At MacWorld this week Google has been thrilling crowds with a chance to surf with Google Earth using a Wii Balance Board and running on a Mac. Googler David Oster wrote some javascript code to interface the Wii with the Google Earth API, and he's releasing the code as open source. He has more details on what he did at the Lat Long blog. And, David says the source code will be posted at the Google Mac Developer Playground next week. In the meantime, watch this video to see it in action:

1:02:44 PM    

Check out this cool display and interface with Google Earth:

Holographic Google Earth from Nicolas Loeillot on Vimeo.

The technology comes from UbiqWindow and lets a computer screen be projected in mid-air. They have devised a touchless way to interact with the "hologram", and Google Earth is a great way to show off its capabilities. it's not a 3D projection, just 2D. But, it sure looks cool. via Google Earth Design

10:19:20 PM    

Last week at the 2008 Where 2.0, there were a number of interesting technologies being shown in the exhibit hall. One of the most interesting exhibits I saw was by a Boulder, Colorado company called earthscape. They showed a number of interesting things (see below), but what really impressed me was when their CEO Tom Churchill pulled out his iPhone to show me how they're working on a 3D Earth application for the iPhone. Check out this video I made as he demonstrated it to me:

I was particularly impressed when I saw they had used the iPhone accelerometers to allow you to tilt and rotate your view by tilting the iPhone. They weren't downloading the imagery data over the net, it was all running local with just imagery for the San Francisco area. But, it was still very cool! The application is under development using the Apple iPhone SDK. So, assuming they finish the product, it should run under iPhone 2.0. You would definitely only want to run a real app like this if you had a WiFI connection or 3G - imagery and 3D takes a lot of bandwidth. But, this demo definitely makes me look forward to the possibility Google will maybe have a version of Google Earth running on our phones. NOTE: the beta sign-up on their home page is not for the iPhone Earth it's for their geobrowser (next paragraph).

When I first saw earthscape's booth, they were showing something that grabbed my eye. They have been developing their own Google Earth-like geobrowser. When I first saw it, the browser was showing a life-like 3D model of an airliner flying over 3D terrain. I spoke to their CEO Tom Churchill at the booth, and he described what was going on. They had developed an in-flight plane tracker for passengers using their 3D browser which showed the position of the aircraft in 3D relative to ground. Passengers can switch to the inside of the cockpit (also rendered in 3D), top-down, or oblique views. They also demonstrated geotagged photos. Tom said they had been working on their browser for 3 years, and they've obviously been able to look at other browsers (like GE) and innovate new UI techniques and data. I liked how they implemented the ability to switch to different base imagery showing older aerial photos. They mentioned a Javascript API to control the geobrowser. I've signed up for the beta on their web site.

And, if that's not enough - during the Where 2.0 sessions earthscape presented demonstrations of software they are developing showing augmented reality for police helicopter pilots. They showed video of the helicopter pilot looking at infrared night video cameras through his goggles. Their software automatically showed augmented information such as street names, addresses, and other useful information so the pilot could concentrate more on flying and keeping his target (usually a car trying to escape capture) in sight. At any moment the pilot can easily tell ground forces the location of the target. Very cool technology! Because of the relevancy to Google Earth, and just the way cool way their iPhone Earth worked, they get my vote for coolest tech shown at Where 2.0.

5:17:49 PM    

According to Apple, over January and February of this year they surpassed Wal-Mart as the largest music retailer in the U.S.

Here’s why this is amazing:

1. The itunes store is only 5 years old. FIVE YEARS.
2. According to Apple, they account for 70% of all digital music sales.
3. The ipod is the market leader with ~75% of all music player sales.
4. Apple was a late entrant: they did not invent the first digital music player, nor the first digital music store.

The most important but rarely told story is that Apple is no longer a niche brand. When else in history has a BMW, a Rolex, a Four Seasons, successfully transitioned into a Honda, a Timex, or a Holiday Inn? It’s rare. When high-end brands go mass market, they rarely get it right. But Apple made the transition in a handful of years without anyone even noticing.

And more interesting to students of innovation is how the story line around Apple is still about innovation despite the gaps in the stereotype. It’s rarely mentioned how they were late to the digital music game, how many of the technological breakthroughs were done out of house, or how many mistakes competitors made that accelerated the rise of the i-pod and i-tunes so fast.

It’s thrilling to see a company thrive on maintaining their standards, and entertaining to see the late followers respond. But the true innovation at work here, if it can really be called an innovation, is quality. The distinction of the Apple brand is superior aesthetic, functional and design quality, and Apple has succeeded in making quality the distinctive factor in tech purchasing decisions. Not price. Not features. But quality. And the irony is how competitors refuse to compete on this turf, retreating back to price and features.

Perhaps the most important overlooked point lesson in all this success is how unexpected it was. I doubt any marketing projection for i-tunes or the i-pod had anything like the adoption curves seen above. I suspect they predicted they’d maintain their high-end brand with it’s resulting high-end marketshare, and were as surprised as the rest of the world with how quickly the i-pod became a phenomenon. For all their well deserved success, Apple still experiences the unexpected.

8:19:04 PM