Google Earth, now used to combat the scourge of marijuana. Police in Switzerland used the map software to help find some 1.2 tons worth of the substance. And that’s not all! → Read More
Google Earth and Maps is more than a noveltiy to this guy. Supposably he located a shipwrecked boat laden gold and silver worth around $3 billion. Billion. That’s a lot of booty. But wait, there is more. → Read More
Can you name Google’s top ten products? If you look at how Quantcast ranks Google’s subdomains, you can get a sense of which Google products are the most popular, since they each have their own subdomain. Google’s main search engine tops the list with an estimated 136.6 million unique visitors in the U.S. Then comes Google Maps (36 million), Image Search (31.7 million), and Gmail (10.5 million). Google Docs, Sites, and Knol are still too small to make the top-ten, but are all showing decent growth.
YouTube and Orkut are not included below because they are on their own domains, but YouTube would be second with 70 million unique visitors. Orkut is not popular in the U.S., so it would not be a factor in this particular list. And I took out sorry.google.com, the domain Google uses to try to catch bots and spyware. It would have ranked No. 8. → Read More
Google, the company, has updated the 3D maps of New York City, the city, in Google Earth. So now when you’re cruising, virtually, around the city that never sleeps you’ll be able to view higher res buildings. No, it’s not the biggest news of the day, but it could be helpful when trying to whittle away the hours while at the office or in class. And really, that’s all we’re trying to accomplish here. → Read More
The terrorist attacks in Mumbai have once again put Google Earth in an unfavorable light. The one (“baby-faced”) terrorist that police caught has said that the terrorists used Google Earth the help plan the attacks. (That they also used everyday cellphones, GPS and other technologies appears to be lost on the ban happy Indian officials.) In order to prevent future attacks, so the line of thinking goes, officials there want at the very least to force Google to blur our sensitive sites from the software, if not ban it outright. Let’s also keep in mind that India plans to launch its own version of Google Earth, so to speak. While it seems an overreaction to me to want to ban what amounts to an electronic map—are we looking to ban regular, paper maps now?—in no way was I affected by the attacks, at least not directly, so it’s hard for me to qualify India’s reaction. It does seem that attacking (banning) tools instead of the idea and forces behind those tools is folly. → Read More
The long-anticipated release of the Google Earth browser plugin for Mac OS X (Intel and PowerPC) has arrived, about half a year after the plugin for Windows was announced and about 5 weeks after the introduction of the GE iPhone application. Linux users will still have to wait a bit for a compatible version.
You can download by visiting any Google Earth Plugin app or visiting the GE API web site. Attention: the file is 47MB in size, because of the combined Intel and PowerPC compatibility. Go to EarthSwoop or 360Cities to see it in action. → Read More
Color me impressed with this one: Prague-based 360 Cities, a network of ‘Virtual Reality’ photographers promoting high-resolution spherical imagery, has integrated its portfolio of stunning 360° panorama shots into the Featured Preview Layer for Google Earth.
A collection of the panoramas just became visible automatically to every user of the free 3D earth visualization software, and the rest of the 360cities database, which is nearly 10,000 spherical images strong, has been added to the Gallery in Google Earth as well. → Read More
Google launched its own satellite, the GeoEye1, last month and this here is its first photo. It’s a shot of Kutzton University in Pennsylvania. The GeoEye1 satellite will serve a number of clients, including the U.S. government (and Google itself). Naturally, the government will be able to access higher resolution images than you and I. That said, the new images that you and I will have access to on Google Maps and Google Earth will be of “much higher quality” than what we’re used to. What’s Google’s stock at right now? I wouldn’t be surprised if this type of lavish spending slows down in the next few months. → Read More
The National Snow and Ice Center, a division of Proctor & Gamble, has uploaded Google Earth-compatible KML files that make it plain as day to see polar ice cap melting over the past several years. If you don’t have Google Earth installed, there’s a Quicktime movie that gives you the gist of what’s going on. We’re all doomed, essentially. Or something. I don’t know, it’s something to mess around with for a few minutes while we all wait for The Big Announcement™. via TG Daily → Read More
Some no-good kids in the UK have been harnessing the power of Google Earth to find houses with nice pools. Once a suitable house has been found, the kids use Facebook to send out some sort of “Crash This Pool” app or whatever the hell it is that you kids do on Facebook these days. Everyone shows up at the pool, beer and cigarettes in tow, and starts doing “the bump” or whatever the hell it is that you kids do at pool parties these days. Sounds fun, except for the part about how the pool and the house it’s attached to don’t belong to the kids. According to the Register… “Owners of several plush poolside properties have already returned home to find teenagers taking a dip in their man-made lakes or their spoor: beer cans, dog-ends and vomit floating atop their once crystal-clear pools.” If I had a pool and some kids showed up in the middle of the night. I’d sneak out into the yard and pretend I was one of them, drinking all their beer and smoking all their cigs. At the end of the night, I’d be like "Hey! Let’s rake this guy’s leaves, clean up after ourselves, and leave him some money! He’s probably pretty cool!" Ah, sweet revenge. → Read More
The Vee Balance Board, finally put to good use. A couple of German researchers hacked the Wii Fit input device to work with Google Earth and other oddball applications. This here video explains the lot of it, complete with early 1990s Hackers-sounding, proto-trance background music. via Nowhere Else → Read More
Want to see what the earth would look like in your iPhone? Watch the video below, which was shot by Frank Taylor of the Google Earth Blog. It shows a demo of the “coolest thing” he saw at the recent Where 2.0 conference from a Boulder-Colorado startup called Earthscape.. The demo is of a mobile application (Earthscape Mobile) in development that puts virtual earth software on the iPhone. When the iPhone is tilted, the earth begins to rotate and you can navigate to another part of the globe. Taylor notes that the app was running locally on the phone, and that ideally you’d would want real geo-spatial information downloaded over WiFi or 3G, which would take a ton of bandwidth and effect performance. But perhaps his fellow Googlers will be inspired enough to create a mobile version of Google Earth for the iPhone or Android with just such features. (We can dream). Note that what you see in the video is not Google Earth, although it looks very similar. Earthscape has created its own virtual earth program that it describes as a social geobrowser. As with Google Earth, it allows you to tag places with text, photos, restaurant reviews, and Wikipedia articles. It also lets you see different image overlays of the same spot during different seasons and different times in history. The software is available only in private beta for Windows (sign up here). Mac and Linux are coming soon. CrunchBase Information Earthscape Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
http://www.collegehumor.com/moogaloop/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=1799272&fullscreen=1 Don’t think this won’t/can’t happen. Google is like a batshit crazy ex-girlfriend. It will find a way and you’ll wake up one morning with IT standing over you all wide-eyed and frothing at the mouth. → Read More
Google has announced two new features for Google Maps that mimic features in Google Earth, begging the question: is Google Earth on borrowed time? The first new feature is the additional of terrain in Google Maps. The terrain fly over feature has long been available in Google Earth, but now you can fly over a map and see the contours of the land, all without the need to download Google Earth. The second new feature mimics the community contribution feature of Google Earth. “Our Maps” brings wiki-style collaboration to Google Maps, with users able to annotate places and share those notes with friends or the greater public. Google acquired Keyhole in October 2004 and it was immediately obvious as to why: Google wanted the satellite imagery to support their move into serious mapping. Keyhole provided Google Earth, a downloadable program that gave a then unprecedented view of the earth through the use of satellite imagery, but Google isn’t a software company, Picasa and a few small efforts aside. Google has integrated many of the functions from Keyhole into Google Maps whilst continuing to sustain Google Earth, but for how much longer? As Google Maps takes on more and more of the functionality of Google Earth the appeal of Earth must diminish. It also makes sense that Google would rather grow and sustain a web product over a software download. Google Earth will still be with us for some time to come, but how long is now up to Google, and I’m betting that Google is already looking at ending support sometime in the next year or two as Google Maps becomes everything Google Earth now is, but online and without the download. CrunchBase Information Google Earth Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Google Earth is pretty cool as it is, letting users traverse the globe and see all sorts of landmarks and the like. What would make it better, though, would be to hear the sounds of the area you’re looking at. One company, Wild Sanctuary, has more than 3,500 hours of ambient sounds from all over God’s Green Earth. Collecting all those sound clips took 40 years and now the company is looking to sell to Google. The thinking is that users want to hear the sounds of Parisian streets or New York cabbies cursing at pedestrians in Farsi. Give Google Earth the coordinates and listen in on the wonderful sounds of life. Hey, I’ve heard worse ideas. Plus it gives you the chance to here places you’d have no intention of ever visiting. Anfield, anyone? (Actually, I have no idea if they’ve captured the sound of The Kop on European nights, but that I’d be willing to pay for.) The software that powers that sound layer will be presented at the Web 2.0 conference later in the month. Do it, Google, and make it free to end-users. Sounds bring Google Earth to life [BBC News] → Read More
GPS software firm Trimble Outdoors gets a gold star for being the first to release an outdoor enthusiast multimedia layer for Google Earth. Users download the software to their cellphones and other GPS-capable devices. It then piggybacks on top of Google Earth, providing video clips and the like for featured areas. Want to check out your local hiking trail before you even step outside? (Well, maybe not your local trails, but the big guys.) Just fire up Google Earth with Trimble Outdoors’ software loaded in and you’ll be able to see the trail and its many hazards right away. Better yet, you can export the data to compatible cellphones so you can see all the hazards and so forth while actually on the ol’ trail. Look, I think it’s pretty obvious that I’ve never spent a minute of my life in the great outdoors, but I certainly can appreciate checking out faraway, um, outdoor locales, from the comfort of Google Earth. Can’t get itchy bug bites that way, now can you? Trimble Outdoors in Google Earth [Trimble Outdoors] → Read More
This week, Pentax received a patent on a 3-D imaging system with distance controls while two individual inventors patented a means for viewing 3-D digital images on the Internet. The art of Stereoscopy has been around for a century, but what’s captivating is where this space can go with the explosion in the digital realm. → Read More
Google has added some new layers to Google Earth. The new layers are part of what is now called the “Geographic Web.” The Geographic Web is a mashup of content from Wikipedia, the Google Earth Community, and Panoramio, a geographical photo sharing site. As you zoom into a specific location, you can see place marks of points of interest, user-generated photos, and selected Wikipedia articles. Hopefully it will remain uncluttered as content fills in but it appears that Google is only using select information in the Geographic Web from the three user-generated feeds. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
