My Favorite Thing About America

Image by NYCUrbanScape via FlickrMy absolutely, absolutely favorite thing about America by a wide margin are biracial and multiracial people with active, vibrant ties to their various heritages. And I have been saying this for almost a decade.

The New York City Subway

I used to say number two would be broadband. Number three would be New York City. But then that goes without saying. NYC is hometown for life. I have been everywhere in America, and I mean literally everywhere. When I look at a map of the US I see what you see when you look at the NYC subway map, if you have been many places in this city many times.

Hitting The Road

Just like I have been everywhere in America, I want to have gone everywhere in the world, but I need to put a few years to get my startups off the ground, first things first. And then global travel with broadband-always is going to be how I spend a few months every year. My microfinance outfit would demand something like that. There are somethings that you just have to see. Google Earth does not quite cut it.

Google Earth Builder

Official Google Enterprise Blog: Bringing 100% web to the world of Google Earth and Google Maps: At Google we’re committed to opening up our cloud infrastructure so that others can benefit from our enormous computational power. Today I’m going to share some exciting details on our plans to make our cloud technology available for processing and serving geospatial data...... Google Earth and Google Maps have given people the ability to easily view rich geographic information from desktop or mobile devices. Google Earth helps us understand the effects of climate change on our ecosystem, Street View provides a panorama of our neighborhoods ...... Constant Innovation: just refresh the browser for the latest features ..... shapefiles of demographic data, spreadsheets of worldwide customer locations and files of your recently acquired imagery for a new development ..... Google Earth has more than 700 million downloads. We hope that more people can use Google Earth Builder to make better location-related decisions within business and government

The day Google Earth first came out, I downloaded it and had an amazing, amazing day roaming the Himalayas and vast expanses of Russia. It was a mind blowing experience. I was like wow.

Google Earth: A House Is A House Is A House

Google, GroupOn: It's The G Factor

Image by earcos via FlickrI am going to post a hypothesis. The hypothesis is that GroupOn always wanted to get bought, and it wanted to get bought by Google. From. Day. One. GroupOn plotted for this day to come before its inception.

Why do I say that?

Google Earth: A House Is A House Is A House

Image via CrunchBaseGoogle Earth is just swell. When it first came out, I downloaded it right away. I saw the country I grew up in - Nepal - in ways I had never seen before. The Himalayas were so awesome to explore on Google Earth. I spun the globe in slow motion over large stretches of Russia. I was a kid in a candy shop.

MapCrunch: Random Places

Image via Wikipediahttp://www.mapcrunch.com

This site is so cool. It taps into the Google Street View database to show you random pictures from all over the world - I just saw one from Antarctica - and it is quite a feeling. In some ways this feels better than Google Earth, although Google Earth is an experience of its own.

You hit the N key on your keyboard and the next picture shows up, and next, and next.

You can view pictures by continent or country. Not all countries are available yet, but that's okay. I will wait.

And there is the obligatory slideshow option. And, of course, full screen mode.

Bon Voyage.