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Earth -- unlike perhaps any other planet out there -- provides a mostly hospitable home for humankind. Yet we seem to have opted for unsustainable growth instead of preservation.

At least that's the message in photographer David Thomas Smith's "Anthropocene" exhibition, which Smith describes as a visual examination of global landscapes transformed by the actions and activities of humanity. Each of the 12 prints in the collection derives from thousands of screenshots, which Smith captured from Google Maps and metamorphosed in Photoshop.… Read more

Apple may be eyeing its own "Street View" type navigation system and one that offers a key benefit over Google's version.

Published today by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Apple's "3D Position Tracking for Panoramic Imagery Navigation" patent filing describes a navigation technology that looks and works like Street View. The system would display a panoramic image of a certain location on your mobile device, allowing you to virtually move around the area.

Google's Street View forces you to swipe your finger or tap on a direction icon to journey along … Read more

Were you one of those kids who saw the silhouette of creatures in the clouds? You might enjoy director Patrick Jean's "Motorville," in which a California city, loosely based on Los Angeles, comes alive and treks across the world in search of oil.

Why oil? Jean says the city needs "oil in order to feed its body, made of streets, highways, and freeways." The director originally created the video for a television channel in the U.S., but the unnamed network supposedly declined the piece after seeing it, so Jean put it on Vimeo instead. … Read more

Google today is "taking a stand on open source and patents," vowing not to sue anyone on specified patents unless first attacked.

The company, which today announced its Open Patent Non-Assertion Pledge, said to start with, it has identified 10 patents related to MapReduce, a model for processing large data sets. It has pledged not to sue any user, distributor, or developer of open-source software based on patents related to MapReduce.

Duane Valz, Google senior patent counsel, said in a blog post that Google wants to ensure open source software remains open:

Namie-machi was a small bustling city that used to sit near the Fukushima nuclear plant. But on March 11, 2011, that changed. After a massive earthquake and subsequent tsunami destroyed the town and the plant's infrastructure, causing hazardous waste to leak into the surrounding land, every single one of Namie-Machi's 21,000 residents had to abandon their homes.

Working with Google Maps and its Street View imagery, the mayor of Namie-machi is now providing the city's previous residents, and anyone else who wants to see, a glimpse of what the town currently looks like.

"Two years … Read more

Working to keep an edge on the mapping front, Google announced today that it's boosting Google Maps' live transit feature. Now, users can see several subway and bus live departure times in New York and Salt Lake City and service alerts for Washington, D.C.'s Metrorail.

"We want to make sure you have access to the most comprehensive, accurate, and useful information when you're on the go -- and that includes public transportation," Soufi Esmaeilzadeh, Google Maps partnership development manager, said in a blog post today. "With these updates -- part of the millions … Read more

Apple has acquired WiFiSlam, a company that makes an app that lets smartphones locate themselves indoors using ambient Wi-Fi signals that already exist in buildings.

The deal was reported by The Wall Street Journal's Digits blog, which said Apple confirmed the acquisition but had no further comment other than to say that Apple "buys smaller technology companies from time to time." Digits said Apple paid $20 million for WiFiSlam.

The WiFiSlam page on AngelList describes the company's product like so:

Allow your smartphone to pinpoint its location (and the location of your friends) in real-time to … Read more

You know all that time you spend looking up your house and your friends' houses on Google Earth? Well, now you can do it anytime, anywhere with Google Earth for iPhone. It brings the popular virtual map service to your fingertips.

To begin, Google Earth for iPhone has a very helpful tutorial for navigating the app. For example, it uses circles to show you how to move up, down, tilt, zoom, and reset the view. We tapped the My Location button and gave it access to our current location. In just a few seconds, an overview of our neighborhood appeared … Read more