Dr. Kevin Montgomery was working at NASA when he had his "A-ha" moment. During a trip to Hawaii, he visited a remote valley on the island of Kauaii, accessible only by helicopter. As he stood in the wild of that pristine valley, home to a range of exotic species and endangered plants, gazing up at a 1,000 year-old temple, he had a realization: "We don't have the right to let something that old die."
When Montgomery returned to his job at NASA, he couldn't stop pestering his colleague about the technology they were working on together. What was it for? What was the purpose of all this? Eventually, he convinced him to take the same helicopter ride he had. "Now he's a big environmentalist," he smiles.
Eventually, Montgomery moved to Stanford, where he is now the Senior Research Engineer at the Center for Innovation and Global Health. That visit, though, has stayed with him, driving him to oversee the construction of the world's most advanced data visualization portal, Collaborate.org, which he unveiled Wednesday morning in Laguna Beach at the Seattle-based Future in Review conference. (Disclosure: Future in Review CEO Mark Anderson is the author's father.)
With 2.2 million layers of data, Collaborate.org allows users to see geographically located real-time visual information of all kinds: All major RSS feeds, all inbound and outbound air traffic in the U.S., college degrees by nation, real time Tweets as they're sent, live television, NASA satellite inputs, satellite imagery, aerial photography, economic factors around the world, tracking of air and water quality. The list goes on. Two point two million times. It's the mission control Captain Planet never had.
Or, as Montgomery puts it, "geospatial analytics for quantitative strategic situational awareness." Features like internal document sharing, video conferencing, task lists and calendars are just add-ons.
