Applied Minds is apparently a geek's version of Monster Garage. It's headed by Thinking Machines inventor Danny Hillis. He's showing the maximod, which has "every legal receiver band and maybe some others," infrared cameras, and even the ablility to inflate and deflate tires from inside the vehicle. "Something like this we just do for fun."

Now he's showing a toy, where you can remix bits of things together. He's showing a ray gun, a helicopter and a car, which can all fit together and it works as a single unit.

It's not just all silly stuff. They are working on cancer research by doing mass spectrometry on blood, in order to identify all the proteins in the blood sample and then try to figure out why certain drugs work on some patients but not others. (I think.)

"I've always wanted a paper map that you could keep zooming out, since I was a kid. So I built this and showed it to the mapmakers." He's showing a video of him demo'ing his mapzoom product at a mapmakers conference. He just brushes his hands across a table-sized horizontal screen that looks like it's about 5' x 3'. "The cool thing was how much emotion I got from the mapmakers. I had people literally come up to me in tears. And you guys think you're geeks." This project speaks to the emotional connection mapmakers have with physical maps.

My mouth is agape at the next video, which is a physical map which actually changes shape to show topography. Mountains rise, valleys drop. That is cool.

He is proposing a different model of the Internet. If you look at how ebay or amazon or a wiki or a blog works, it isn't publishing. Its contributors put data up; and the publisher has a way of generating a view of that data. What's wrong is that the individual databases are not shared databases. Everybody contributes to a shared database and has their own way to visualize slices of that data.

"I think another thing will emerge, which is that this is about the sharing and rendering of the public database." But now he's out of time.

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