Editor's note: Ben Kacyra is managing director of CyArk, a nonprofit that seeks to digitally preserve cultural heritage sites worldwide. He was co-founder and CEO of Cyra Technologies. He spoke at the TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh, UK, in July. TED is a nonprofit organization dedicated to "ideas worth spreading," which it makes available through talks posted on its website

(CNN) -- When I was a boy, my father used to take me by the hand to visit the ruins of the ancient metropolis on the outskirts of our town. We would always stop by to visit the huge winged bulls that guarded the gates of the ancient city of Nineveh.

I was scared of the winged bulls, but at the same time, they excited me. Through them and the site, I learned the stories of the civilization that lived along the Tigris River in what was now Northern Iraq.

Many decades later, I started a technology company that brought the world its first 3-D laser scanning system and cloud of points software. The systems we developed were extremely fast and could rapidly collect millions of points with very high accuracy and very high resolution.
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