As you’ve likely heard, Microsoft has unveiled it’s new Bing search engine. As part of that rebranding process, other Microsoft applications are getting renamed. Of particular interest to us are the new names for their mapping products.
Live Search Maps will now be simply called “Bing Maps”, and the Virtual Earth platform will now be known as “Bing Maps for Enterprise”. Much more about this can be found on Chris Pendleton’s blog or by watching the video below.
This could be pretty cool. Microsoft’s remarkable Photosynth software now is playing nicely with Virtual Earth. From their press release:
Photosynth software analyzes digital photographs and generates a 3-D model by “stitching” the photos together. These models, or “synths,” can now be viewed using Silverlight technology across multiple platforms. Virtual Earth brings together features, functionality and content that help consumers, businesses, citizens and governments bring location to life. It helps businesses and governments share location-based information, build better connections with consumers or citizens, and helps organizations make better operational decisions. With the integration of Photosynth into Virtual Earth customers will be able to create detailed 3-D views of anything from places to products and from hotels to homes.
Greg Sterling has some good ideas on how companies could best use this, covering ideas such as real estate and retail stores.
I was wondering if Google would be adding their “ocean” features to other bodies of water, and it turns out they are! You can now dive into the five Great Lakes just as you can with the oceans.
From the LatLong Blog:
Users will be able to explore features such as the canyons and shoals in eastern Lake Superior, the Lake Michigan mid-lake reef complex, and the old river channel, now underwater, that once connected Lakes Michigan and Huron at the Straits of Mackinac.
In addition, the NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory
has created a narrated Google Earth tour which you can download here (KML) or view directly in your browser.
There’s some confused people in Broughton, a Buckinghamshire village. According to the Times:
So when the Google Street View car trundled towards Broughton with a 360-degree camera on its roof, villagers sprang into action. Forming a human chain to stop it, they harangued the driver about the “invasion of privacy”, adding that the images that Google planned to put online could be used by burglars.
Their main concern seemed to be that this would help to facilitate crime in the area. They’ve had three burglaries in the past six weeks and they’re concerned that this could lead to more. I’m thinking that if they already have a high crime rate in the area, stopping Google from getting imagery should be a little lower on their list of concerns.
A commenter on Digg made a good point that I’m sure will be lost on these villagers:
I hope everyone’s bank account is FDIC insured because I’m sure the street car has caught a lot of banks on camera and now they’re all like 20 times more likely to get robbed.
For the record, the car was on public roads and was completely legal. It’s not like the couple that sued Google for taking pictures of their house on a private road (which backfired badly anyhow). Google had every legal right to do what they were doing. That being said, I think the driver did the right thing by turning around to avoid making the situation worse.
I’d really like to see these images show up on StreetView, with a mob of (blurred-out, I suppose) faces around the car. I’m sure they won’t post it, but it’d sure be funny to see! I wonder if Google will go back and try to capture this area again, or if they’ll just move on to other areas?
Google has just released a new mobile phone app called “Latitude”
that helps you track down friends and family in real-time.
The app is currently available for Blackberry, S60 (Nokia N95, etc) and Windows Mobile. An Android app will be available in the next few days and it’ll be coming to the iPhone “very soon”.
The system feels a bit similar to Yahoo’s new Fire Eagle, but with one big difference: Fire Eagle is a way to push your location publicly, while this service is for friends only.
Here is a brief video that shows how the service works:
This is simply one of the biggest releases ever for Google Earth. Some of the goodies:
Enough talk. If you haven’t seen GE 5.0 yet, then you just need to go get it and play!
GeoEye made quick work of posting an image from Barack Obama’s Inauguration today. As promised, they snapped a photo at 11:19am and had it posted by this afternoon. The photo does a great job of capturing the mass of people that were in Washington. It was very interesting to see the the crowds formed — presumably to get in front of the billboard-sized screens that were set-up along the mall.
If you’d like to see it for yourself, Google has created a special overlay that includes the file.
I’m a bit disappointed there weren’t any easter eggs in there — it was well known that the photo would be taken at 11:19, and the festivities hadn’t really begun at that point. Still, given the relatively low quality of the photo it would have taken some serious work to make something that would have been visible. Plus, you never know when a plan like that can go bad
.
Two days before Tuesday’s Inauguration of Barack Obama, Google has updated the imagery in the Washington, DC area. According to the Google Earth Blog, the imagery for the White House and Capitol building are still from 2002, but much of the imagery in the area is dated 2008.
In addition, some of the censorship has been eased. For example, the US Naval Observatory is no longer pixelated, though it’s still somewhat blurry. That simple change helps it flow much better with the surrounding imagery without giving away too much detail. It seems like a smart way to do it.
Also, be sure to visit Google Map Mania’s list of other useful Inauguration-related Maps.
Google has just announced the release fo the transit layer for 50 cities worldwide. Google Transit has been around for a while, but this actually overlays the transit lines on the map.
As the Google LatLong blog says, using this in combination with hotels and/or restaurants can make life much easier when you’re visiting a city.
For more information, you can also visit Google Maps Mania. The complete list of cities includes Belo Horizonte, Berlin, Bordeaux, Brasilia, Cairo, Capetown, Caracas, Chicago, Copenhagen, Dallas, Dortmund, Duisburg, Düsseldorf, Ekaterinburg, Essen, Frankfurt, Genoa, Guadalajara, Hamburg, Helsinki, Johannesburg, Kazan, Köln, Lille, Lisbon, London, Lyon, Madrid, Marseille, Medellin, Mexico City, Melbourne, Monterrey, Montreal, Munich, Naples, Nizhniy Novgorod, Oslo, Paris, Perth, Portland, Porto, Porto Alegre, Prague, Pretoria, Recife, Rennes, Rio de Janeiro, Samara, San Francisco, Santiago, Sao Paulo, Seattle, Strasbourg, Toulouse, Tunis, Vienna, Warsaw.
Hot on the heels of its arrival on the iPhone
, the web interface of Google Maps has just received a major overhaul. In particular, the handling of StreetView is much different.
Google Maps Mania has a great overview of the changes, as does the video below. Check it out!