Two Cool Technologies

I came across these two new technologies from Microsoft and Google today.

  • Microsoft Surface - It's a 30-inch tabletop display that allows several people to work simultaneously using just their hands without a mouse or keyboard. You can grab data with your hands and move information around between objects using gestures and touch. I've seen various versions of this in development. The new iPhone has some of these features as well where you can modify photos using touch. Apparently this is going to reach the market in Winter 2007. Pretty cool.
  • Google Street View Maps - Google added an additional feature to their maps application where you can get a "street view" of a location that you've mapped. It's essentially a 360 degree view from street level that you can rotate and walk along. I think Microsoft Live Maps had something like this where you could virtually drive around a city, but this is much cleaner, much faster, and far better executed than Microsoft. Very cool.

Comments

gnp said…
Regarding Microsoft Surface, check out this presentation from the TED conference ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwGAKUForhM. Very cool stuff.
June 1, 2007 at 9:40 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Green VC Stars

Image
There's a lot of VC money going into "green tech" projects these days - $2.2 billion in 2007! I read an article in Forbes about the next generation of VC's leading the charge. The bios of these folks is truly ridiculous. Here's an excerpt: This trio could get hired anywhere. Aileen Lee was president of her section at Harvard Business School. Trae Vassallo learned to program when she was 7 and at 28 cofounded a wireless e-mail company that Motorola bought for $550 million. Samir Kaul led the effort to sequence the genome of the arabidopsis plant and then built three life sciences companies from scratch. He's only 33. These three are among venture capital's new guard. That's kind of humbling.
Read more

Nine Prescriptions for Building the Duke Entrepreneurial Community

Image
I think Duke can have one of the strongest entrepreneurial communities in the world. Are we there yet? Well, not yet. But there's a tremendous amount of momentum that I saw build in just the past two years while I was getting my MBA at Duke. While leading Duke's 10th annual business plan competition, the Duke Start-Up Challenge (DSC) , last year, I witnessed a near doubling of participation on campus in just a single year. The interest on the ground was clearly there and building rapidly. But now that I'm an alum, I'm looking back and wondering ... how do we rev-up the Duke entrepreneurial community even more? I read a great article by Daniel Isenberg, a professor of management at Babson, called " How to Start an Entrepreneurial Revolution " in the June edition of the Harvard Business Review. Isenberg outlines nine prescriptions for governments that want to create entrepreneurship ecosystems in their countries. Although he was focused on governments an...
Read more

Dancing on the Edge of a Volcano

I found this opinion piece ( Democrats aren't innocent bystanders ) interesting on how both Democrats and Republicans share responsibility for polarizing the electorate and undermining some of its faith in democracy. It references two other posts that were pretty good as well: The Disease of Delegitimization The Weimarization of the American Republic The second article is really long and heavy on history.  But given all of the comparisons people make between the current times and those of post-WWI Germany, I found it interesting to dive in to understand where the comparisons are coming from and how close we really are.  The short answer is that we aren't that close (phew). Seems like post-WWI Germany was incredibly fragile.  This was a good excerpt that summarized it: So, unlike the 60s, you have a dynamic in which both sides are behaving like radicals, in which the establishment isn’t yelling “stop,” and in which oikophobia is more evenly distributed, relative to its Boo...
Read more