Google Street View In The Grand Canyon

It is not a street anymore, is it?

Source: Wired

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

Project Noah: FoodSpotting's Sibling Company

Image by Nic*Rad via FlickrI just showed up at Fred Wilson's blog, and read through his post for the day. I quit coffee, but have not quit Fred Wilson's blog that I visit near daily. You know I visited because I leave a comment at the bottom of every post I read. I check in the AVC community way.

So I am reading the post and I am thinking, I just found a sibling company to FoodSpotting. Instagram is a sibling company to FourSquare, Project Noah is a sibling company to FoodSpotting.

This is exciting, and underestimated. This is nothing less than a quiet revolution. My first event of the ongoing Social Media Week was the FoodSpotting/Whole Foods panel. I blogged afterwards. I started working on another post right away but never got to completing it. And I am going to cannibalized that for this post. Or maybe it will stay a separate post, my next post: Turning The Table Upside Down With Food.

Food/Social = Physics, Coding = Mathematics

FoodSpotting Day: Thoughts

Image via CrunchBaseI have been fascinated by FoodSpotting. I am not exactly a meat and potatoes kind of guy, but I am only slightly above steamed broccoli. I would not describe me a foodie. I come from a country of subsistence farmers. I am sufficiently into food, don't get me wrong. But my fascination with FoodSpotting has been what it has meant as a tech startup, best caputured by a phrase I coined, that FoodSpotting is the next FourSquare. It is the leader in the what after check in space. It inhabits the royal vertical in that space.

World FoodSpotting Day 2011: January 15: Photos

So when I celebrated FoodSpotting Day yesterday - in two separate cities, Philly and NYC - I was on a mental hyper drive of sorts. I kept thinking, what next, what next? What next for FoodSpotting?

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.

Self Driving Google Car

New York Times: Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic: they can transform society as profoundly as the Internet has ..... Robot drivers react faster than humans, have 360-degree perception and do not get distracted, sleepy or intoxicated ..... more than 37,000 people died in car accidents in the United States in 2008 ...... the technology could double the capacity of roads by allowing cars to drive more safely while closer together ..... the company’s ambitions reach beyond the search engine business ....... The project is the brainchild of Sebastian Thrun, the 43-year-old director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, a Google engineer and the co-inventor of the Street View mapping service. ...... deployment of the technology more than eight years away. .... Under current law, a human must be in control of a car at all times

This is an entrepreneur having turned a company into one big incubator. If you think about it, Google is one big incubator. The founders did the work on the search engine - and it was pretty fundamental - but then they, as a company, have been smart about laying out the vision, and going out there and finding the top people in their respective fields, hiring them, and giving them the resources to go do their thing.

Pretty much all breakthroughs from Google this past decade have followed that path. Looks like you don't have to sell or leave the company you started, or retire, to be able to do the incubation, venture capital thing. This is the corporation as an organism.

What's next? I wish Google were in a position to do something fundamental in clean tech, but it is not. Energy is not a software problem.

Related articles

• Google pulls an Asimov, announces self-driving cars smart enough to take on traffic (venturebeat.com)
• What we're driving at - Larry and Sergey founded Google ... (Sebastian Thrun/The Official Google Blog) (techmeme.com)
• Google Pulls an Asimov, Announces Self-Driving Cars Smart Enough to Take on Traffic (nytimes.com)
• Smarter Than You Think: Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic (nytimes.com)
• Google tests 'intelligent' cars (bbc.co.uk)
• Google Reveals Secret Project To Develop Driverless Cars [I Feel Gassy] (jalopnik.com)
• World-Changing Awesome Aside, How Will The Self-Driving Google Car Make Money? (techcrunch.com)
• Google has self-driving cars... Self-driving cars! (thenextweb.com)
• Are you feeling lucky? Why Google's driverless cars show its technology heft (guardian.co.uk)
• KITT? Google's self-driving cars already on roads (ctv.ca)