If you’ve got a favourite piece of the world you want immortalised in coffee table form in your living room then this is for you. It will take the cartographic features of any place on the planet and turn it into a uniquely customised piece of furniture.
There are heaps of other customisable products from the same company.
There’s been oohing and ahhing over the weekend as some Google Earth watchers thought they might have found Atlantis. The blogosphere went crazy over the idea. Chris just posted a link to the googleblog today. Sunken mythical cities don’t really excite me. But this idea from the googleblog does. And google would be one company with the resources to make it happen.
“But we could map the whole ocean using ships. A published U.S. Navy study found that it would take about 200 ship-years, meaning we’d need one ship for 200 years, or 10 ships for 20 years, or 100 ships for two years. It costs about $25,000 per day to operate a ship with the right mapping capability, so 200 ship-years would cost nearly two billion dollars. That may seem like a lot of money, but it’s not that far off from the price tag of, say, a new sports stadium.”
That would be cool. And cheaper than building a real life, working, death star or Enterprise – or whatever was in those links I posted for calculating the cost of unrealistic science fiction technology a few weeks ago.