Last week I participated in the MeriTalk panel at the Reagan Center in Washington D.C. that focused on implementation of cloud computing within the federal government.  The panel included GSA CIO Casey Coleman, Assistant Deputy Under Secretary of Defense Comptroller Radha Sekar, Navy CIO Robert Carey, and Director of the National Business Center at the Department of the Interior Doug Bourgeois.  MeriTalk describes itself as an "online community at the crossroads of IT and public policy."  A very interesting conversation followed...

On Tuesday, we released new higher- resolution lunar imagery and maps that include NASA multimedia content on the Google Moon site at http://moon.google.com. Updates include new content from the Apollo missions, including dozens of embedded panoramic images, links to audio clips and videos, and descriptions of the astronauts' activities during the missions. The new content is overlaid on updated, higher-resolution lunar maps. Also added are detailed charts of different regions of the moon suitable for use by anyone simulating a lunar mission.

On August 12th, I participated in a NASA mission lead by Peter Jenniskens to hunt meteors.  This mission, along with a second mission on September 1st has been designed to study two meteor showers, the annual Perseid shower peaking on August 13th, and the Aurigid shower on September 1st.

Last week, Microsoft and NASA released four new Photosynth collections.  I'd like to thank Pete Worden at Ames Research Center and Bill Parsons at Kennedy Space Center for their support, and Bill Gerstenmaier for his support up at NASA Headquarters.

We worked with MSNBC on the release to create a site called SPACEWORLD to announce the four new collections from their MSN and NBC/MSNBC affiliates.

NASA had a very successful launch of space shuttle endeavour last week.  I had an opportunity to view the shuttle at midnight the day before the launch with Steve Wozniak (above) and a few other VIP guests of Ames. 

This week, I attended the MIT Emerging Technologies Conference in Boston.  Several of the sessions were quite good, including the P2P Networking, Engineering the Brain, and the fireside chat with Ann Winblad, who is a partner at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners.

The P2P session was very objective and covered a wide breadth of issues relating to P2P, including the benefits of source and destination obsfucation, the challenges of decentralized application architectures, and and the impact P2P traffic in LAN and WAN environments.  Panelists on the P2P session included Klaus Mochalski, CEO, Ipoque; Roger Dingledine, President and Cofounder, The Tor Project; Robert Morris, Associate Professor of Computer Science, MIT.