Star Trek gets Googled

Google Earth chief technologist, Michael Jones, who quipped that his job was to make certain Google’s mapping service was "the warp drive of computer graphics," commanded a booth modeled after the Enterprise bridge.

"You sit in the captain’s chair and the main screen is Google Earth," Jones said in a telephone interview from the booth. "It is cool. People go to their house, China, Singapore, The Netherlands… it has been fun."

Google deemed the convention a prime place to search for talent because the fans tend to be tech-savvy, passionate, and in tune with the show’s theme of expanding the boundaries of human accomplishment, according to Jones.

"It is the spirit of getting to a distant planet, solving a problem and coming home – making the universe a smaller place," Jones said. "You don’t have to teleport to the Eiffel Tower. You can type it into Google Earth and fly there in a few seconds and learn about it."

Jones, 46, spoke of watching Star Trek as a child and being inspired by the "tricorders" characters "beamed" onto strange planets would use to quickly learn its composition, atmosphere and life forms.

"It was the notion that you could be smart about something you couldn’t quite see, but was around the corner," Jones said. "Through Google Earth, when you land at your Paris hotel you can see the Champs de Lysee and things to do. You get a sense of the planet."

The Google clan felt a kindred spirit with Star Trek fans that unabashedly demonstrated devotion – by dressing up as favorite characters, stocking up on mementos, and seeking autographs from actors.

In a light-hearted blog entry, Google technical writer Tom Galloway referred to the television show’s Captain James T. Kirk as an early blogger due to the "captain’s log" he narrated in episodes.

The crew’s flip-open communicators could be seen as predecessors to popular mobile telephone models, according to Galloway.

"And the crew was constantly asking the ship’s computer for information… sort of like Google," Galloway wrote.