Morning session wrap up and cool technolgies from OQO and the Omni globe

John Calkins just showed off some future "WOW" technology and raised a few eye brows inn the wrap up for this morning's session. We saw a digital pen... imagine scribing with a pen in a familiar manner, tracking lines and shapes, taking notes etc... then you dock the pen and the updates are stored and displayed within your Geodatabase.. COOL! I'm sure it's likely not quite as simple out of the box but none the less its very slick. We saw metalens, a servcie from National Geographic that uses the Adobe Flex UI (i actually saw this at Where2.0 also). Use it to locate images, documents, or videos fromm a specific region. Users can also integrate this will technology like the GPS enabled Ricoh camera in order to immediately share images captured inn the field. We saw a way cool USB stick that had a whopping 8 GBs or data and was used to boot up a laptop on Linux and then run an application. The scenario was meant to show how a first responder could get access to an application and data while in the field, simply by getting a small flash drive from the command center. under the heading of "small packages" we saw the OQO mini computer - similar to the Nokia Tablet PC in concept although this device runs Vista. I actually just ran into Sue and Jessie from Very Spatial and Sue was packing one of these devices around. She gave me a demo loading ArcExplorer and google Earth on the device. It had decent wireless connectivity and was pretty quick too. Search OQO for more on this device. finally... under the topic of TOTALLY FREAKING COOL Calkins showed us what I think was called the Omni globe. Imagine a large (4ft in diameter) illuminated Globe on a stand. the Globe rotated slowly and the data diaplsyed on it changed accordinng to a scene selected from an application... imagine swapping from a topo map, to a thematic map etc... on a Globe... see the flickr for pics of this one. Gotta go as the laptop battery is done and I'm starving! (sorry about the typos but my "m" key is sticking!)