How cool is this? World Wide Telescope

This is going to be great.

There are some pretty nerdy looking kids in the video of the kids react to the WWTelescope. I think one of them looks like Bill Gates from 2nd grade but The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a rich visualization environment that functions as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from the best ground and space telescopes in the world for a seamless, guided exploration of the universe. Think Google Maps and being able to drag around your local maps but now think of it in terms of the universe and the sky. This will help provide context for the universe and open up anyones imagination who looks at it.

Robert Scoble wrote about it over on his blog and gave us the heads up.

Some other things.

1. It’s dedicated to Jim Gray, the Microsoft Researcher who sailed out of San Francisco Bay about a year ago never to be heard from again. He started this project with a paper back in 2002.
2. It runs only on Windows. It’s coded in C#/.NET, you’ll meet the developer in our video and you’ll hear more about that then.
3. It’s free, but only in a private alpha right now. I’m not sure when it’ll be released to the public.
4. There are terabytes of data, all seamlessly integrated for the first time here.

This is really going to be an inspirational tool for children and adults. I can't wait to take a look at it in the Spring of 2008.

Corbis Lays off more People

Corbis, the Bill Gates owned media company, announced that they have laid off 125 employees in an effort to streamline its customer service operations and sales team. According to people familiar with the situation, the layoffs were meant to streamline the sales effort and will entail shutting down some local offices (see Chicago, Montreal, Madrid, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Brussels, Singapore and Melbourne) and replacing them with regional sales centers (see NY, London and soon to be China) and outside sales teams for which the company is actively recruiting. A bit weird to be laying off sales people on one hand and then recruiting them on the other.

I really wonder how this will affect their acquisition of Veer's sales team and whether any of those people will be affected. It doesn't appear for the time being that it will.