A Boston-area security tech company and the University of Michigan are involved in one of the most ambitious—and potentially controversial—transportation projects of our time. It could have major impact on federal legislation, and almost everyone you know.

Picture this: You’re driving in your car, approaching an intersection. Maybe you’re speeding a little, going 40 mph in a 35 zone, say. Unbeknownst to you, another driver is racing down the cross street and is about to run a red light (probably texting or something). This could spell disaster. But instead, your car picks up a wireless signal from the other vehicle. A beeping sound or flashing light on your dashboard alerts you to slow down, so you hit the brakes. Disaster averted.

Now let’s take it a step further. Maybe the alert is hooked into your car’s control system, so if you don’t put on the brakes, your car does it automatically. And maybe that’s fine with you. But you might be a little worried about giving up that kind of control in life-and-death situations. After all, computers get hacked and software crashes. Not to mention, you might not want your car broadcasting its speed and location out there for all to see (especially not the cops, since you were speeding).

This scenario isn’t the future. It’s happening already—at least the driver-alert part. In six cities around the U.S., trials of about 100 drivers each are underway to see how people react to in-car alerts (such as collision warnings, do not pass, and vehicle stopped ahead). But the next step is bigger. In Ann Arbor, MI, some 3,000 cars will be equipped with onboard wireless devices for communicating with each other and signaling to drivers when there’s an imminent hazard. This 12-month pilot study, which was announced recently and starts next August, is being led by the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI) through a $14.9 million contract from the U.S. Department of Transportation. The state of Michigan has been heavily involved as well.

The goal of the federal initiative is, ultimately, to save lives. In the U.S., auto accidents are the leading cause of death for people aged 15 to 34; more than 30,000 people are killed on the nation’s roadways each year. The hope is that with new early-warning systems in place, a sizable fraction of would-be victims could be saved—some say 80 percent of non-alcohol-related cases—especially when high speed is involved.

The idea of wirelessly connected cars isn’t new, of course. The field of vehicle telematics has been around for years, with applications in fleet management, tracking, and safety. But advances in GPS location technologies, wireless communications, sensors, hardware, and algorithms are enabling smarter, better-connected vehicles to be tested on a bigger scale. And recent breakthroughs such as autonomous road-racing vehicles and Google’s self-driving car are starting to propel the technology into the mainstream.

Nevertheless, the Michigan study raises some serious real-world concerns. “This is a massive system with tremendous security and privacy implications,” says Ed Adams, the chief executive of Security Innovation in Wilmington, MA. And that’s exactly where his software security firm comes in.

Security Innovation developed the mobile software being used in the U-M study to … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Seattle-based 3Tier Group, which has developed a map of the world’s best places for wind and solar power, has named Craig Husa as its new chief executive. Founder Kenneth Westrick, who previously served as CEO, remains with the company as chairman. The company announced in December that Westrick was moving away from day-to-day duties.

Husa is an experienced businessman who previously served as CEO of NeuralIQ, General Software, and Healia, and founded CourtLink Corporation, 3Tier said in a statement. Westrick said Husa has a record of guiding “similarly sized companies through aggressive expansion.” Husa also holds an MBA from Harvard and is a former Navy officer who trained in nuclear engineering and served on submarines, 3Tier said.

We last checked in with 3Tier more than a year ago, when the company had just reported $3 million in additional equity financing and was fresh from completing its map of promising solar-power sites. The map of wind currents was completed in late 2008, and the company raised $10 million to finish the project around that time.

The recession hit alternative energy companies hard, though, and 3Tier was forced to lay off an unspecified number of people in 2009. 3Tier is privately held and backed by venture investors, with Switzerland-based Good Energies as lead investor.

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:          

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 »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

There are plenty of GPS-based smartphone apps these days that can give you turn-by-turn directions as you commute to work or drive to Grandma’s for the holidays. But there aren’t many that can tell you to get off at the next exit because an app user 10 minutes ahead of you got stuck in a traffic jam. In fact, there’s only one: Waze.

The four-year-old startup behind the app, which relocated its headquarters this summer from Tel Aviv, Israel, to Palo Alto, CA, calls the Waze system a “social mobile” application. Not only is the map data you see on Waze collected by users themselves, but if enough users have the free iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, or Symbian app running on their smartphones as they drive, Waze can assemble a live traffic map of a metropolitan region and send users advice about the quickest paths. Eventually, it might also be able to serve them highly targeted advertisements and discount offers based on their current locations or their customary routes.

“Our goal is to shave five minutes off your commute every day,” says CEO Noam Bardin. With 2.2 million people using Waze worldwide for an average of 300 minutes per month per user, the goal isn’t an unreasonable one. “Just like Yelp has become part of going out to eat and Groupon has become part of shopping, you’ll turn on Waze because we will give you the best route,” he predicts.

Today Waze announced that it has collected an impressive $25 million in Series B financing. (It’s the second big “up round” we’ve reported today—San Francisco-based Zendesk nabbed $19 million.) Blue Run Ventures, which also pitched in for Waze’s $12 million Series A round in 2008, led the new round for Waze, which was joined by existing investors Magma Venture Partners and Vertex Venture Capital. The big addition to Waze’s lineup of backers is strategic investor Qualcomm Ventures, a unit of the San Diego-based maker of communications chips for cell phones.

Waze passed the 1.5-million-user mark in September—only 20 months after the app debuted in Israel, and about 10 months after its U.S. launch, Bardin says. That was the event that attracted the attention of investors willing to put big bucks into Waze’s further expansion. “In the location segment, 1.5 million is the threshold—up to that point it’s just noise,” says Bardin, who previously co-founded Deltathree (NASDAQ: DDDC), a voice-over-Internet provider that went public in 1999. “So we got a tremendous amount of interest.”

Waze was “looking for strategic investors who could bring unique assets, and Qualcomm is a great example of that,” Bardin adds. The San Diego company is deeply involved in … Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

None of this would have happened 10 years ago. Where to begin?

Last month, I walked into a room of about a dozen robotics experts and technology startup investors. It was one of the sessions at the MassTLC Innovation “unConference” in Boston. The discussion centered around how to build a successful robotics company. But it was some of the newer context around this question that turned the session into a watershed moment I won’t soon forget.

Two main takeaways: First, robotics companies around Boston have come a very long way since 2000, when I was a postdoc in a robotics group at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. That sort of academic research is still going strong, but the bigger story of the past decade has been the business success of robotic vacuum cleaners, bomb-disposal units, and surveillance drones, and how that has helped pave the way for a new generation of companies.

My second takeaway is that the business community thinks there is a new threat to Boston’s competitive position in robotics—and its name is Google. I’m not usually one to fan the flames of Boston vs. Silicon Valley arguments, but in this case the discussion hits close to home, so I wanted to see if there’s much truth to it.

The Boston area, of course, is home to numerous robotics companies—iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT), Boston Dynamics, Harvest Automation, Heartland Robotics, Kiva Systems, iWalk, and CyPhy Works, just to name a few. Many of those companies were represented in the unConference session, along with investors from CommonAngels, Founder Collective, and General Catalyst. Historically the region has had lots of expertise, both in universities and industry, in key technologies underlying robotics such as sensors, actuators, control algorithms, artificial intelligence, computer vision, and data storage.

Yet 10 years ago, most early-stage investors (angels and VCs) wouldn’t think of touching a robotics startup. The development costs and business risks were too high, and the technology infrastructure—onboard processing power, wireless communication, programmable chips, sensors, algorithms—wasn’t quite ready for prime time. Now things have changed, certainly in investors’ minds, … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

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.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

It’s been a busy week already when it comes to acquisitions and venture deals in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. There’s too much going on to write it all up separately, so here’s a quick rundown:

—After operating for just two and a half years and raising $76 million in venture funding, Mountain View, CA-based social gaming giant Playdom will be acquired by Burbank, CA-based Disney (NYSE: DIS) for $563 million plus up to $200 million in follow-on payments, dependent on the company’s performance. Playdom games like Bola, Market Street, Social City, and Sorority Life are among the top social titles on MySpace and Facebook. The startup’s investors included Bessemer Venture Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, New Enterprise Associates, New World Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, and Steamboat Ventures.

–Adobe (NASDAQ: ADBE) in San Jose, CA, will buy Day Software, a Zurich, Switzerland-based maker of content management software for companies maintaining large websites, for roughly $240 million. Software made by Day, which went public on the Swiss Exchange in 2000, is behind the websites of many Fortune 1000 companies, including Adobe. I wrote last fall about Day’s decision to move its U.S. headquarters from Newport Beach, CA, to Boston.

—San Francisco-based Nexant, a provider of grid management software to electric utilities, has raised $32.5 million in a venture financing round that could total $50.4 million, according to a regulatory filing yesterday. The funders were not identified, but past investors in Nexant include Beacon Group, Bechtel Capital Partners, IBM, MIC Capital, Morgan Stanley, and Nth Power Technologies, according to VentureWire.

—CloudMade in Menlo Park, CA, announced that it has raised $12.3 million in Series B funding. The company creates software tools that allow makers of mobile and Web-based applications to incorporate maps based on data from the crowdsourced OpenStreetMap project, which was started by CloudMade co-founder Nick Black. New investor Greylock Partners led the round, which also included original investor Sunstone Capital.

—San Jose-based BlueArc, which makes network storage systems for large enterprises, has raised $20 million in new financing from a group of 31 investors, according to a regulatory filing and a company announcement. Investor Growth Capital, the venture capital arm of Sweden’s Investor AB, led the round.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

Every Wi-Fi network in every home and business broadcasts both public data—such as its network name and unique machine identifier—and “payload data,” or actual content such as e-mails and Web pages. For the last several years, Google said on Friday, the Street View teams who crisscross the world taking pictures and collecting Wi-Fi network location data have inadvertently been recording fragments of payload data traveling on those networks.

To stem concerns about the potential misuse of the data, the search giant has temporarily grounded its Street View fleet and is working with regulators in Europe—where an audit request this month triggered the discovery—to ensure that the private data is properly deleted. But while Google has traced the problem to a communications breakdown between its software engineers and Street View project leaders, a local observer familiar with location finding technology says the crisis may have originated earlier, with specific technical decisions about how Google collects Wi-Fi data.

“It’s really a matter of the questions you ask each [Wi-Fi] access point,” says Ted Morgan, CEO and co-founder of Boston-based Skyhook Wireless. “There are a couple of different approaches to getting the signal data; one of them is active scanning, and the other is passive sniffing. Both techniques have their pros and cons, but when you are doing the passive sniffing you have to make sure you are not accessing private network messages. It’s not a hard thing to do; you just do not record those messages.”

Skyhook has been collecting data on the locations of Wi-Fi networks around the world since 2003, to feed the database behind the location-finding software that it licenses to mobile device makers such as Apple, Motorola, and Dell. Skyhook has used only active scanning to collect the data, Morgan says, whereas Google’s Street View teams employ passive sniffing.

And that’s what seems to have set up Google for the current crisis. In a post on the company blog on Friday, Alan Eustace, a senior vice president of engineering and research at Google, said an engineer working on an experimental Wi-Fi project in 2006 “wrote a piece of code that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast Wi-Fi data. A year later, when our mobile team started a project to collect basic Wi-Fi network data like SSID information and MAC addresses using Google’s Street View cars, they included that code in their software—although the project leaders did not want, and had no intention of using, payload data.”

Google surveys Wi-Fi networks for the same basic reason Skyhook does—to provide an additional way, beyond GPS and cell tower triangulation, for phones (in Google’s case, those powered by its Android operating system) to determine their locations. The devil, as always, is in the details. In active scanning, Wi-Fi surveyors driving down a public street send out probe requests that … Next Page »

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:          

Portland, OR-based Platial, a social mapping startup, is shutting its doors, according to a blog post on the site. The news was reported yesterday by paidContent, TechCrunch, GigaOm, and others. Platial was backed by Kleiner Perkins, Keynote Ventures, Ron Conway, and other investors.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

Bellevue, WA-based Root Wireless, a maker of technologies that analyze and map the performance of cellular networks and devices, announced today it has closed $3.25 million in Series B funding co-led by Fred Warren and Oliver Grace, Jr. Also participating in the round were existing investors Scott Anderson, Jack Roberts and John Stanton. Root Wireless formed a partnership last month with CBS Interactive to allow the tech news site CNET to post maps of cellular network strengths and weaknesses. The startup, led by CEO Paul Griff, currently tracks network performance in eight metro areas around the U.S., and is mapping 12 more. News of the funding was first reported by TechFlash.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

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 »

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share:          

Say you’d like to look up an old friend from high school. You have no idea what happened to him after college, and you can’t find him on Facebook. But you do remember the address of his house down the street from your childhood home. What if there was a Web-based map where you could log on, locate your friend’s old house, and leave a virtual note for him to find?

That’s the scenario that Mark Sherman hopes millions of people will explore at ZoomAtlas, a new social mapping service going public today at O’Reilly Media’s Web 2.0 Expo in New York. Using the site’s tools, you can publicly annotate any location that has some personal meaning to you. That might mean leaving a note for someone, or it might mean reminiscing about the house where you grew up, or a school you attended, or even a restaurant where you had a good meal.

But Sherman, the president, CEO, and main funder of the Cambridge, MA-based startup, thinks finding long-lost acquaintances will be the most compelling use for the site. “There’s nothing on Facebook I’ve seen that allows you to reconnect on the micro level,” he says. “The closest thing you have is groups for school alumni—but that’s not the only place that people want to reconnect from.”

You can think of ZoomAtlas as a cross between Google Maps, Facebook, and Wikipedia, with user-generated missives and memories as the key ingredients that—in theory, at least—will make it more than just another mapping site.

Speaking of Wikipedia, Sherman says Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the first wiki, is a close friend and an advisor to the company. In a short essay posted on the site, Cunningham says ZoomAtlas is “a perfect example” of the collaborative philosophy behind wikis. “We can make an atlas of our world that shows what we know and love, not just what a satellite can see,” Cunningham writes. “We can weave our memories and impressions together using the computer’s ever improving graphics to make a collaborative picture from our eyes and minds and hearts in equal proportion.”

The first thing to try when you visit ZoomAtlas is typing in a specific street address—say, the house where you grew up. You’ll see a satellite image of the neighborhood, with small icons representing the location of each house. Each house icon can be edited in a number of ways: you can move it in case it’s not in the right location on the property, you can give it a different look to correspond to your memory of the place, you can write an article about that address (this is the most Wikipedia-like part), and you can attach short notes for others to find. Right now the maps are 2-D, but in the future, according to Sherman, you’ll be able to go inside houses and annotate individual rooms. “Users are empowered to help detail to the map to the point that every location on Earth, no matter how small, can be defined and have attributes assigned to it,” says Sherman.

But ZoomAtlas is more than just a map-based bulletin board where people can leave notes for long-lost friends, Sherman says. He hopes it will evolve into the locus for any online conversation linked to a place. “It’s a framework on which to allow discussion of locations, whether big or small,” he says. “If there were another Fort Hood incident, God forbid, you could … Next Page »

Comments (9) | Reprints | Share:          

Being journalists, we here at Xconomy try to refrain from bald political statements or endorsements. We’d never ask you to “vote early and often” for any candidate for office. But this week we can cheerfully recommend that you subvert the democratic process by going to www.google.com/trike and voting as many times as you can for Boston’s Faneuil Hall Marketplace as the next U.S. pedestrian mall to be photographed by Google’s tricycle-borne Street View crew.

Street View, as most Google users know, is the Google Maps feature that gives you a panoramic visual preview of places you may plan to visit in person. Using a fleet of camera-equipped cars, Google has collected 360-degree, street-level views for hundreds of cities in all 50 U.S. states and quite a few countries around the world. But until recently, those views haven’t extended into pedestrian malls, parks, hiking trails, and other areas where cars are off limits.

That’s changing thanks to the Street View Trike, a contraption dreamed up a couple of years ago by Google senior mechanical engineer Dan Ratner. The trikes are essentially pedicabs that Google has converted to carry the standard Street View camera and computer equipment. Ratner and his crew have already used the trikes to create Street View images of places like California’s Legoland (just north of San Diego), and in an October post on the official Google blog, Ratner invited users to say where they’d like to see the trikes go next.

The company got 25,000 nominations, and on Monday it announced that it had picked 24 finalists in five categories. Faneuil Hall is a finalist in the pedestrian malls category. It’s pitted against Chicago’s Navy Pier and San Francisco’s Pier 39.

Now, without insulting our friends in the Windy City and the Golden Gate, I think it’s fair to say that Faneuil Hall is the only historically significant place on that list. Pier 39 is a mall-on-stilts built in the 1970s that owes most of its fame to the sea lions who have adopted it as their home, and Navy Pier was basically an abandoned eyesore until its redevelopment in the 1990s. So Boston’s historic “cradle of liberty”—the site of fiery oratory by the fathers of the revolution—should clearly be the first of these locations to get the Google Trike treatment.

Google users get to vote for the winners in each category. According to the company, you can vote as many times as you like—but you’ve only got until midnight on Monday, November 30. So stop reading this now and go vote!

To get the whole scoop on the Google Trike and how it’s changing the face of Google Street View, I talked with Dan Ratner himself on Tuesday.

Xconomy: Do you think the Google Trike helps to put a human face on Street View, which has sometimes run into public skepticism and misunderstandings?

Dan Ratner: Let me put it this way. Every time I’ve been out there on the bike—which is quite a number of times now—there’s been a lot of excitement. People are like, “Wow, this is Google Street View? I’ve seen that, but I didn’t know how you get the data!” Seeing a bicycle does seem to put a human face on it, literally, because … Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

If you’re under 25 or so, you probably don’t need much training on how to share digital photos, make a digital sketch, create an animated cartoon, make a personalized online map, or the like. I wrote the last three installments of my World Wide Wade column for everyone else: The majority of everyday computer users who are vaguely aware of all the amazing tools popping up in the digital media world, and who might even enjoy putting some of them to creative use, but who could use a few handy pointers.

But my “Seven Projects to Stretch Your Digital Wings” series appeared in three episodes over the course of two weeks, which isn’t too handy. So I thought it might be useful to list all seven projects in one place. Here we go:

1. Make a Digital Painting with Brushes. Relive your finger-painting days using the same iPhone app used by artist Jorge Colombo to create the June 1 cover of The New Yorker.

2. Start Lifestreaming with Friendfeed or Posterous. Set up a “lifestream”—2009′s replacement for the old-fashioned blog—as a locus for all your social media activities.

3. Document a Space with Photosynth. Use Microsoft’s amazing experimental software for collating hundreds of digital pictures of a single space or object into an immersive, three-dimensional environment.

4. Become an Amateur Podcaster with AudioBoo. Learn how to use this UK-born iPhone app to make mini-podcasts that all your friends can listen to.

5. Create a Short Animated Film with Xtranormal. Be the first on your block to script your own computer-animated short feature, using a nifty new “text-to-movie” technology.

6. Put Yourself on the Map with Platial. Learn the basics of photo-enhanced storytelling using digital maps.

7. Become a Virtual Architect in Second Life. Try your hand at building 3-D virtual objects inside the world’s most flexible and welcoming social virtual world.

Have fun and let us know what you created!

Comments (4) | Reprints | Share:          

When I set out to write “Seven Projects to Stretch Your Digital Wings” two weeks ago, I really meant to put all seven projects into one column. But I’m famous around Xconomy for my inability to say anything briefly. If 800 words are good, then 1,600 words are even better—that’s my motto.

The point being that I only got through three projects in that first column—on art, writing, and photography—before I ran out of time and space. Last week, I finished two more, on audio self-publishing and computer animation. In today’s third and last installment, I want to suggest two final projects that will give you a chance to express yourself in digital media that may be a little less familiar: maps and 3-D virtual worlds.

6. Put Yourself on the Map with Platial

Mapmaking hasn’t traditionally been seen as a craft open to amateurs, or even one where self-expression is encouraged. A map, after all, is a public resource, and is supposed to be objective and accurate, right? Well, maybe in theory. In practice, the digital revolution is transforming the meaning of maps just as drastically as it’s changing the way we think about music and news and other forms of communication.

Platial is a website where average users can try a new form of storytelling that combines maps, photos, and writing. Once you’ve signed up for an account, you can create your own themed maps for other Platial visitors to browse. Each map consists of a set of locations that you designate on an underlying Google map; for each location, you can add a title, a written description, photos, and Web links.

One way to use Platial would be as a kind of personal photo-travelogue, uploading pictures from your trips across the country or around the world. But a lot of people seem to employ Platial to document personal interests or obsessions. For example, a user named “Barnaclebarnes” has created a map of famous film locations, like the house in suburban Tujunga, CA, where Steven Spielberg filmed E.T. And I’m working on my own Platial map showing locations around San Francisco used in one specific film, Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

You can designate a map on Platial as closed—meaning it’s for your own personal doodling—or open, meaning anyone can contribute to it. One cool open map is “Where I Was When I Heard Obama Won,” where you can join the more than 15,000 people who have marked the spots where they learned of President Obama’s historic election. For people on the go, the folks at Platial have also built an iPhone app called Nearby that figures out where you are and shows you nearby Platial locations created by other users. The app also lets you create and document new locations directly from your phone.

To me, the intriguing thing about Platial is the way it melds the personal and the public—allowing users to anchor their inner visions and insights by attaching them to maps representing our shared landscape. And Platial is just one example of a worldwide explosion of Web-mediated geographical expression and exploration. The phenomenon goes by fancy names like “neogeography” and “locative media,” but it boils down to … Next Page »

Comments (4) | Reprints | Share:          

Boston-based uLocate, maker of the “Where” platform for location-based applications on mobile devices, today announced the launch of a new iPhone application called Traffic.com. Using maps and data from Navteq’s website of the same name, the application detects the user’s location and shows which local roads and highways are congested. The app, which appeared in Apple’s iTunes App Store last week and is already the store’s top traffic application, also allows users to get accident reports and other traffic data create for a customized set of frequently traveled routes.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

At a press conference in the bustling lobby of Boston’s South Station this morning, Google and the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (known to locals as the “T”) announced that they’ve collaborated to make route and schedule information for all T trains and buses available inside Google Maps.

It’s all information that’s already online at the MBTA’s own Trip Planner website (which includes embedded Google maps), but now it’s accessible to Google’s large number of users, who can go to the “Get Directions” tab of a Google Map, click on the new “By Public Transit” link, and see a list of transportation options, with route maps and estimated trip times for each.

For example, for my own commute from my apartment in the South End to Xconomy’s office in Kendall Square, Google Maps suggests several options: take the #1 bus down Massachusetts Avenue to MIT, then walk (38 minutes); take the Silver Line bus to the Broadway T station, then take the Red Line to Kendall Square (37 minutes); or walk to Boylston Street, then take the Green and Red Lines to Kendall Square (43 minutes).

Using the Street View feature of Google Maps, potential T riders can get a photographic look at locations like bus stops, to better prepare for their trip. The service also works on mobile versions of Google Maps, for Web-capable cell phones such as iPhones, Blackberrys, and Android phones.

“There’s no excuse now not to feel a level of comfort [riding the T] because of the navigability of this new system,” said Dan Grabauskas, general manager of the MBTA.

Between eight and 10 other cities (including San Diego and Seattle, Xconomy’s other hometowns) have already partnered with Google to put their transit systems’ information into Google Maps, according to Steve Vinter, engineering director for Google’s Boston-area headquarters in Kendall Square.

Getting a new city involved in what Google calls its “Google Transit” program involves two ingredients, Vinter told me after the press event. “There’s a technical part and a non-technical part,” he said. “The technical part is there’s a lot of data that has to be available in a certain format, and it has to be exchanged, and there has to be a system set up to make sure it’s up to date. The non-technical piece, obviously, is a commitment to share the information and to work through the obstacles to get the partnership to be successful. In this case, it’s all come together and it’s working great.”

Vinter says Google didn’t have to do much to clean up the data supplied by the MBTA. “It was in the format we’d requested, but I think it was some work on their side to get it all organized and pulled together. That’s what the big accomplishment was here.”

Of course, the transit directions that Massachusetts residents get from Google Maps is only going to be as accurate as the MBTA’s own data. And as it turns out, there are concerns about whether that data is as up-to-date as it could be. At South Station, I spoke with Jonathan Kamens, a Boston resident who said that the MBTA’s published information about where T buses stop in his neighborhood has been wrong for the last six years. “Now they’re putting that incorrect data into Google Maps, where it will be orders of magnitude more accessible,” Kamens said.

The MBTA may already have identified Kamens as a potential troublemaker. In an unfortunate example of what I saw as overbearing policing, a transit police officer interrupted our interview and threatened to remove Kamens from South Station after she saw him hand me a flyer detailing his unsuccessful attempts to get the MBTA to update the bus route information for his neighborhood. The officer said a permit is required to distribute printed information on MBTA property—even if that printed information is being handed to a journalist. The officer said Kamens was allowed to talk to me all he wanted—he just couldn’t hand me any information on paper. [Update: Kamens has blogged about the incident here.]

I asked Vinter whether putting transit system information online via Google might create an opening for a crowdsourced solution to the MBTA’s alleged data accuracy problems. In Google Maps, after all, it’s possible for any user to correct Google’s own information about the physical locations of street addresses simply by dragging a location marker to the right spot on the map.

“Google has a lot of tools for crowdsourcing,” Vinter agreed. “I think the correction process, as you might understand, is a little more complicated. Changes have to be done in a controlled way and reviewed. I think what this is going to do is make the information that’s there much more publicly visible and accessible, and it’s going to create the opportunity to get a broader review of what’s correct and what’s not, and hopefully allow us to get that feedback loop to happen.”

Comments (6) | Reprints | Share:          

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Most eyes in the mobile industry are on San Francisco today, where Apple unveiled the latest version of its smart phone platform, the $199 iPhone 3GS, at its Worldwide Developer Conference. But that hasn’t diminished the buzz around Palm’s newest phone, the $200 Palm Pre, which hit stores on Saturday and has already sold at least 100,000 units. One of the leading apps for the Pre, a collection of location-driven software widgets called Where, comes from Boston’s own uLocate.

Like the iPhone, Symbian, and Blackberry versions of Where, the version that uLocate developed for the Pre’s webOS operating system taps into the device’s built-in GPS capability to provide location-specific data such as weather forecasts, news, restaurant reviews, movie showtimes, and nearby Starbucks locations. It’s currently the 5th most popular app in the Palm Pre’s App Catalog, according to Lacy Garcia, uLocate’s director of marketing and communications. (At this early stage in the Pre’s life, though, there are fewer than two dozen apps in the catalog altogether.)

But one unique feature of Where on the Palm Pre—thanks to a webOS communications feature called Palm Synergy—is the ability to weave localized content into the device’s personal-organizer apps. For example, users can insert showtimes for local movies directly into their calendars.

“Palm has done a great job with webOS, and has allowed us to integrate the features that our consumers love about WHERE with the functions of the device such as calendar and contacts,” Walt Doyle, CEO of uLocate, said in a statement. “This integration has helped us deliver a very rich user experience.”

Preparing the Where package of applications for the Pre was “a breeze,” thanks to webOS, according to Dan Gilmartin, uLocate’s vice president of marketing. “As the leader in the mobile application space, we think it is important to make the Where application available to users on all platforms,” Gilmartin says. “With their long history in mobile, we believe that Palm will continue to create great devices, and the Pre is no exception…We think that users will be very happy with Where on the Pre and this latest release will build upon our leadership in the mobile local arena. ”

The Palm Pre, which is available for the Sprint network in the United States, has both a touch screen and a pull-out keyboard. It’s widely considered to be the make-or-break device for the Sunnyvale, CA, device maker, which transformed the smart phone industry with the Treo in 2002 but has found itself overshadowed in recent years by competitors such as Apple. In other Palm Pre news, our Seattle team reported today on new entertainment apps from Microsoft spinoff Zumobi.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

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.

Comments | Reprints | Share: