Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Buzz from Bloggers

We have gotten some good reaction from bloggers who saw our demo at Launchpad. We just wanted to highlight a couple...

Google Earth Blog
upnext.com
- Also still in beta - this web site was presened by Danny Moon. I'm highlighting this one because they have developed a custom Java plug-in for visualizing New York City in 3D in a very Google Earth-like fashion. They have a large percentage of the buildings modeled in a artistic style which looked quite good. Their web site is focused on building real-world social network by tying event information (festivals, parades, parties, whatever) to location on a map. Allowing you to hook up with friends or make new acquaintances. They also showed off that they have real-time lighting including sunrises and sunsets in their app. Definitely worth a look after they come out of beta.

GISuser Blog
Something new... only available for New York users at this time... UpNext is a 3D virtual cityscape where users can explore and discover their city. UpNext empowers users to search visually, straight from their web browser, to find what’s UpNext in their city. Explore and discover your city in 3D. Search by address, street intersection, … uses MS local search API.. users can add restaurant or business reviews.. search by category or medallion (ie. Night life) think 3D search, fast panning (AJAX), locate events, read user comments and reviews, See what’s going on in New York! See upnext.com - WOW!

Chris on eParticipation
- UpNext definitely impressed me by offering a great 3D enviroment (only in Manhatten so far though) to explore what's going on in your city. The unique thing is that all information is contained by the building rather than a point on the map and the look and feel of searching and exploring the content is amazing. Definitely a next step in visualizing local content in the third dimension.

O'Reilly Radar
UpNext showed a 3d cityscape of New York. It allows you to zoom around the space and select what kind of data it show. It pulled in restaurants, nightlife, shopping as well as a mashup from upcoming.org. You can click on any building to find out what is in it, as well as tag buildings.

The demo looked really neat with a quite usable 3d interface. From my point of view, the question is if consumers will prefer the 3d ability to zoom around, or prefer more traditional 2d maps.

Just to address the last sentence. We think there is a place for 2D and 3D maps on the web. But for local discovery and exploration, we think users will prefer an immersive 3D environment. Also, based on the number of 3D applications at the Where 2.0 conference, there appears to be a big push towards the 3D web.

If you find anything else on us that we might have missed, drop us a link in the comments.





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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Found one on Swivel's blog, great comments from a great team:

http://blog.swivel.com/weblog/2007/05/swivel_g_rocks_.html
"There were lots of great products being shown. Like UpNext and their beautiful (seriously) 3-D cityscape of New York City."

Anonymous said...

Quite awhile without any new posts...any updates? Or did Google swallow you?