virtual

Earlier this week, Al Gore, Jimmy Buffet, and a famous oceanographer came together to announce a Google Earth update.  Don't look for the same level of hubbub here, but Microsoft's now taking its own impressive step in this area by releasing about 100 terabytes' worth of Virtual Earth imagery.

Read this essay by Andrew Tuplin about morality in virtual worlds and try to keep your brain from tying itself in knots. New technology brings up (surprisingly) an age-old question: Is fantasizing, or playing out an immoral scenario, the same as (or as bad as) actually doing it?

As the news continues to pour in and the news media works hard to sell their wares (meaning the more terrible the news the more people pay attention) there are more victims to be counted in the carnage. This time the targets are the ‘darlings’ of the new world advertising and marketing including web video, mobile phones, gaming and virtual worlds.

A few days ago, Marissa Mayer wrote a blog post about Google's homepage, and an obsession with simplicity and clean design became almost painfully clear.  Now, her company's launching a sort of fragmented virtual world in which users can choose cats as avatars and hug each other underneath dinosaur skeletons.

1-800-Flowers has launched BokayMe.com, a site that allows people to send virtual flowers to each other. The service is free for basic bouquets and up to $3 for enhanced bouquets.

The Virtual Earth team wants our feedback. Wonderful. Kudos to any company that wants its customers’ feedback and offers a participatory approach. So, here’s my feedback… Microsoft added a LOT of whizbang features to its maps.live.com maps (3D, lots of photos, and such) but they didn’t focus on the basics.

We’re not even positive of its name, but without a doubt, this will be big; China is making an 80-square-kilometer space into the home of nine huge virtual worlds.

PayPal has partnered with MasterCard to release the PayPal Secure Card. It’s a virtual credit card that generates a unique credit card number for each online transaction. Nothing new here, except as of tomorrow you can download software so you can easily use the service on any site, regardless if they accept Paypal or not. PayPal has been testing the feature with 3 million of its customers this past year.