Monday, July 25, 2005

Google Earth, Yahoo Maps, & Microsoft Virtual Earth Are The Latest "Killer Apps"

I have been conducting further experiments with Google Earth and just ran across a great blog entry that Rev. Dan Catt made about the "Network Link" feature within Google Earth. The technology might work with Google Maps, but I have not seen it to be fully incorporated into Google Maps yet.

The rapid pace in which information is being combined, synthesized, and morphed together is nothing short of amazing.

Take traditionally separate concepts of digital photography (or even a camera phone), GPS technology, blogging, and a search engine (Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft all have one now) and mix them together and what do you get?

You now have geoblogging, geosearches, and a host of other unique ideas that should serve to revitalize failing economies.

The main thrust of the latest mash ups of technology is that you can better combine, separate, or isolate the online world to the offline world.

Photo websites like Flickr now are having people add GPS coordinate tags to their photos to indicate where the photo was captured.

I just saw the website Geoblogging and saw an amazing combination of Google Earth, GPS technology, and digital photography added together. You can essentially rotate a global map and see the latest photos that people are sharing.

I know that this fits into what we have done with GPS Concierge and expect to further observe eBay, Overstock.com, and online commerce websites have to play catch up since the satellite map technology essentially cuts out the middleman altogether.

Right now as a result of this blog, I realize that you can tag a photo on Flickr and add another tag such as "online auction" or "available for sale" and any other identifying tags imaginable and state the identification and availability of supply and stimulate demand for the item.

One could still essentially use eBay or another online auction marketplace simply as an outsourced technology since there is no desktop auction management technology immediately known and identified. Does this identify a need for a program called eBay Desktop or Desktop eBay? I strongly think so.

The ongoing key is going to be to inform the buying public that they can use search engines and geophotography websites such as Flickr to buy items.

One comment mentioned how satellite maps will be in real-time at some point in the future. This will make substantial economic growth AND poverty be manifested and vaporized at the speed of thought.

This is definitely one of those thoughts and concepts that our children will become more proficient at than any of my peers;)

I would love to see the various tools added to social networking websites like Orkut, Friendster, Dodgeball, and other mailing lists and online communities.

As a matter of fact, I'm on my way to contributing my part right now!!!

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