An acutal Marriott employee, not the PR people, dropped me a line to note the company was now using Microsoft Virtual Earth to locate its vacation and hotel properties on its website. I'm not sure what it used before.

One note below the map found after a search: "Please note: maps are currently not viewable with Safari browsers"

CTO Justin Rattner gave a keynote address at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco highlighting how the 3D Web, with virutal and more realistic 3D renderings, is the future.

"This may be the killer app of killer apps," Rattner told reporters after they keynote. "As people demand a more immersive, a more realistic experience, they're just going to push the computing demands to unprecedented levels."

And of course, Intel will be there to provide chips to support all that rendering... Rattner was not all smiley; he noted challenges to 3D including standardization and user interfaces.

- InfoWorld

A press release from Acacia Research Corporation announced that its subsidiary Acacia Patent Acquisition Corporati has acquired rights to a patent relating to vehicle location technology. Which patent? They don't say, but they do note:

This patented technology generally relates to systems capable of locating vehicles and providing subsequent services from a remote location. It covers satellite-based location systems, such as GPS, and is applicable to vehicle tracking, vehicle assistance services and other similar services.

This tells me that folks are gathering up such patents for future exploitation as LBS continues to grow. And, interestingly, it creates a market of "middlemen" license those patents. Back in the old days, people kept their patents. When Doug Richardson, now Exec. Dir. of the AAG was on WAMU radio earlier this week, he noted his former company's (GeoResearch) patent on using GPS to make maps using GIS.

In other geo-car related patent news CalAmp Corp. of California filed complaints in US Federal Court against Procon, Inc., Skywatch GPS LLC, and iMETRIK Solutions Inc. for infringement of two patents related to a vehicle location system for" dealers and finance companies to locate and repossess vehicles serving as collateral on loans that go into default." The patents were acquired in an acquisition in March.

- RTT News