Am I the only one to think there is some kind of real-time Google Earth stuff going on behind the scenes, supposedly in their labs ? $41M, I can clearly see ho

Am I the only one to think there is some kind of real-time Google Earth stuff going on behind the scenes, supposedly in their labs ? $41M, I can clearly see how that would fund a face/shape/... recognition engine, reconstruct some 3D models from the images and then play with them. Frankly the iPhone app just seems to me like a cheap way for them to get a bigger image dataset and begin telling users that all their photos will be public anyway.