Made by the Getty Conservation Institute, MEGA stands for Middle Eastern Geodatabase for Antiquities – Jordan, and it will go live gradually in the coming months. It reminds of Sweden's RAA online database launched in 2006 (http://www.raa.se/cms/fornsok/start.html) but Jordan has a lot more stuff, and MEGA looks like it might be more sophisticated.
Adrian Short uses his API for London's bike hire availability to build a live 3D view in Google Earth. Great example of neogeography in an urban context.
US National Geospatial Agency will be getting an easy-to-use Google Earth-based system to share data in a "cry for help" to Google. Bing Maps also wanted to bid on the contract, but the article makes clear the agency thinks only Google can deliver the goods. Bing Maps doesn't have a virtual globe, has little foreign satellite imagery, and no built-in timeline for historical imagery — all of this useful to geospatial analysts.
After 10 years in a Russian jail on spying charges, "His favorite discovery is Google Earth, which peers into secretive Russia like no spy ever could. Sitting at a computer, he used it to find his house outside Moscow. But he was uncertain whether it was the one on the left or the one on the right. So instead, he brought up his prison camp. He had no problem identifying each building.”
Jeff Jarvis tweets that Google PR told him: "Google is not testing or using this technology. This was a purchase by a Google executive with an interest in robotics for personal use." Let the guessing game begin re which exec.