The urge to crap on this is so, so strong. Fortunately, I powered through and read the whole thing. As it turns out, they've actually sold some of this technolo

The urge to crap on this is so, so strong. Fortunately, I powered through and read the whole thing. As it turns out, they've actually sold some of this technology. "With just the partnerships they have in place, Oblong is already cash-flow positive (and have been since last year). They haven’t raised money since the $8.8 million Series A in 2007." Cash-flow positive? Hrm. I'm assuming that means profitable? Maybe not, but it's something. They've actually sold and installed this at some customer locations. That's pretty amazing. I'm curious what it's used for. When I saw who it was, I immediately thought, "Oh no, not this crap again," but there is some new stuff here: * The company is "cash-flow positive" (as mentioned above) * They have an actual product, Mezzanine, that has sold to actual customers * They have a software SDK that will (presumably) allow mere mortals to build actual apps for the thing; and there is also an app server * It doesn't rely on the cumbersome gloves any more; it works with "wands" and iPhones/iPads In addition to all this, it seems that Underkoffler has a somewhat realistic expectation of the time scale involved here: 3-years-ish. "'All of us who read TechCrunch have a reasonably large amount of screens we use, so we need to get there,' he continues. At the same time, 'we’re not nearly finished,' Underkoffler adds. 'It’s fair to say it will be about three years until this is fully into consumer electronics devices,' he continues, noting that the biggest inhibitor is simply cost and bringing it down to a reasonable level for consumers." Although I disagree with him about the biggest inhibitor. I think the biggest inhibitor is going to be finding actual uses for the thing. I'm trying to understand how this would fit in my anything I do during the day. Rotating 3D models in real time using a wandy-thing-ma-bob looks cool in demo, but it's serious "naval contemplation" type stuff in the real world. Right now, I'm sitting here typing text in to a pretty plain looking website, and I'm really, really in to it. I could be doing other things, but this is what I choose to do. Why? Because the hope that I feel -- the hope that someone will read what I've said and respond to it -- isn't closely tied to the amount of wizardry used in the interface.