Make has an excellent business idea involving SketchUp, woodwork projects, and entrepreneurial DIY stores:

Eventually you might be able to send off your files to a fabricator, lumber yard or whatever supplier – the stuff shows up, you make it! How cool will that be! Maker-aware suppliers could have all their parts/tools/things available as Sketchup components so we can use them to build our projects (and eventually order).

Why not take this concept and apply it pre-fab homes (within reason)? And perhaps there will soon be a day where you can download a car chassis, different interlocking component panels and then build your own “custom” car. I hear GM is in need of a new big idea…

• Simple things done well can be so impressive. Take a look at these spectacular georeferenced photos of Namibia, taken by Andrea and Christian Heinrich. There is no better way to lure people to Namibia. And all it took was a KML file. (Via this GEC post)
• Another recent best-of-breed example is this travel guide for Prague, replete with 3D models, subways stations, walking tours…
• AECnews reports on a company with an intriguing concept: AfterCAD will soon be releasing InSite, a product that marries AJAX with 3D CAD in a browser. AECnews has the details.

SketchUp resources, cont.:

• CADlab points to [pushpullbar]2, an “architecture + design forum”. It began life as a SketchUp bulletin board, but now offers much else besides. Worth looking into if you’re shopping around for a SketchUp community.
• Form Fonts 3D is a commercial, subscription-based 3D content and script library for 3D authoring tools like SketchUp. It predates Google 3D Warehouse, and offers content made by pros. It’s $11 a month for download access, but the overall quality of the models is impressive. Form Fonts 3D is offering some freebies in a clever bit of stealth marketing on 3D Warehouse.

Over in the UK, a campaign started by the Guardian, “Free our data“, argues that government-funded data, such as the geographic data collected by the UK’s Ordnance Survey, should be made available to tax payers at no additional cost, as they have already paid for it. Perhaps. Perhaps not, in that paying for usage defrays costs that would otherwise raise the tax burden for everyone. But this post is not about the merits of the argument, it is about this sentence in the manifesto:

It cannot make any sense that Google, an American organisation, is presently more popular with people aiming to create new map applications.

I want to know:

• What difference does it make what nationality Google is? Would it have been okay if Google had been British?
• Why can it not make any sense that Google is “presently more popular”? Google is a company. Companies tend to be acutely aware of market opportunities and rush to exploit them — while governments do not, on the whole. Remember the origins of France’s Géoportail virtual globe? Said project leader Patrick Leboeuf: “It was the arrival of Google Earth that spurred us, by showing how much the public wanted this kind of information.”
• If Google were to get data for free, eiher as a result of the “Free our data” campaign or because enlightened local city councils decide there is a major silver lining for local businesses, wouldn’t Google Earth become even more popular, not less?

• Yay for the City of San Mateo (California), which hired a company called Farallon Geographics to develop a system that publishes all its GIS data, including aerial imagery, as network links to Google Earth, for public consumption. More layers are forthcoming, promises the press release.
• Let’s Push Things Forward has some initial comments on WWML’s chances — WWML being NASA World Wind’s mooted future geospatial markup language of choice.
• Navigadget reports that Speed Sentry, “a GPS-enabled speed monitor/car computer” for Pocket PC, now exports to KML.
• Until this morning I had never heard of Groboto, a Mac-only 3D authoring tool intended to foster learning. It exports in file formats that SketchUp can read, and hence you can now place some pretty strange structures in Google Earth, as this blogger has done.
• WorldCAD Access does actual reporting (good blog!) and asks the makers of VectorWorks what exactly they meant with “We plan to continue our compatibility work with SketchUp.” The response.
• GIS for Archaeology and CRM gets a makeover and moves to www.gisarch.com.
• GeoRSS gets its very own press release.

This thread on Google Earth Community leads to an interesting question: Does or does not Google Earth’s licensing agreement permit corporate employees to use a non-commercial version? Google’s Lrae seems to think that it does, whereas many businesses seem to have been convinced that it does not.

It all comes down to how you interpret this paragraph in the licence agreement:

This Software is for non-commercial use only and your rights in the Software are strictly limited to home, personal or recreational use only by you and not for the benefit of third parties.

I’ve always read the licencing agreement as follows: Employees can use Google Earth at work, but only for personal, recreational use… which probably implies to admins and bosses that if you’re using Google Earth at work, you must be wasting company time.

But perhaps Google’s Lrae has in mind a more mixed-use scenario for Google Earth in businesses — one that is more in line with how we use our web browsers at work every day: For consuming all manner of information, some of which is used in business decisions.

If that is the case, perhaps Google could clarify more formally, especially as NASA World Wind presents itself as an open-source alternative without such restrictions on business use.

Google Earth competitor ESRI ArcGIS Explorer is coming in June, ESRI CEO Jack Dangermond has just promised. Thus reports Directions Magazine‘s Adena Schutzberg from the 2006 ESRI Business GeoInfo Summit held in Boston over the past few days:

Dangermond did make it a point to highlight one product in particular: ArcGIS Explorer. It will be released in June, he said, and looks “exactly like” Google Earth. Dangermond quickly rescinded that bold statement and said it had the same form factor as Google Earth. “Unlike Google Earth, it can task models and analysis.” Dangermond also spoke briefly about ArcLogistics Route, Business Analyst (desktop and server), BusinessMap and data products. ArcWeb Services (some 100 layers mostly for U.S.) cost $25 million to develop. He was clearly interested in showing off ESRI’s commitment to the Web model for GIS.