nuance intelligence

I had a great lunch today with John Corbett, CEO of AWhere and Bill Gail, Director of Strategic Business Development for Microsoft’s Virutal Earth. I’ll have a lot more to say about John and AWhere (disclosure: AWhere is a client of mine) in the days and months to come, and have a ton of respect and excitement about their work.

Today’s discussion ranged from the intersection of virtual maps and virtual worlds like Second Life. Interesting to hear Bill emphasize the cross-platform impact he expects here, combining artifacts of the imagination and real-world information represented in a fully immersive (like SecondLife) view. Bill is a fascinating thinker, who taught me a new word today: photogrammetric, which is the practice of combining and composing maps from aerial photograph. Needless to say, this takes some very complicated algorithms to compensate for the subtly different perspectives that result from ever-changing planes in the airplane-mounted lenses.

Bill’s also been a leading thinker on the relations between space (and space travel), climate change and IT. A recent article in IEEE Spectrum magazine on climate change has been widely referenced for its innovative space-based solutions to managing climate change. Among them: deploying ‘space dust’ to reflect more of the suns rays, increasing carbon sequestration in the oceans and unexpected consequences.

Bill also puts forward a vision for a national earth information initiative, which leans heavily on his background in satellite development, remote sensing networks and growing interest in national policy. He summarizes it well here:

In an increasingly interconnected world, societies that have the foresight and commitment to develop and apply Earth knowledge will outpace those that do not.

Bill Gail, just another fascinating guy contributing to the future of our society from Boulder, Colorado.