For a limited time, Occipital’s Panorama 360 is free . If you don’t know why this is such an awesome app, watch the short video demonstration below.

We closed our investment in Occipital last week and I wrote about it in the post titled The World Is Just A Bunch Of Pixels . The Occipital gang is going to create a bunch of amazing stuff and now’s your chance to get on board with a one minute iPhone download. And, if you are reading this after the free offer expires, it’s still worth getting for the couple of bucks they are charging.

Yesterday, we announced that we have invested in Occipital . You may know them as the creators of the popular iPhone app 360 Panorama, the creators of Red Laser (acquired by eBay) , or just a gang of the smartest computer vision guys you’ll come across. And when I say “computer vision”, I don’t just mean the technical part, but also a vision of where it’s going. For example, from the Occipital blog post announcing the investment:

“Your smartphone’s computational reach into its surroundings ends at its touchscreen surface. To your device, the real world isn’t a canvas of interactivity. Instead, it’s little more than a grid of pixels that might as well be random. We’re changing that. We’re using computer vision to make real world environments computationally interactive and fun, thereby extending the computational reach of your device into the visual space around you.”

I met Jeff and Vikas in 2008. They are brilliant and have always had a huge vision. In Do More Faster, they wrote that you should Be Tiny Until You Shouldn’t Be. Red Laser was step 1. 360 Panorama was step 2. 360verse is step 3. And we are really psyched to invest and to help out with step 4.

Just for perspective, with my iPhone, I was able to create a pano of where I’m staying in Tuscany . It took 7 seconds and I’m a pretty mediocre photographer.

We now have three investments, starting with the letter O, in teams that just blow my mind with what they can make a computer do. We’ve talked about Oblong many times in the past. And our friends at Organic Motion just released an amazing new version of their markerless motion capture system.

Our good friend Manu Kumar from K9 Ventures joined the board as did Gary Bradski of Willow Garage.

Here’s to the letter O, as well as the machines getting a little bit smarter, every day, and in every way.