When you run a startup that focuses on mapping the floor plans of retail stores, there’s this inevitable question: What happens when Google, the company that has already mapped the entire world, decides to do the same thing as you? Josh Marti, the CEO of Seattle-based Point Inside, has heard it plenty of times.

“And our answer was always, yeah absolutely—whether they use our maps or their own maps, they’re going to see the value that indoor maps bring,” Marti says. His job as an entrepreneur is to make sure Point Inside is offering something more valuable.

That particular part of the job got even more important last week, when Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) announced that it was indeed bringing indoor layouts to the latest version of its maps application for Android.

As we’ve reported before, Point Inside thinks partnering with big players in location services can be good for its business, so I wondered whether Google’s new offering included the Seattle startup’s maps. Turns out, that’s not the case—Google appears to be partnering with retailers on its own, and also appealing to retailers to submit floorplans themselves.

Marti took this challenge head-on earlier this week during his demo of Point Inside at Xconomy’s Mobile Madness Northwest, a packed half-day forum on innovation in mobile computing. As Point Inside also detailed on its blog, the question isn’t necessarily whether Google can successfully map indoor spaces, he says—it’s whether Google’s business model of selling ads within those stores will be appealing to retailers.

To illustrate the point, Marti pulled up Google’s app and navigated over to a Home Depot store. Once there, he searched for “paint,” and was promptly redirected to a Lowe’s down the street.

That got some pretty hearty laughs from the crowd. But it’s serious stuff, both for retailers and smaller companies like Point Inside, which has some 1,300 locations using its indoor mapping service.

Marti puts it this way: Google’s overarching business model has been to index large amounts of information, attract eyeballs, and sell advertising. For a retailer, that could be a scary proposition: If Google makes the map, who owns the advertising inside your own store?

“Right now, the way it’s deployed today, it’s certainly a scenario where if you invite them in, you’d better be prepared to pay them to keep the competition out,” Marti says. “Assuming that the business model for websites is the same business model for physical locations, you’ll see that competitors are going to start buying ad words against each other and ad locations against each other.”

To be fair, that sounds like some pretty classic fear, uncertainty, and doubt from a competitor. And Marti is quick to acknowledge that this is still the very early public version of Google’s indoor mapping product—there’s no definite way of knowing how it will shake out.

But in any case, Marti says Point Inside is confident that retailers will want to retain more control over their shoppers’ trips through the aisles. That’s what the Seattle startup, which presently has about 30 employees and is seeing growing revenue, offers through a white-label service for indoor navigation apps.

“They have a real opportunity to control their brand experience as well as maintain the relationship with their customers,” Marti says. “And that’s an important, lifelong theme for the retailers—they hate to be disintermediated by anybody.”

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Josh Marti’s wife is one organized lady. When she sends him a text message with the night’s grocery shopping, it’s arranged like a roadmap to the whole store, with items listed in the order they’re found in the aisles for maximum turn-by-turn efficiency.

With four daughters at home, that list is one heck of a ruthless time-saver. But really, should she have to do that, with the location-aware minicomputers everyone carries around in their pockets these days?

Marti thinks it should be easier—and he’s working on a solution at Point Inside, the Seattle startup he co-founded with longtime collaborator Jon Croy. The company, founded in early 2009, is developing an indoor version of GPS by building interactive maps of shopping malls, big-box retailers, and airports.

Merchants and advertisers appear to be pretty hungry to develop the platform. Marti wouldn’t reveal actual sales figures, but says the startup’s revenue for 2010 came in double its goals. “And 2011 has already seen an increase on top of that, to the point where we’ve raised our estimates,” Marti says.

Clients include Continental and United Airlines, Clear Channel’s airport advertising branch, mall owner General Growth Properties, and Meijer, a regional retailer that operates big combination grocery-and-merchandise stores.

Big players are also looking at the indoor navigation sector, including Microsoft’s Bing search engine, which unveiled its own mobile mall maps just earlier this month. Marti says Bing’s move into mobile mall mapping is nowhere near an existential threat to his startup—instead, Point Inside sees the big guys getting involved as good partnership opportunities.

“I can confirm that we have formal relationships with large mapping players, whether they’re content providers or mapping companies,” Marti says. “We just don’t name who they are.”

In fact, he says, Point Inside has made a lot of its own mapping data available to companies like Google and Apple in an attempt to broaden adoption of interior location maps.

Point Inside had to expend lots of effort to get its mapping procedures down—projects that once took four months can now be banged out in four days. But getting big players … 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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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 »

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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.

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The next time you’re trying to pick a place to go out to eat, you might have more information at your fingertips than just reviews, photos, and menus. A Boston-area company called EveryScape has teamed up with Microsoft’s Bing Maps to deliver 3-D panoramic views of restaurants—both interiors and exteriors—on the Web.

EveryScape, based in Waltham, MA, is announcing today a new online app, which it developed using the Bing Maps software development kit. The technology uses high-resolution graphics and animation effects to give consumers a “walk-through” immersive experience as they browse restaurants on the Web. Financial details of the agreement weren’t given, but the map app is being rolled out initially for Boston-area restaurants, with other major cities to follow later this year. As of today, the company says its software shows the insides of 500-plus restaurants around Boston, and exterior 3-D views of more than 1,300.

It’s all part of a trend of increasing competition at the intersection of local search, online maps, and 3-D image-based graphics. Google Maps’ Street View feature, for instance, provides panoramic views of a large (and growing) number of outdoor locations worldwide. Microsoft is known for Photosynth, its technology for creating 3-D virtual environments from collections of photographs. Bing Maps already incorporates some aspects of Photosynth, as well as “streetside” and “bird’s eye” visuals. Meanwhile, little old EveryScape competes with the big boys on the quality of these kinds of visuals, at least in some locations.

Which is why today’s news is particularly important for the small company. EveryScape’s new app, which was developed in a “strategic relationship” with Microsoft, “further validates” its strategy of delivering real-world experiences to consumers and businesses online, says Mok Oh, the founder and chief technology officer of EveryScape, in a statement. Oh adds that the new software brings “the power of Bing location search to EveryScape’s visual guides.”

The relationship also makes sense for Microsoft, which is trying to compete more strongly with Google Maps for market share in search and location-based services. “We are thrilled to work with EveryScape to deliver a map app that brings users inside for a truly immersive experience,” says Chris Pendleton, technical evangelist for Bing Maps, in a company statement.

EveryScape was founded in 2002 (formerly known as Mok3), and is led by CEO Jim Schoonmaker. The company raised $7 million in Series B venture funding in 2008. Its investors include SK Telecom Americas, Dace Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Draper Fisher New England, Draper Atlantic, and Launchpad Venture Group.

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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 »

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Cambridge, MA-based Metacarta, whose software searches digital text for references to place names and addresses, has been acquired by Nokia, the Espoo, Finland-based mobile hardware giant announced today. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, and it’s not yet clear how Nokia will integrate Metacarta’s technology into its mobile offerings, which include navigation services through the Ovi Maps application. Nokia’s terse press release said only that the 30-person startup’s technology will be “used in the area of local search in location and other service.”

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Microsoft announced yesterday that Bing search is now available as a free app on the iPhone and iPod Touch. It includes features like voice search, news, maps, and other location-based services. Bing is already available on BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and a few other mobile platforms. The move to Apple’s iPhone signifies the importance of mobile search (even on a competing device) in Microsoft’s competition with Google.

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If ever a company defied hyperlocal coverage, it’s Google.

Whether you live in Boston or Bosnia, Seattle or Shanghai, Google is a big deal—and it’s getting bigger every day. Whether it’s attracting or gobbling up the best companies and talent in New England or Southern California, or competing with giants like Microsoft (Bing) and Amazon in the Northwest, that all takes a back seat to the bigger picture coming into focus: that of a truly global company delivering some pretty astounding and pervasive Internet technologies, but also facing some of the greatest challenges of its corporate life.

That bigger picture is exactly what computer scientist and Google senior executive Alan Eustace works on every day, and yesterday he gave me a unique glimpse of the inner workings of the company’s strategy in engineering and technology.

Eustace joined Google in 2002. Previously he had spent 15 years at the Western Research Laboratory (the last three as director), originally run by Digital and acquired by Compaq and then Hewlett-Packard. He is now a senior vice president of engineering and research at Google, where he helps oversee an annual R&D budget of some $2.8 billion (according to 2008 figures, that represents 13 percent of Google’s revenues) and numerous engineering centers around the world, including in the Seattle and Boston areas. (In October, Eustace spoke about the local innovation community at the company’s Kirkland, WA, offices.)

I got a chance to speak with Eustace yesterday about everything from Google’s engineering management strategy and what he worries about most, to its $750 million purchase of AdMob last month and the broader significance of mobile to the company’s business. We also touched on some farther-out implications of advances in areas like speech interfaces, machine translation, and even quantum computing. (Eustace had no comment on the widely rumored “Google phone” coming out next year, though.)

Here are some highlights from our conversation, edited for length and clarity:

Xconomy: How do you allocate Google’s engineering resources across core areas like search versus other areas like cloud computing and mobile? What’s the overall strategy?

Alan Eustace: We have a 70-20-10 rule. We spend 70 percent on core products, 20 percent on emerging areas, and 10 percent on “wild and crazy” ideas. Those are things we may not have a business model for, but may be important in the long run. Things can move between core and emerging. For example, mobile used to be something of an emerging area—the business models weren’t completely clear. Now with smart phones, mobile search is happening with increasing frequency. Internet access has gone up substantially in the last three years. Now people will do searches on either phones or the Web. People are using YouTube [on phones]. Something that used to be a tiny part of all our searches, and was quite different from desktop searches, has evolved into a superset of the desktop experience.

X: What’s your approach to coordinating which engineering center works on which particular products, and managing all those different efforts?

AE: It depends on the expertise in the area. I look at the various areas inside the company. I want to support those areas based on the talent of those [geographic] areas, the quality of the talent and leadership. It’s important that we don’t fragment, that we don’t have 27 places working on the same thing. It’s also important to have critical mass, so communication overhead doesn’t … Next Page »

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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 »

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Boston-based Skyhook Wireless is expected to announce next week that it’s releasing an application for Nokia smartphones that will give owners a far faster and more accurate fix on their locations. Skyhook’s $2.99 Maps Booster works on any Symbian S60 handset and will be available starting next week through Nokia’s Ovi app store; it replaces the Symbian operating system’s built-in location-finding platform with Skyhook’s software, which then feeds location data directly to other location-aware apps such as Google Maps. The company says it created the program because Nokia phones are notorious for their slow performance in GPS mode. “With such high price tags, we think all features of Nokia smartphones should work perfectly,” Kate Imbach, Skyhook’s director of marketing and developer programs, said in a statement. “Maps Booster, finally, will make the location on any Nokia S60 device work just as well as location on the iPhone.”

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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 »

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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!

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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 »

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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.”

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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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Seattle-based TrafficGauge, a provider of road traffic information in real time, has been acquired by Networks In Motion, a mobile navigation and search company in Aliso Viejo, CA. Financial terms were not disclosed. TrafficGauge first launched its mobile traffic map in Seattle in 2003.

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It was another slow week in the Northwest for deals. Still, there was a trickle of activity in energy, biotech, and software.

—Seattle-based EnerG2 and its lead investor, Kirkland, WA-based OVP Venture Partners, told Xconomy the full story of the energy-storage startup’s $8.5 million Series A financing. Turns out EnerG2 needed to refocus on a particular slice of the market and prove it could scale up its operations before the deal could happen.

—Bellevue, WA-based Talisma, a maker of customer relationship management software, was acquired by Campus Management, an e-learning company based in Boca Raton, FL. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

—Luke reported that Seattle-based Accelerator, the biotech startup incubator, collected some $4.5 million in investment from PPD, the global contract research organization that runs clinical trials and animal tests for pharma companies. The new investment gives Accelerator a total of $27 million in its third fund.

–Seattle mobile-software startup Ontela landed a partnership with Denver, CO-based Photobucket to provide automatic photo uploading to the Web via Verizon Wireless phones. So far, Verizon is the largest wireless carrier to sell Ontela’s photo-sending technology as a monthly service.

—Not technically a deal, but a merger of sorts. EMC (NYSE: EMC), the Hopkinton, MA-based data-storage company, formed a new company, Decho, out of two of its formerly separate businesses, Seattle-based Pi and Utah-based Mozy. Decho will combine the “personal information” management software of Pi with the online-backup service of Mozy.

—Lastly, a rundown on where a lot of local deals are made—unofficially, of course. We presented Xconomy’s Greater Seattle Coffee Cluster, a list of 38 (and counting) area cafes, together with the innovators and investors who frequent them, all in the form of an interactive map and list.

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Back in January, Boston’s Skyhook Wireless scored a huge win by getting its Wi-Fi Positioning System (WPS)—which helps cellphones and laptops determine their locations by listening for nearby wireless hotspots—into the Apple iPhone. And every few weeks since then I’ve gotten another note from Skyhook, saying that WPS or its hybrid GPS/Wi-Fi/cellular-based cousin, XPS, has been incorporated into yet another system, whether it be camera phones, memory cards for cameras, Mac desktop applications, or browsers.

And now Skyhook has pulled off its biggest coup since the Apple deal, getting WPS added to Symbian—the operating system used on hundreds of mobile phones made by Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, and other manufacturers.

In an announcement today, Skyhook said that Symbian phones running WPS were being demonstrated at this week’s Symbian Smartphone Show in London. The demonstration proves that WPS can be successfully integrated with the location-based services already built into Symbian OS 9.5, the latest version of the operating system, the company said. These features allow owners of Symbian phones to do things like exchanging Wi-Fi-derived “location tags” which can be shared with GPS-based mapping programs, helping phone owners to navigate to one another’s positions.

While many Symbian phones can already determine their locations using GPS, the main selling point for WPS has always been that GPS signals are often weak or unavailable indoors and in dense urban areas. Mike Whittingham, vice president of ecosystem development for Symbian Limited, said in a statement that Skyhook’s WPS is “an innovative solution that will enable the future revenue opportunities of location-based services.”

Mike Shean, vice president of business development, called the Symbian deal “an important milestone” for the company, given that Symbian is the world’s leading provider of smartphone operating systems. “This demonstration shows how Wi-Fi-based positioning can be used by Symbian OS-based devices to enable many innovative and location aware applications,” Shean said.

There was no word in the company’s announcement about when the first Symbian-based smartphones with WPS will be available to consumers.

I fully expect the parade of Skyhook-enabled phones and applications to continue; it won’t be long, I predict, before WPS or XPS show up in a Google Android phone, given the large percentage of Android applications that draw on location information.

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