It used to be that purchases began depreciating in value the moment you bought them. A new car, for example, might as well come with a little Kelley Blue Book countdown under the odometer showing its declining resale price. Indeed, the idea that property depreciates is so universal that it’s built into our accounting methods and tax codes. Traditionally, there have been only a few categories of things that don’t automatically drop in value over time, such as homes (up until 2008 anyway), precious metals, and maybe fine art and other collectibles.

But in the realms touched by software and the Internet, something different is happening. These days, many of the tools that modern consumers depend on, such as computers, smartphones, and entertainment devices, actually grow more useful and more valuable over time, thanks to a) the constant stream of new applications that exploit the devices’ capabilities in innovative ways, and b) the relatively new tradition of free updates for applications or operating systems you already own. In fact, when it comes to digital technologies, we’ve entered what you might call the Age of Appreciation. You can buy a gadget like an iPhone, an Android phone, or an iPad, and then sit back and watch it get more powerful without having to spend another cent.

It’s true that hardware itself still ages, breaks, grows obsolete, or loses its luster. Lord knows that my iPad, which seemed so shiny and magical just a year ago, looks a tad antiquated in my eyes now that the iPad 2 is out. I’m definitely not arguing that we can or should stop buying new stuff.

But I do think it’s worth slowing down to acknowledge the amazing situation we’ve created for ourselves, only 70 or so years into the era of electronic computers. In the Appreciation Age, objects containing computers grow in value because their value resides mainly in the software code they run, and that code can be so easily replaced, supplemented, or upgraded.

What got me thinking about all of this was a pair of relatively routine upgrades to Apple TV, the little black box that lets you play TV shows and movies from the iTunes Store on your big-screen TV. Last November, Apple updated the firmware inside the Apple TV from version 4.0 to version 4.1. And then, just a couple of weeks ago, it upgraded again to version 4.2. We’re so accustomed to such decimal-point changes these days—and they usually happen so automatically, quickly, and painlessly—that they often pass unnoticed. But these two updates definitely came with enough goodies to catch my attention.

The biggest change was the addition last November of something Apple calls AirPlay. This feature connects different devices over a home Wi-Fi network so that, for example, a music or video file stored on a Mac or a PC can be streamed to your TV. I like this feature because it has turned my TV into the sound system for my whole apartment. I can start an album playing on iTunes on my Mac or my iPhone, tap the AirPlay button, and throw the audio over to my TV, which (thankfully) has decent speakers. I also like to buy season passes for a couple of TV series on iTunes and download the episodes to my iPad. When I’m at home, AirPlay lets me watch those shows on the big screen, where they belong.

The more recent 4.2 update came with a big bonus for sports fans: Apple added the ability to watch live, on-demand Major League Baseball and National Basketball Association games for people with … Next Page »

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Why can people planning trips online “see every cabin on a cruise ship and every seat on a plane, but not every room in a hotel?”

That was the rhetorical question posed to me yesterday by Kevin Fliess, an Internet travel industry veteran. The basic answer, of course, is that hotel chains use antiquated reservations systems that make it impossible for guests to screen or select specific rooms in advance, the way airline passengers can when they’re buying tickets online. But that doesn’t mean you have to arrive at your next hotel totally unarmed—at least, not anymore.

Today Room 77, a Sunnyvale, CA, startup where Fliess is general manager and vice president of product, took the lid off a huge hotel room database that, for the first time, will allow travelers to figure out which rooms they’ll probably like best at specific hotels. Using information from the Room 77 site, guests can arrive at a property ready to negotiate for the room they want. Or they can use the Room 77 mobile app on the spot to screen rooms offered to them by front-desk staff. Thanks to a little Google Earth magic, they can even see what the view out the window will be like.

Ever heard of SeatGuru, the TripAdvisor-owned site that lets you zero in on the best seats on almost 800 models of planes owned by nearly 100 airlines? Room 77 is like that, but for hotel rooms. The startup has painstakingly assembled floor-by-floor maps of 425,000 rooms in 2,500 hotels around the world. (About 500 hotels are searchable at the Room 77 site starting today.) If you like rooms on high floors that are close to the elevators, you can sort through the possibilities according to those criteria, and others. Just like SeatGuru, Room 77 shows you the best matches on each floor in green, poor matches in red, and in-between choices in yellow.

The site is the brainchild of founder and chairman Brad Gerstner, who also runs Boston-based Altimeter Capital Management, a travel, technology, and Internet investment firm. Gerstner “has been in the travel space for over a decade, and he grew increasingly perplexed by the fact that there are dozens of sites where you can learn about hotels, but the hotels themselves are a complete black box,” Fliess says. “The room you are assigned is a crap shoot, and you know nothing about it until you open the door. [Gerstner] is a big believer in creating transparency where it doesn’t exist on the Web. So we started building what amounts to the first hotel room search engine.”

There’s a fascinating story to how the company built this engine (at least, it’s fascinating to me, a certified mapping and travel geek). The first hurdle was creating an annotated map of every floor in every three- to five-star hotel in every major world travel destination. Room 77 couldn’t simply tap via the Internet into hotels’ existing computerized reservation systems, called property management systems, because most don’t even have programming interfaces that can connect to other software. So they started by asking individual hotel managers to hand over their detailed floor plans.

Some cooperated; some were more reluctant. But hotel floor plans are public data—in most cases the information is available from city planners. So “we can make this happen with or without the hotel’s participation,” Fliess says. Room 77′s secret weapon is … Next Page »

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Yesterday we published Part 1 of a Q&A with Danny Kennedy, the former Greenpeace activist and administrator who founded Oakland, CA-based Sungevity in 2007. The company’s mission is to make it easier and more affordable for homeowners to reduce their monthly utility bills by installing rooftop photovoltaic panels. The main strategy: computerize as much of the solar installation process as possible. For example, Sungevity has developed Google Earth-like tools that allow it to generate accurate cost estimates without having to send technicians to customers’ homes. Homeowners can apply for low-cost leases online, and the company manages the local permitting and other red tape involved in solar installation behind the scenes.

Sungevity thinks of itself as the “Amazon of solar electricity,” Kennedy says. By that he means the company has designed its systems to accommodate millions of customers while keeping the company’s own overhead low and profits high.

The focus on profits may be new for Kennedy, the former Greenpeace activist, who once led a campaign that helped to bring key solar installation rebates to the state of California. But to him, it’s all just another form of social entrepreneurship. While he’s working hard to make the 90-employee company succeed, he says his bigger goal is to help more homeowners bypass the fossil-fuel-powered electrical grid, make a real dent in carbon emissions, and blunt the impact of global climate change.

“Sometime in the next century or two we will make [the] transition from this dumb experiment from digging up sunlight and burning it to using fresh sunlight,” Kennedy says. “I am trying to usher in that transition faster than the current economy would have it happen.”

In the second part of our conversation, transcribed below, Kennedy and I talked about his history at Greenpeace, his transition to the startup world, how Sungevity stands apart from its competitors, and (for a bit of dessert) what he thinks about Bill McKibben’s latest book Earrth and President Obama’s record so far on energy.

Xconomy: What motivated you to leave Greenpeace and become an energy entrepreneur?

Danny Kennedy: I have been passionate about global warming and climate change for 20 years or more. I felt like we had turned the corner in 2005, where we had finally convinced the majority that there was a problem, and then there was Gore’s Nobel Prize and all these other things. Suddenly we were no longer arguing that there was a problem, but what are the solutions. In my theory of social change, it is actually incumbent on social movements to start demonstrating that there are solutions. Groups like Greenpeace are great at knowing what they are against, but not as good at knowing what they are for.

I had done a bunch of renewable energy campaigning, for Gray Davis’s Renewable Power Authority, and solar bonds in San Francisco, and other things in Europe and Australia and China. But I wanted to get more involved and roll up my sleeves and build a business that was leading by example. Deeds, not words. Then I partnered with these two great entrepreneurs, Andrew Birch [Sungevity's CEO] and Alec Guettel [senior vice president of corporate development]. Andrew is a serial entrepreneur and Alec was an old friend from 20 years ago when he was a student activist.

In 2006 and 2007, as we were coalescing around the plan, our common sense was that the industry was too fixated on the hardware. There were a bunch of geeks engrossed in their gadgets, but the gadgets were commoditizing before the market had matured. The customer is what matters. So we decided to build a business not on the hardware side but downstream, focusing on … Next Page »

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Yesterday we told you all about Recurve, a San Francisco home energy auditing and retrofitting startup whose founder argues that before energy-conscious homeowners put solar panels on the roof, they should focus on fixing what’s under it—poor insulation, leaky ducts and windows, inefficient HVAC systems, and the like. But let’s assume you’ve done all that. What’s next? Here in California, there’s an array of companies working to make it far easier and more affordable to install electricity-generating solar panels on your home.

One of the most innovative and fast-growing startups in this industry is Oakland, CA-based Sungevity, which is probably unlike any cleantech company you’ve heard of. The company doesn’t have its own installation workforce, and unlike competing firms such as SunRun, it doesn’t have “power purchase agreements” under which homeowners buy electricity from the company. What it does have is software. It’s got applications that allow technicians to peer down from the sky (via Google Earth-style satellite photos) and figure out exactly how many solar panels will fit on your roof, then generate a project estimate. It’s got applications to automate the sales process, and it’s got applications to cut through the red tape around permitting for solar installations.

In effect, Sungevity is a new low-overhead, high-efficiency middleman in a business that’s long been a cottage industry, dominated by small solar installers who have to roll a truck every time a potential customer requests an estimate. (In many of these respects, Sungevity is similar to Recurve, which, as I explained yesterday, is also using software to systematize and scale up a cottage industry—in its case, home energy retrofitting.)

Danny Kennedy, Sungevity’s founder, argues that simplifying and automating the solar installation process is the only way to bring this form of renewable power to the mass market. Together with co-founders Andrew Birch and Alec Guettel and chief financial officer Charles Ferer, he’s built a business that’s collected $9 million in venture backing and is set to grow from $3 million in revenue in 2009 to nearly $30 million this year, with no end in sight. The core of the business model is the 10-year “solar lease,” an idea Ferer brought with him from former employer Solar City. In return for assigning solar tax credits and rebates to the lender—Sungevity and its financial partner US Bank, in this case—homeowners get to install solar panels for only about half of the actual cost of equipment and labor, and they can pay for the project over the course of 120 months.

Sitting down with Kennedy to talk leases and rebates and software is an unusual experience, given that his background isn’t in the energy business at all, but in environmental activism. A native of Australia, Kennedy is a 12-year veteran of Greenpeace, where he started out in the 1990s working to block oil projects in Africa and went on to run the organization’s California Clean Energy campaign. That campaign helped to bring about Governor Schwarzenegger’s $2.8 billion California Solar Initiative, under which the state is providing cash rebates of $1 to $2 per watt for solar photovoltaic installations. (A typical home installation might amount to 3 to 10 kilowatts.)

Those rebates are a big part of what’s making programs like Sungevity’s solar leases affordable, and are one of the reasons Kennedy and co-founders decided to build their business in the Bay Area. Another is the population’s openness to new ways of doing business: “If there is anywhere that’s going to be comfortable adapting to Internet commerce models [for solar installation], it’s California,” Kennedy says.

Our look at Sungevity comes in the form of an extended Q&A. In Part 1, below, Kennedy talks about Sungevity’s business model and technology, and describes how the installation process works. In Part 2, coming tomorrow, he talks about how he made the leap from Greenpeace to energy entrepreneurship, how Sungevity plans to scale up, and how the company’s work fits into global efforts to reduce carbon emissions and blunt the effects of climate change.

Xconomy: What is the mission of Sungevity?

Danny Kennedy: The big picture mission is to take solar to scale. Which I’m sure every solar entrepreneur says they want to do, but our vision is to do it in the residential market, which is ultimately the highest value market for solar electricity. Finding a scalable way to deliver solar electricity to residential customers in middle America is the best chance to make large profitable ventures, which will in turn scale the production and consumption of solar itself.

If you can capture developed-country, grid-connected markets, such as the wealthy German, Japanese, or California markets, it will drive solar production in … Next Page »

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According to reports in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and elsewhere, Mountain View, CA-based Google has acquired Tel Aviv startup MentorWave Technologies. The company is known for its Quiksee service, which allows users to upload interactive photo and video tours of real-world locations and pin them to online maps. A report in TechCrunch puts the purchase price at $10 million to $12 million. The startup will join Google’s Geo team, which oversees its Google Maps and Google Earth products.

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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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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 »

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When I was in fifth grade, I wanted to be an architect. (I also wanted to be a geneticist, a meteorologist, and an astronaut. I guess I wound up doing the next best thing to all of those sci/tech careers—writing about them.) I loved my junior builder kit, a collection of little plastic columns and I-beams and snap-on windows that was perfect for constructing models of International-style skyscrapers like the Sears Tower in Chicago. The only problem with the kit was that once you’d finished your perfect modernist creation, you had to tear it all down before you could build something else.

Now there’s an easy way to build as many model buildings as you want—and put them on display for millions of people to see. It’s Google’s Building Maker tool, released last month. The Web-based software lets you easily create beautifully textured 3-D models of real buildings by matching up simple digital shapes with information from Google’s aerial photographs of major cities. You can store your finished models in Google’s 3-D Warehouse and submit them to Google for “publication.” If a model is well-constructed and no one else has built a better version, Google will insert it into Google Earth itself.

Google made Building Maker available for about 50 world cities when it introduced the tool on October 13. This Tuesday, it added eight new cities to the list: Boston; Brussels, Belgium; Cologne and Dortmund in Germany; Las Vegas; Los Angeles; Rotterdam in the Netherlands; and San Jose, CA. Once I heard Boston had been added to the list, I couldn’t resist diving in and playing around with the tool, starting with a model of my own apartment building in Boston’s South End.

After a couple of days of experimenting, I can tell that Building Maker is going to provide some addictive fun for a lot of mapping and modeling freaks like me. But just as important, I think it will provide a rewarding way for people who aren’t professional architects or cartographers to contribute to the “geoweb.” Today, we can explore this expanding digital replica of the real world through 2-D interfaces like Google Maps, Google Earth, and Microsoft Virtual Earth. But as it gains fidelity, the geoweb could eventually blossom into the immersive, geographically accurate 3-D online world that futurists have called the Metaverse.

If the Metaverse does come into being someday, it will be in large part thanks to Google, which is on a mission to “create a three-dimensional model of every built structure on Earth,” according to an October blog past by Google product manager Mark Limber. But even a company as wealthy as Google doesn’t have the resources to model all the world’s buildings on its own. So in classic Tom Sawyer fashion, it came up with Building Maker, which makes the work so enjoyable that thousands of Google users will be glad to pitch in.

From talking with Limber himself yesterday, I’m convinced that this strategy is only one part shrewdness and about three parts sheer enthusiasm. “The world is really big, and there are an awful lot of buildings, so I do think everybody will have to get involved” to fill out the 3-D world, Limber says. “But on a personal level, it’s really fun to be able to drop a couple of blocks, move them around a bit, add a texture, and voila! There is a little bit of magic there that we hope will draw people into this whole word of 3-D, and be a little more informed about it because they participated in it.”

Like all good pastimes, Building Maker starts out simple, but goes very deep. What makes the tool possible in the first place is the fact that … Next Page »

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I’ve been writing World Wide Wade for almost a year now; this is the 44th installment. A year is a long time in the technology world—long enough for many of the gadgets, services, and websites I’ve covered in the past to evolve cool new features. So I thought I’d revisit a few of my previous columns and fill you in about what’s changed.

1. Beyond megapixels. In my April 4 and June 6 columns, I wrote about the Gigapan community site, where you can upload super-high-resolution photos stitched together from lots of regular digital shots. In January of this year, a new company called GigaPan Systems introduced a $379 robot camera mount that puts gigapixel imaging within the reach of hobbyists. It takes care of the tedious part of gigapixel imaging by guiding your camera through hundreds or thousands of individually-angled shots, with just enough overlap to give the stitching software something to work with.

2. News aggregators on steroids. Last April 11, I wrote about my favorite news-tracking tools on the Web, including Netvibes and Alltop. Netvibes hasn’t changed much in the last year, but Alltop, a cool aggregator that uses pop-up windows to squeeze a lot of news onto a single page, has exploded beyond all bounds. It had about 55 categories of RSS feeds when I last wrote about it; now there must be well over 500, on everything from Atheism to Zoology. And for tech-news enthusiasts, there’s a site called TechFuga that recently got a nice overhaul that makes it more competitive with the uber-popular but somewhat tired TechMeme. The new features at TechFuga include Twitter searching, reflecting the fact that more and more people are getting their news from each other via the red-hot microblogging service. (Speaking of Twitter, you can follow me there at “wroush“.)

3. Earth as you’ve never seen it. On April 18, I wrote about Google Earth 4.3, which featured improved navigation and a larger crop of 3-D buildings. The latest version of the world’s most popular geo-browser, Google Earth 5.0, came out in the middle of last month. The coolest improvements: a fantastic view of the ocean floor, the ability to delve back in time and see aerial imagery from the 1980s and earlier, and imagery for Mars as well as Earth and the Moon.

4. An art museum in your living room. If you’ve got an HDTV already, there’s no reason to buy one of those expensive digital photo frames. My April 25 column talked about GalleryPlayer, a company that provided software and imagery for turning your TV into a digital art exhibit. Unfortunately, GalleryPlayer went out of business in July (though founder Scott Lipsky, an ex-Amazon exec, hinted that it had merely been sold and might re-emerge). Luckily, there are still plenty of ways to find and display high-resolution images on your big screen. DeviantArt is a great place to browse and download free HD-resolution images created by professional artists and photographers. And if you hook up your computer to your TV, you can use software like Slickr or FlickrFan to display those images—or your own—in the form of animated slide shows.

5. An elephant never forgets. My July 18 column was about Evernote, a fantastic cross-platform system for storing and tracking all the info-flotsam in your life: Web pages, photos, receipts, you name it. I still add material to my Evernote account every day, and the company just keeps making the software better and better. There’s now a version for Android phones (on top of the existing Web, Windows, Mac, Windows Mobile, and iPhone versions). In December, Evernote (whose logo is an elephant) added a file synchronization feature, so you can use it to keep copies of important Word files, PDFs, PowerPoints, and other electronic documents, and more recently, it rolled out a vastly improved version of its Web Clipper, which is the tool I use most often. A feature I plan to try soon is the recently-announced Shoeboxed, a service that will scan that pile of business cards and receipts on your desk and put them right into Evernote. And if you used Google Notebooks—which Google gave up on in January—you can easily import all of your notes to Evernote and pick up where you left off.

6. Cutting the cord. In my July 25 column, I threatened to give up my cable TV subscription and switch to watching my favorite shows online, via video aggregators like Hulu. Well, it took me a while to gather up the courage, but last week I finally made good on the threat, and dropped my $80 digital cable package at Comcast in favor of a $10 lineup of about 23 local channels (which I kept just in case I ever feel the need to watch live news). While I was at it, I canceled … Next Page »

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There’s a small company in downtown Seattle called 3Tier Group that has a goal of no less than “Remapping the World” for alternative energy. T. Boone Pickens, the billionaire Texas oilman, is such a big fan, he used 3Tier’s maps to draw a bold conclusion-that the United States has the potential to be “the Saudi Arabia of Wind.”

3Tier might sound a little New-Agey in its goals, maybe a little pie-in-the-sky in a world where Exxon Mobil has enough money in the bank ($36.7 billion on Sept. 30) to bury all U.S. cleantech startups. So I decided to check it out personally, meeting with Kenneth Westrick, the founder and CEO, at his 21st floor offices in the Westin Building in downtown Seattle. Westrick, an atmospheric scientist with a master’s from the University of Washington, greeted me with a boisterous handshake. He was wearing a long brown leather jacket like the one worn by Jimmy McNulty, the protagonist of HBO’s “The Wire.” (One of my all-time favorite shows.)

When we sat down in a conference room looking out over South Lake Union, I asked what he really meant with his “Remapping the World” initiative. It’s about using high-powered computers to crunch data that helps developers, financiers, and governments decide where the best places are to put a wind farm, solar panels, or hydropower turbines. This isn’t nearly as easy as it sounds, because wind ebbs and flows at different times of day, different seasons of the year. Some years are El Nino, some La Nina. Measurement instruments at Sea-Tac airport don’t always capture wind speed at the corner of 1st Avenue and Pike Street. Same goes for solar, and hydro.

That’s a lot of variables to account for, especially if you’re General Electric and looking to invest $300 million in a wind farm that’s supposed to pay off over two or three decades. So 3Tier inhales huge amounts of climate data into its computers, and analyzes it in models to come up with an accurate forecast of what kind of power a particular wind farm is going to produce over time. It can also take measurements at a site over a year’s time, and crunch numbers that may spot a better site a few miles away from one the developer originally scoped out, Westrick says.

“The greatest risk is in the availability of fuel,” Westrick says. “We can create a map of where the wind blows. We can ask where is it abundant? Will it be abundant when we need it?” He added later, “Only a couple of companies can do this.”

Westrick started this company in 1999 in his bedroom. It has grown to about 70 employees. About one-third were trained in earth sciences, one-third are software programmers, and the rest in are in administration, support and business development, he says. 3Tier doesn’t disclose its financials as a private company, but he says the company has boosted sales growth by more than … Next Page »

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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.

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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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