Nine months ago, Do, with whom we’d worked years ago, approached us with the project, which has accelerated ever since. Today, the San Diego Metropolitan is proud to introduce sandiego360.com and sandiego360.magazine, online worldwide and in your hands at newstands, hotels and restaurants near you.

Mayor Dick Murphy calls sandiego360.com “the World’s First Virtual City.” Scott Barnett, executive director of the San Diego County Taxpayers Association, calls it “the best thing that’s happened to the hospitality industry since ConVis, except sandiego360. com doesn’t require any tax dollars.”

Well, that’s very nice. The San Diego Convention and Visitors Bureau does a fine job, although its Website is in the throes of some needed redesign. We hereby welcome ConVis to embrace sandiego360.com as the smart new mayor has: “It’s like owning a fine picture book of San Diego, only it’s for your desktop rather than your coffee table,” the mayor says. Now who couldn’t embrace that? Plus, we’re inexpensive.

For those who are computer-illiterate, worse than Murphy, we extend our acknowledgement and disappointment. Get with it, because words cannot describe the little thrill of delight of getting online and experiencing sandiego360.com. But we’ll try.

Sandiego360.com offers hundreds of 360-degree, spherical views of San Diego’s most beautiful attractions — parks, museums, beaches, bays, ocean, architecture, restaurants, hotels, shops, inside and out. So, for instance, looking at a picture on your computer screen, mouse in hand, you could be standing on the Prado of Balboa Park, looking at the California tower, and you can twirl to your right and see the San Diego Museum of Art, or to your left and see the Museum of Man. You can twirl all the way around, look up to the trees and sky, or down to your toes. You can zoom in and see if that’s your friend in the picture, or zoom back and see the entire panorama. You can go inside the museums and stroll the gardens, even browse inside the gift shops.

You can tour the Gaslamp Quarter up and down and cruise Imperial Beach during the Sand Castle Competition. Check her out. You can stand at the Point Loma Lighthouse and twirl, or explore the Malcolm X Library and twirl some more, all from the comfort of your home or office computer. O.B., Black’s Beach, Swami’s and on and on. More than 200 places throughout San Diego County can be explored, with more being added daily. While sandiego360.com definitely has tourists in mind, “as San Diegans enjoy our so-called ‘tourist attractions,’ so too will San Diegans enjoy cruising through sandiego360. com,” says Mayor Murphy.

We also knew sandiego360.com would appeal to expatriate San Diegans, and indeed it was heartwarming when we received our first entries in the “guest book” from far-away surfers. Richard E. Mindine Jr. writes, “Very nice Website. Makes me want to live there in San Diego again!!!!!!” Sonny Sturn, who moved to Texas, uses it with fond memories. There’s Horton Plaza, which he opened in 1985. And Ken Klausen, at home, says, “Congratulations ... for making ‘America’s Finest Website’ for ‘America’s Finest City.’ And Joyce at jebphotos2000@yahoo.com, says, “Heard about this site on the radio and thought we’d check it out. Looks great and we’ll bookmark it.” Really nice. And here’s Cindi Wood of cw@succeed.net: “I think this site is extraordinary! Very creative and really informative. My compliments to the creator of this site! We need to see more sites like this on the Internet!”

Well, thank you all. John Do deserves most of the credit. Darcy Alvey, a Metropolitan writer, has been named editor of sandiego360.com and sandiego360.magazine. She’s been working on it for months. Tim McClain, editor in chief, the heavy hand over the award-winning sandiegometro.com, maintains a heavy influence without a heavy hand over sandiego360.com. And Jim Matta, production director, maintains creative, graphic continuity among all the related products. Nick Abdelnour, yes, the city clerk’s son, sells advertising for both products, as does Morgan Dawson, a recently retired Navy SEAL. Sometimes you need a SEAL.

Sandiego360.magazine is the glossy, print counterpart, with 200,000 copies being distributed throughout the county throughout the year at 360 obvious visitor locations. It incorporates the old Guide to Downtown San Diego, which the Metropolitan has published since the early 1990s. Like sandiego360.com, the digest-size magazine contains lot of art and information about restaurants, tours, museums and other attractions. The Website includes weather information and hundreds of restaurant reviews, mostly by Terryl Gavre, the Metropolitan’s food editor and Cafe 222 proprietor. Sandiego360.magazine is the only visitor publication we know of with a companion Website, and vice versa.

Advertisers, including restaurants and retailers with a continuing presence in the Metropolitan and sandiego360.magazine, are enjoying 800,000 copies distributed annually. Add sandiegometro.com, sandiego360.com and maybe even the North Park News, and they’re really cookin’ with 920,000 copies annually, each with more shelf-life than dailies or weeklies. (The more of the Metropolitan’s companion media are added, the cheaper the ads get per unit.)

360 operates out of the Metropolitan’s Downtown offices and from John Do’s maximumview.com workspace in Mission Valley, with the server hosted by Reid Warrick’s Teracenter, locked down in one of the data warehouses on Mira Mesa. It’s a Unix box with a DS3 line, right next to PacBell’s server.

The whole project has been capitalized with less than $50,000, and that’s the reality for most Internet entrepreneurs, who struggle with relatively little capital or even less. You read about the high fliers with venture capital, public investors and a lot of promises, especially the ones that have crashed and burned. The Larry Smarrs of the world with $300 million in government and corporate grants make for great cover stories. But the reality for most high-tech communications entrepreneurs, trying to earn a nickel from their work, is much more modest. If sandiego360.com is successful, Do wants to take the concept to other cities. To date, the most tours of other cities using similar “virtual reality” technology number 12. Sandiego360.com, using superior VR technology, already enjoys more than 200 VR tours. “I don’t consider 12 VRs a virtual city,” says Do, who hopes to be profitable by year-end.

Aside from sandiego360.com and maximumview.com, John Do is a remarkable story himself. A Vietnam refugee, he set foot in San Diego County in October 1975 and lived his first months here in a tent city on Camp Pendleton, a penniless 10-year-old with penniless parents. Casino operators, his parents sheltered the children in a French Catholic boarding school during the war and lost everything but their lives as they fled Saigon with John and his 5-year-old sister, Kim. The family made it to El Cajon for six months, where he and Kim were the only Asians in school. But the children were thrilled. “Everything was new. It was cool.” They learned English from “Batman,”

Gilligan’s Island” and “Charlie’s Angels,” moved to City Heights where Hung Do grew up and quickly came to prefer, well, John to Hung. Dad became a gardener. He struggled at SDSU, studied architecture for two years at Mesa College while working for Bundy & Thompson, still “the best firm I ever worked for,” then found his way to Cal Poly Pomona for four years to study urban planning.

“That’s when I started learning how to use computers and computer graphics,” he says. “The first computer I bought was a little Mac SE black and white. Now, I have two G3 Macs. My main Macintosh that I did the development of sandiego360.com on is a G3 with 1 gigabyte of RAM, 240 gigabytes of harddrive and a 21 inch monitor. I also have a Mac laptop, a PC laptop, a Windows NT machine, a tower, and a Windows 98 machine, so I can test my work.”

Shortly after leaving school he joined the San Diego Daily Transcript, where he served as the webmaster who designed its San Diego Source, the first newspaper-based Website in Southern California that was soon followed by the Union-Tribune and then the Metropolitan’s sandiegometro.com. After that he joined the county, spent three years developing its Website, then established maximumview.com as he perfected the 360-degree, spherical technology.

And the rest is high-tech commercial hospitality communications history in the making.

Log on. Take us for a spin. Let us know your thoughts.