Earthmine is Indexing Reality into 3D Maps

Earthmine is a street-level, 3D mapping company that is focused on indexing reality. Their geospatial data mine of urban environments is an order of magnitude more detailed and accurate than anything before. Earthmine's new kind of map is a geospatially accurate model of the world that is accessed through an intuitive panoramic interface.

Google Maps Street View and Everyscape offers similar immersive visual experience. However every pixel in each high quality Earthmine image has highly accurate latitude, longitude and elevation data. This provides a unique three-dimensional context to existing spatial data not offered by others.

Check out this amazing Earthmine demo video:



Earthmine has vehicles with a calibrated camera array, collecting highly accurate and detailed data at the street level using technology licensed from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This data is processed into a form that is deliverable over the internet as a subscription service to their customer base. Their highly scalable data collection and processing technology is highly scalable allows entire municipalities to be captured in weeks.

Earthmine will offer the first street-level geospatial platform for urban environments in early 2008. Their framework includes

• a pre-collected base data layer of 3D panoramic images tagged with 3D location data
• a set of web-based professional tools to gather, analyze and visualize street-level location-based information

This geo-spatial framework will integrate into any web application, act as the foundation for layers of geo-tagged meta-data, and connect with existing systems and applications.

AIR iPhone on your Desktop Powered by Ribbit

Get a fully-functional iPhone on your desktop that enables users to make and take calls on your computer. The innovative AIR iPhone developed on the Ribbit API using Adobe AIR technology makes this a reality. Users can make outbound calls to any type of phone; landline, mobile or online phone. They can also receive incoming calls and voice messages from any phone networks.

The AIR iPhone was developed by Joe Johnston of Knoware. Check it out here.


My earlier post describes the Ribbit API which enables VoIP phone calls directly from the browser. The Ribbit Developer Platform has just been released so developers can access it by signing up for an account.

Ribbit's open API enables developers to integrate voice 2.0 communications into web sites, communities and applications. A great example is Ribbit for Salesforce which links mobile voice communication to Salesforce.com. Mobile calls, voice messages and text transcriptions automatically flow into Salesforce, so users can play, read, store, search, and act on voice communications right inside their customer relationship management (CRM) web environment.

Amazon SimpleDB - Scalable Cloud Database

Amazon has announced the limited beta of Amazon SimpleDB - a simple web services interface to create and store multiple data sets, query your data easily, and return the results. Together with the Simple Storage Service (S3), Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and other web services Amazon offers a complete utility computing platform. SimpleDB was the missing piece of AWS - the scalable structured database.

Amazon SimpleDB is easy to use and provides the core functionality of a database - real-time lookup and simple querying of structured data like:

• CREATE a new domain to house your unique set of structured data.
• GET, PUT or DELETE items with attribute-value pairs
• QUERY your data set using this simple set of operators

Users pay only for the resources that they consume. Pricing is based on

• Machine Utilization
  $0.14 per Amazon SimpleDB Machine Hour consumed
  (normalized to the hourly capacity of a circa 2007 1.7 GHz Xeon processor)
• Data Transfer
  $0.10 per GB - all data transfer in
  $0.13-$0.18 per GB - data transfer out
• Structured Data Storage
  $1.50 per GB-month
  

Get started today with the Amazon SimpleDB Guide.

Many companies already use Amazon Web Services as their utility computing infrastructure like finalists of the Amazon Web Services Start-Up Challenge:

• Ooyala - a platform to deliver video content for publishers
• Brainscape - an engine for measuring the networks in the brain
• Commerce360 - optimize paid search campaigns to deliver improved campaign efficiency
• Justin.tv - a massively scalable live video platform
• MileMeter - “auto insurance buy the mile”
• UserTesting.com - quick and cheap website usability testing
• WeoGeo - a one-stop marketplace for mapping

With the introduction of Amazon SimpleDB utility computing just got even better!

Here Comes Another Bubble Video

Are we riding the Web 2.0 bubble? For some fun (or reality check) enjoy this video by The Richter Scales:



Got me a CS degree
Honor roll, MIT
Moved to Palo Alto
Opportunity knocked

Thought I have the perfect plan
Took a job at webvan
Traded in my twenties
For a worthless pile of tech stocks

Suffered through the market crash
Lost a giant wad of cash
Pink slips, burger flips
Would you like some fries?

Happy days are here again
Larry Page, Sergey Brin
Time to write a business plan
So I can be like those guys!

Here comes another bubble
It's a monster rally
All around the valley

First you need a buzzword
Then a second and a third
Pick at least two industries
You'll revolutionize

Find yourself and engineer
Feed him pizza, buy him beer
Give him just a fraction
Of a fraction of the pie

Need a good domain name
Must be cheap, can't be lame
Something cool like
Flickr, meebo, wikiyou, mahalo, bebo

"telephone" without the "t"
"digg" but with a triple "g"
Make your elevator pitch
Code it up and flip the switch

Here comes another bubble
The VCs are backing
Baby let's get cracking

and so on ...