HTML5

HTML5 canvas was a natural extension for giscloud.com, distinguished by posting vectors on the web, overlaying rasters like a desktop, and with a optional postGIS running in the background. Not only does this speed up drawing maps on the web, it also allows massive amounts - in the millions of points, lines and polygons - to render PDQ (pretty darn quickly) - hence the title: Vectors are your friend - their blog outlines this recent breakthrough, and my moderately complex maps benefit from even clean&crisper renderings, of polygons as expected and of tiled images especially.

This is my old Medieval Fenlands map in East Anglia with 10 layers at 2000 polygons each and two web mapping services - zoom in an out to appreciate its speed. Here the original map, which you can switch back to non-HTML mode by clicking on the "5" logo to the upper right.

Here's the Goddard Space Flight Center's AIRS NRT imagery web mapping service to show tiling speed. Dino's start-up company being still in its infancy, there is a long way to go yet, as some of the 1500 tweets in the 24 hrs following their announcement pointed out - labeling, scale dependency, layers etc. And with the inevitable comparisons with raster webmaps that are sure to follow, 3D viewing and globes etc.

Fifteen years ago Argus Technologies distinguished themselves from ArcView 2 and Mapinfo 1 by rendering in less than 5 s. all 50 US states and 3000+ county polygons. And about that time another Croatian genius mapped the solar system at millimetric scale... One could say that:

What goes around, goes around, goes around again,
da-na-na da-na-na da-na-na my frien-end say
Where you gonna run to? When it gonna end?