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CLIMATE ALIVE ! An *excellent* seven-minute film about Asheville North Carolina's role in understanding climate change.

"The need has never been greater for accurate and understandable information about climate change and its impacts.

The Centers for Environmental and Climatic Interaction (CECI) is a non-profit partnership among government, academia and industry that provides trusted climate change information and analysis to policymakers, business leaders and the public.

Located in Asheville, North Carolina, home of NOAA's National Climatic Data Center, CECI provides innovative education strategies, natural resource impact analysis, visualization technologies and other tools for making crucial decisions.

Leading edge visualization tools, including geodomes designed and produced by the Asheville-based company, The Elumenati , are a key component of the city’s climate services skill set.  READ MORE »

Reviewed By Brady Forrest at O'Reilly Radar

Poly9 has released a new free 3D globe called Free Earth. It uses Flash, but requires no other download and cross-browser. That spinning blue marble is really sweet looking.

Using their Javascript API you can add placemarks (as you can see below with the tarsier marking the O'Reilly offices), video, and control the globe's movement.
Right now there is no zoom, but they are in the process of getting satellite imagery. According to CEO Greg Sadetsky, "The plan is to have a licensable product for commercial use, and a free product for everybody."

Poly9 is a group of hackers in Quebec City.  READ MORE »

Hans Rosling's nonprofit called Gapminder, uses animated interactive design to make global statistics understandable.

Gapminder is a non-profit venture for development and provision of free software that visualise human development. This is done in collaboration with universities, UN organisations, public agencies and non-governmental organisations. Gapminder is a Foundation registered at Stockholm county administration board (Länstyrelsen) (reg. nr. 802424-7721). It was founded by Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund and Hans Rosling on 25 February 2005, in Stockholm. Gapminder Foundation will advance software development that have been done earlier by the non-profit company Gapminder Ltd. Funding has been and is mainly by grants from Sida for the Trendalyzer project. Being a producer of global public goods Gapminder benefit from free and creative inputs from pilot-testers and other end-users in many institutions and organisations.

Via Businessweek