Comedy troupe The Vacationeers has a new video parodying Google Maps and its Street View feature. Shortly after the introduction of Street View, privacy concerns were raised by several groups regarding the amount of zooming and the capturing of license plate numbers, but nobody's come close to comparing it to a formidable and mysterious opponent the likes of the smoke monster on J.J. Abrams' Lost.
I desperately hope this becomes a series.
[via Digg]
Peter Kafka at Silicon Alley Insider has started a little guessing game: which anonymous New York tech start-up is getting backed by influential ex-Googler Chris Sacca, who left his job as head of special initiatives to become an angel investor?
On Sunday, Sacca wrote on his blog that he's looking for a "Web geek" for an "edgy little content company" based in Gotham, which "needs its first full-time tech lead."
This is a big deal, because powerful ex-Google executive muscle would mean both great press and deep-pocketed connections for the start-up in question. … Read more
Remember that feature Google rolled out back in November of last year that let users edit location markers? This morning the company's released a new Maps visualization to let you watch a portion of those user edits in real time. Like some of the Flickr and Twitter mashups that have done the same thing with photos and messages, you can glean a certain level of entertainment off watching people's changes, and as long as you're sitting far enough back from your computer monitor you can avoid the Cloverfield-like nausea when the map quick pans to the next location (seriously).
From my time watching the page this morning, nearly all of the changes remained within the United States with just a few trips to southern England. This could mean that either Google's localizing the data feed, or trying to keep the transcontinental panning to a minimum.
Google Maps continues to be one of Google's fastest changing services within the last year. Just yesterday it finally got list reordering as part of My Maps (previously user-created maps would remain in the order of the spot or landmark at the time it was created), and earlier this month it added live Doppler radar and satellite weather reports as a mapplet.
See it in action an animated GIF after the jump.
Not that Austin needs any help in the tech cred department, but Google's decision to open an office in the city can't hurt.
The search giant has leased 25,000 square feet in the heart of hip downtown Austin, Sixth Street and Congress Avenue, according to an article Thursday in the Austin American-Statesman.
So if and when the new Googlers ever leave the office, they can walk right onto Sixth Street--Austin's famed drag of music venues. In their more sober moods, they can peer up Congress Avenue and view the state's austere capitol building.
The … Read more
UPDATE: Google representatives informed CNET News.com on Thursday that this "internal issue with Google Translate" has been fixed.
Gawker has unearthed a rather odd bug in the Google Translate software: its English-to-Spanish translator converts the name of the actor Heath Ledger, who died tragically on Tuesday, to the name of another actor--Tom Cruise. So if you enter in "I will miss Heath Ledger," Google Translate will come back with "Voy a perder Tom Cruise."This looks like a simple bug in the system, perhaps the work of a bored Googler somewhere in the … Read more
We're always on the lookout for smart travel tools, and World Taximeter is no exception. It's an intelligent mashup, combining directions from Google Maps with local cab fares. It'll let you know how much the ride should cost using local rates by distance and time of day, and combining that with live traffic estimations from Google. Depending on what country you're in, it'll also give you the heads up on any additional charges, like if you're booking it over the phone, or traveling on a weekend. For anyone who's visiting a foreign country … Read more
Microsoft has launched Live Search 地图, the China branch of its Virtual Earth project.
Compared with Google's ditu.google.cn and Sogou's (搜狗) map.sogou.com, the site seems about the same, if a little faster--though traffic may still be low. What Google and Microsoft have in common is that the maps contain listings for restaurants, banks, and other locations rendered as icons on the map. Sogou has no such advantage, but sometimes it resolves addresses better than Google.
But here's the interesting part: Microsoft's new service includes major highways and the locations of main cities on Taiwan. … Read more
Although news of layoffs and cost cutting is never a good sign for tech companies, there are some instances when such news arrives that may actually be a sign of good things to come.
According to The New York Times, Yahoo may be preparing to lay off hundreds of people in the coming weeks and focus on three parts of its business-- becoming a "starting point" for the most consumers on the Web; extending its advertising offerings to sites across the Web; and opening up Yahoo's technology infrastructure to third-party developers and publishers.
So what does this mean for me and you? It means that Yahoo may finally be taking a step in the right direction and realizing that the Google onslaught it has been forced to endure over the past few years will only get worse if it doesn't act now.
And based on what I saw from the company at CES, there are some signs that things may turn around.… Read more
In a speech celebrating NASA's fiftieth anniversary, Google's CEO Eric Schmidt urged NASA to be more collaborative with other agencies and even the general public. He suggested that Google's successes often result from opening up without knowing where the breakthroughs would occur.
While Schmidt acknowledged that government agencies like NASA can't wholly adopt Google's "shift and iterate" model whereby it throws a lot of projects at the wall to see what sticks, it
...can learn from open-software development and projects like Linux and MySQL, where collaboration is necessary. And the agency can learn about the value of flexibility from companies like Google, he said.… Read more
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