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Google’s latest move on maps is impressive, and knocks out Microsoft’s latest effort to spruce up its maps with 3D imagery.

Separately, scared out of the shadows is a Waltham, Mass. start-up, Everyscape, which has a similar offering, but its twist is that it lets you cruise streets, landmarks and even enter buildings. It has a demo of Union Square, in San Francisco, and says a full lunch is planned for fall. It has a high gee-whiz factor, but takes some skill in directing yourself with navigational arrows — sort of learning how of to fly a magic carpet. More on Everyscape in a second, but first back to Google.

Google’s offering is called Street View. Go to Google Maps, select an address, and hit “street view,” and Google renders a 3D image of the street you’re on and surrounding view.

More impressive, it is interactive. Once you get the image (an example is below), you can drag it around, so that the image turns with you — a full 360 degrees. (Try it with the Golden Gate Bridge here). If you want a view of another place, you just take the little person-icon and drag them in the map to your desired location.

Microsoft, while doing something similar, is clunkier. The 360 degree swivel isn’t seamless. You can pick north, south, east and west, and have different screens for each. Still, Microsoft will no doubt scramble again to catch up.

More details on Google’s Street View from Greg Sadetsky: Cities covered so far are Denver, Las Vegas, Miami, New York and San Francisco. It is Flash, can be decompiled using Flare, and a server from Keyhole (a property recently integrated into Google earth) suggests Google Earth may be supported soon.

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EveryScape, meanwhile, lets you do even more. It lets you circulate in a neighborhood and enter stores and restaurants. It provides an on-screen window providing reviews of these locales, from Yelp and elsewhere. Turnhere, another start-up, offers videos of various places, but doesn’t offer the navigational kick provided by EveryScape.

EveryScape wants users submit photos of their favorite places, so that it can offer more than the nine cities where it is launching by the end of the year. It also wants to let visitors share their stories, opinions and reviews about their daily experiences at these places, against the visual backdrops. This is all dangerously close to the direction likely to be taken by Google’s Street View and Google Earth — though Google has yet to prove adept at encouraging user participation around its products.

On EveryScape, someone looking to rent his or her apartment can add a “For Rent” sign and an apartment tour. The beginnings of an ultimate virtual world?

No download is required. EveryScape is Flash-based. The company said the images it uses come from standard digital single-lens reflex (SLR) cameras, and are uploaded to EveryScape for processing. It says it wants to cover the entire world.

Update: More here from the Mercury News’ Elise Ackerman, about how the latest technologies are shaping up in the competition between Microsoft’s Virtual Earth and Google Earth.

(Updated) Round-up in Silicon Valley:

Google working on a Google Earth version of Second Life? — So says venture capitalist Michael Eisenberg, a partner at Benchmark capital, the firm that invested in Second Life, citing a rumor from the “PhD grapevine.” [Update: Google spokesman Daniel Pastor says: "We're continually exploring opportunities to expand our offerings, but we don't have anything to announce at this time."] Google co-founders have always been about having “impact.” This would give them a chance to act as virtual central bankers, a function Second Life has been having problems with. See the latest allegations, for example, that Second Life is akin to a pyramid scheme, and that it’s much harder to pull your money out than you’re led to believe.

Marketclusters, latest effort to filter blogs for corporate clients — It is the old lemming play. Monitor110, of New York, and TechDirt, of Belmont, Calif. (Silicon Valley) are doing versions of this, and have just raised capital to sign up clients. And so Marketclusters, of London, has raised $3 million from New Media Spark. It serves corporate and financial clients. Notably, it lists among its clients Silicon Valley venture firm Benchmark Capital, which happens to be an investor in Seeking Alpha, a company that aggregrates information from financial blogs, and so is somewhat related. Benchmark has been known to hedge (for example, investing in both online loan marketplace competitors, Zopa and Prosper).

The world’s densest memory circuit — Researchers at Caltech and UCLA said they have created a circuit 100 times denser than today’s standard memory circuits — while remaining as small as a human white blood cell.

Adobe’s curious acquisition of a peer-to-peer networking company — Om speculates on why Adobe, the giant software and Flash multimedia maker, has bought a Santa Cruz, Calif. P2P networking start-up, Amicima though we’re still left scratching our heads about exactly why.

Bix, the little $41M web site? — Bix, you’ll recall, was the light-weight Web site that let people compete in online karaoke, hot or not and other contests. It raised $6.7 million, and then was snatched up by Yahoo, apparently for a 6-fold return (according to one rough account), within six months of launching. Not bad. [Update: A credible source close to Bix tells VentureBeat the actual price was higher than $41M]

CleverSet latest online behavior monitoring company — This company joins a number of other players, including Aggregate Knowledge, that try to predict what people will want to buy based on their behavior. CleverSet watches what you click on, what information its clients have about you, your purchase history, all to help their online retail clients make better merchandise recommendations to you. The Seattle company just raised $2 million. On its advisory board are Dr. Peter Norvig, director of research for Google, and Dr. Andreas Weigend, former chief scientist of Amazon.com.

The latest tech news in Silicon Valley:

The mobile TV revolution continues, and MobiTV is hot — MobiTV, of Emeryville is one of the start-ups on the forefront. It offers TV programming from networks and cable providers. It started out serving mobile phones. Now it has expanded, first to WiFi, and now with AT&T to anyplace with broadband.

Venture investors like Oak are paying a good price to play. MobiTV raised $70 million in a July third round, at a valuation in excess of a pretty $400 million, according to PE Week Wire. That’s compared to a value of just $50 million following a $15 million round in 2004. Oak invested $65 million of the total new investment.

Loopt, the mobile presence company, is finally launching — Loopt uses GPS and other data to give you the location of your friends, along with their presence status, such as available or away. Techcrunch has a review. The company has changed its name several times.

You’ll be able to get alerts when your friends are within a certain distance, and send messages to them (see image below). The service is initially available only to customers of pay-as-you-go service, Boost Mobile.

The Costco of travel sites — cFares, a travel start-up based in Redwood Shores, is charging you $50 to get access to wholesaler discounts, and the resulting prices are about $30 to $50 below those of other major sites, finds GigaOm. The company has raised $1.5 million from Garage Technology Ventures and is working on a second round. Also interesting: cFares.com has built a way for an airline to under-bid another airline at the point of sale, thereby providing a below-market price to the consumer. Finally, it has a “Name-Your-Price” feature, where it does an ongoing search online for fares priced at your wish, or lower.

Social networking siteXuQa raises more than previously thought — The youth oriented site, previously slammed by critics, has relaunched; it is focused on model contests, and revolves around a system of “gathering peanuts.” Goal is to become the most popular, and you get up to $1,000 in cash for rewards. We’ve mentioned the company before here. Some doubted it would raise VC money. But who isn’t able to raise money these days? Turns out, it has gotten $1.3 million from BV Capital and Morten Lund, an early Skype investor. It is based in San Francisco, with most of its developers in Karachi, Pakistan.

Yahoo Local revamps — It now lets you write reviews and submit ratings for local businesses, save your favorite locations, view local businesses on one map to see what’s around you and so on. (See more here, which includes a look at Microsoft Live Local Search’s improvements too.)

Yahoo seeks to retain talent — It is setting up an in-house incubator, called Brickhouse, and will be led by Flickr founder Caterina Fake.

Networking company Netgear ships a Skype phone that works with WiFi — The phone started shipping this week for $249.99.

Google’s market share in China is plummeting (see Red Herring article) — We got in touch with Kaiser Kuo, who wrote the piece, and he says the guy who led the study, Mr. Lu, is credible. As a start-up, Google neglected China. Chief executive Eric Schmidt first traveled there last year. More recenlty, Google was criticized for allowing censorship there, but China’s government has played hardball anyway, and now Baidu is eating Google’s lunch.

Google Earth shows you around the Bay Area with TurnHere videos — Google has released a host of new ways to find information while you’re zooming around its virtual globe. You click on the checkbox for “Featured Content” in the Google Earth sidebar, and a whole bunch of multimedia overlays pop up. In the Bay Area, we see the usual National Geographic feature boxes already announced. But now you see a whole bunch of new videos from start-up TurnHere; it’s a good way to check out restaurants or other places before you visit. In fact, TurnHere plans to shoot 25,000 short videos this year, most of them neighborhoods and local attractions. This could get interesting. Here’s a good Merc story on TurnHere. Here’s a story about Google’s Featured Content.