into a Locr application that allows automatic geotagging of photographs taken using Wi-Fi-enabled camera phones. That, in turn, will allow users of Locr (and eventually other photo-sharing websites) to browse their own and other people’s photos by geography—one of the most obvious uses of location information, and just the tip of the iceberg. In short, Wi-Fi-based positioning is allowing Web and mobile developers to barrel forward with many long-anticipated applications of location awareness—completely leapfrogging the cellular carriers, who at one time hoped to own the location-based-services business but simply dithered too long.

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The number-one customer complaint coming into Waltham, MA-based EveryScape, says CEO Jim Schoonmaker, is “Give us more.”

So far, EveryScape’s Web-based collection of pannable street-level photographs is limited to Boston and environs, New York, Miami, Laguna Beach, and four Colorado ski resorts—Aspen, Breckenridge, Snowmass Village, and Steamboat Springs. (Oh, there’s also Beijing, China—which is a strange and beautiful city, but not a place where many U.S. Web users are likely to need navigational advice.) For a company whose tagline is “The Real World, Online,” that’s what you call a start.

Schoonmaker acknowledges that EveryScape is “probably six months behind Google in the acquisition of content”— referring to the images behind the Street View feature of Google Maps, which covers 29 U.S. cities and counting.

Which is why the $7 million Series B financing round EveryScape announced today will come in very handy. “We need to get more content, put in more cities, and do it all faster,” says Schoonmaker. That will mean, among other things, making EveryScape’s server infrastructure easier to scale up, finding better ways to recruit and reward “Scape Artists” (outsiders who agree to contribute images and links), getting faster at creating the company’s distinctive interior tours of private properties, and generally bringing down the cost of content acquisition.

“If your ambition is to build the world, you can’t have even one expensive component,” says Schoonmaker. “Everything has to be scalable. That’s why we’ve had to think hard about how to shoot the public content, how to enable the private content to be shot and sold, how it’s all hosted on the portal, and how we can maintain it and make changes and update it over time. I think over time we’ve probably made as many mistakes as anyone else—but hopefully that just makes us a lot smarter.”

As we’ve noted in our previous pieces on EveryScape, the company’s patented “HyperMedia” technology weaves together photographs of contiguous locations using 3D graphic technology that makes browsing is database a far more immersive experience than what you’ll encounter with Google’s Street View service. But Google provides much wider coverage and, arguably, a friendlier interface.

Schoonmaker says improving EveryScape’s interface will be a major priority this year. The company has already bounced back from one misstep: its initial choice of Adobe’s Shockwave as its interactive-animation platform. “It was wonderful but no one would download it,” Schoonmaker says—so the company switched to the much more commonly installed Adobe Flash format. Now it needs to work on making its resources more discoverable and usable, says Schoonmaker. “For the vast majority of people out there, the idea of panning a picture is still not intuitive,” he says. “Pictures don’t move; movies do. So you’ve got to find a way for people to come to your site and understand immediately how to use it.”

Taking the lead in EveryScape’s financing round was Dace Ventures, a new Waltham, MA-based firm led by former CMGI president Dave Andonian that mainly invests in digital media, consumer marketing, and mobile services startups. (The firm’s portfolio also includes auctionPAL, CityVoter, LocaModa, Panraven, and Vitrue.) Also participating were existing investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Draper Fisher New England, Draper Atlantic and LaunchPad Venture Group.

“Dace is consistently looking for the next wave of innovation in the Web 2.0 space coupled with passionate entrepreneurs that can bring cutting-edge technology to market,” Andonian said in EverySpace’s official announcement of the financing round. He said the company “has the potential to fundamentally change the way we explore cities, towns and businesses online by truly replicating the real world experience.”

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Say you’re looking at somebody’s vacation pictures. Chances are you have three questions right off the bat about each photograph: When was it taken? Where was it taken? And who’s in it? Digital cameras automatically handle the first question, embedding a time code for every photograph in the so-called “EXIF header” that prefaces the actual image data in an image file. But while programmers and hardware designers have been working on the second question for a while, and there’s even a standard slot in the EXIF header for the latitude and longitude where a picture was taken, there’s still no easy, universally available way to “geotag” photos.

This week, though, Boston startup Skyhook Wireless will announce an agreement with Locr, an online photo-sharing community based in Germany, that could get us one step closer to automatic photo geotagging. I last wrote about Skyhook in January, when Steve Jobs announced that the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch would henceforth include Skyhook’s Wi-Fi-based positioning technology, called WPS. Tomorrow, in advance of the CeBIT mobile technology conference scheduled for next week in Hannover, Germany, Skyhook and Locr plan to announce that a new photo geotagging program from Skyhook and based on WPS will soon be available on Locr’s website for download to members’ Wi-Fi-enabled camera phones.

Whenever a Locr member takes a photo with a camera phone that has the new software, WPS will estimate the device’s latitude and longitude in less than a second, based on Skyhook’s database of Wi-Fi networks and their locations, and insert this data into the EXIF header. Members will then able to upload their photos to the Locr site, where they can be automatically associated with the appropriate locations on Web-based maps.

I geotag my own photos by uploading them to Flickr and then using the site’s drag-and-drop map interface to assign a location to each photograph, one at a time. It’s actually kind of fun, since I happen to love working with maps. But it’s terribly time-consuming. And given the spread of positioning technologies, latitude and longitude really ought to be among the bits of information that get added to a photograph automatically.

And that’s exactly what Skyhook’s software will do, at least for people who own one of the growing number of phones that can connect to the Internet over local Wi-Fi networks. Locr members can already download similar geotagging software based on the Global Positioning System (GPS), but adding WPS to the mix will bring geotagging capabilities to a larger range of devices—and will help users get a location fix in a larger variety of places.

“We believe GPS isn’t very well suited for geotagging of photos,” says Mike Shean, Skyhook’s co-founder and vice president of business development. “Specifically because a lot of photos are taken indoors or in urban areas, and GPS has some real issues getting a good location fix indoors and in dense urban locations. Our partnership is going to increase the number of devices that support automatic geotagging, so any Wi-Fi-enabled handset can do exactly what the GPS-enabled handsets did in the past.”

Ironically, the iPhone (which has an excellent built-in camera) isn’t one of the devices that will be able to run the Skyhook-Locr software. It’s going to be available initially only for Windows Mobile devices and phones running the Symbian operating system, which includes most Nokia phones. But Apple has said that it will soon publish a software developers’ kit giving programmers tools and instructions for tailoring third-party applications to run on the iPhone; at that point, says Shean, iPhone users should start to look for an Apple-specific version. “I think they would definitely be a target device for Locr to add their software support to,” Shean says.

As for the pesky third question—who’s in that vacation photo?—don’t hold your breath waiting for software to give you an answer. A few companies, such as San Mateo, CA-based Riya, are working on services that identify people in snapshots. But they require a lot of training, and aren’t incredibly accurate. Making facial recognition systems work well is still one of the biggest challenges computer-vision researchers face.

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EveryScape’s online collection of 360-degree street views, which we reviewed in October, grew today by one city: Xconomy’s own Cambridge, MA. It’s the seventh city that the Waltham, MA, startup has added to its photographic database, after Boston, New York, Miami, Aspen, CO, Lexington, MA, and Beijing, China.

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New England’s exponential economy grows faster than Xconomy can chronicle it. But we try our best—and in our first six months of operation, we’ve published detailed profiles of more than 125 local companies and organizations across the entire gamut of commercial technologies. Altogether, we’ve trained our uniquely personal, hyperlocal lens on hundreds of people and organizations, publishing more than 600 stories exploring the business and innovation scene in Greater Boston (and greater Greater Boston, which extends all the way from southwest Connecticut to eastern Canada, the way we see it).

To give our readers a new way to browse all this information, we’ve used the simple map-building tools provided by Google Maps to create a geographic guide to the organizations we cover. This Greater Boston Innovation Map—which is still a work in progress—will eventually include every company and organization mentioned in Xconomy for which we can find a street address. For every company or organization on the map, a pop-up window provides the address and a handy link to a list of Xconomy’s stories about that organization.

To use the map (below), just click on one of the colored icons. You can zoom in and out using the + and – buttons, and you can pan across the map using the up, down, left, and right buttons or by dragging the map itself. Click “View Larger Map” to interact with the map using the full Google Maps interface.

Be sure to zoom in on downtown Boston and Cambridge for a detailed view of that area’s dense cluster of technology organizations, and to zoom out to see companies as far away as Norwalk, CT, and Montpelier, VT. The colors of the icons correspond to industry categories—software, hardware, energy, biotech, finance, media, and the like (see map legend at bottom).

View Larger Map

Map Legend

	Software (includes Internet, networking, security)
	Hardware (includes robotics, storage, aerospace)
	Energy (includes cleantech, materials)
	Life Sciences (includes biotech, pharmaceuticals, medical devices)
	Finance (includes venture capital, private equity, legal)
	Media (includes publishing, gaming, entertainment, music)
	Nonprofit (includes universities, foundations, consortia, government)

Note: We’re still adding companies to the map, starting with those we’ve covered most recently and working backward through our archives. If you notice that a company that’s appeared in our pages is missing from the map, please let us know at editors@xconomy.com or just check back in a few days—we’ll get to it as soon as possible.

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I can tell you right now that Wade is not going to like this post. As many of you know, he’s a huge fan of both maps and 3-D modeling technology, and anything that puts the two together…well, forget about it. Which is why, I’m guessing, he is so intrigued by EveryScape, a Waltham, MA-based company that’s building a navigable, photorealistic, 3-D online map of the world, or at least select cities. To be sure, there’s a lot even for map-neutral users to like about EveryScape site, which Wade wrote about when it launched in October. But I have to say, Google Maps’ street view feature, launched today for much of greater Boston, is better.

First of all, there’s the question of coverage. Google’s got most of the inside-Route-128 region pretty well blanketed with panoramic street-level photographs that let users pick a spot on the map and not only see what it actually looks like—an absolutely critical feature if you’re trying to plan a trip through what’s probably the worst-signed streetscape in the country—but also to pan and move as if actually walking around. EveryScape, on the other hand, is so far limited pretty much to Boston proper. (On a national level, Google has the edge too, covering Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Boston, Fort Worth, Houston, Indianapolis, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New York, Orlando, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Portland, Providence, San Diego, San Francisco, St. Paul, and Tucson, compared to Aspen, Boston, Laguna Beach, Miami, and New York for EveryScape.) With Google, you can even take a gander at Xconomy’s Cambridge headquarters; with EveryScape, not so much.

I’ll cut EveryScape a break on the coverage question—lord knows a startup with less than $10 million in venture funding can’t match Google’s resources to send photographers out to every nook and cranny of every city. But what really bugs me is how user-unfriendly the company’s site is. Compare, for example, the landing page you get if you choose to visit Boston via EveryScape and the corresponding offering from Google. A map site that requires reading four different information boxes before it lets you actually see the map just isn’t very intuitive, in my book. With Google, you just drag the little orange avatar anywhere along any of the blue-lined streets and a window pops open with a view from that location; you can then pan around in place or follow arrows down the street. With EveryScape there’s a more complicated system involving a small map off to one side; I can’t describe it exactly because just having the site open actually brought my computer to its knees (probably the central source of my frustration with EveryScape, truth be told).

Now, to be clear, I don’t think it’s time to give up on EveryScape just yet. As Wade pointed out, the site’s photography is much brighter, sharper, and prettier than Google’s—making the possibility of convincing virtual tourism much more likely with EveryScape. [Everyscape also puts a lot more effort into the animations that give you a feeling of moving from one point-of-view to the next. ---your friendly editor, W.R.] And unlike Google, EveryScape lets you explore inside certain buildings, though the number of them is limited so far.

What’s more, the way that the startup is monetizing that feature by selling commissioned interior views to property owners, stores, and the like is both clever and, I think, likely to generate content that will be genuinely useful to users. Being able to virtually walk up to and into an expensive hotel, say, or a tony club before you plunk down the cash could provide a big help in deciding how to spend your time and money—and a nice voyeuristic break for those not planning on spending either. If it’s going to realize that vision, though, EveryScape will need to make sure that virtual tourists don’t get tripped up before they even cross the threshold.

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