Mapping

After Paris 26 Gigapixels was created, it only made sense that someone would one-up the City of Love. Dubai can now be viewed in a whopping 45 gigapixels, thanks to photographer Gerald Donovan.

With the help of a Canon 7D, Donovan took 4,250 photos. He used a 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 L zoom lens at 400mm. According to a blog he wrote last week describing his feat, it took Donovan about three-and-a-half hours to take a full panoramic view for Dubai 45 Gigapixels. Amazingly, he did the shots in 98-degree weather, which made "the camera and lens...… Read more

A useful feature that Google rolled out for the Web last September has just made its way to U.S. Android phones and iPhones.

You might have noticed Place Pages as a newish type of search result that pops up on Google.com, often as the first nonsponsored listing. Connected to Google Maps (and Local search results), a Place Page gathers together key information about a location: the Web site, map, phone number, link to directions, and user reviews.

The mobile version, accessed through Google.com, similarly puts useful info for local businesses at your fingertips. "Local" is … Read more

Those of you who have become tired of typing addresses and search terms into Google Maps for Mobile now have a reprieve.

Version 4.1 of the standalone smartphone maps app brings voice search to Symbian S60 and Windows Mobile phones, a huge convenience feature that's already eased the typing pain in many an Android- and BlackBerry-carrying fingertip.

In addition to submitting to the usual voice queries, this version of Google Maps for Mobile subtly adds language choices to the settings page. The linguistically-sensitive developers have also slipped into the options Google's characteristic variety of accents that acknowledge … Read more

Now that the dust has settled after Google's horrible PR misadventure with the release of social-networking feature Google Buzz, Google is trying again to make Buzz ubiquitous--this time by adding it as a layer in Google Maps for the desktop.

To read publicly "buzzed" points of interest from your computer, there's a new Buzz layer in Google Maps that you can add from the "More" button that resides between the "Traffic" and "Map" buttons on the map face.

Buzz, which is read-only on Google Maps.com, will also give you … Read more

This is a true story: Two weeks ago I'm zipping along in southern England in the back seat of a silver VW Golf, listening for the better part of an hour and a half while my sister reads aloud directions to the car's driver from the screen of an HTC Touch.

The instructions are specific ("Turn left in 100 feet") but fruitless; we flip a U on the muddy one-track road and head back toward the village to blindly pick our way to our obscure destination, a farmhouse that brews traditional cider, using just wits and … Read more

Google is rebranding its Google Maps listing service for local businesses as it continues to try to organize--as well as sell ads against--a seemingly inexhaustible supply of local search results.

Google's Local Business Center will henceforth be known as Google Places, the search giant plans to announce late Monday. All in all, it's mostly just a name change, although Google plans to roll out a few new features for local merchants that have claimed their "place page" on Google Maps.

Google Maps is littered with small links to pages with information about local businesses, from pizza … Read more

When we first looked at geo-centric Twitter trend-tracking service Trendsmap it had one notable shortcoming: It was unable to drill down to an accurate city level. The good news is that this is about to change.

With the inclusion of geo-location as part of tweets, sites like Trendsmap will be getting a whole lot more detailed. Though even now, getting enough geo-tagged tweets has proven to be a challenge.

CNET met with Trendsmap's lead developer is John Barratt on Tuesday, who explained that while the geo feature has been live on Twitter for some time now, people just aren'… Read more

Canadian iPhone users on the Rogers network have another option for turn-by-turn directions with the Rogers Navigator app for iPhone.

When you download Rogers' app, you get speech recognition for destination entry and search, text-to-speech reading of turn-by-turn directions with street names, and real-time traffic alerts with one-click rerouting around congestion or incidents. Rogers Navigator also integrates your iPhone's contacts data so you won't have to enter the addresses you already have in the phone, and integrated iPod controls so that you won't have to leave the app to manage your tunes.

The app has a pair … Read more

As promised, on Tuesday Navigon released another major update for its iPhone MobileNavigator app, version 1.5.0, to add three more features to the already feature-rich navigator application.

The new features includes connection to Facebook and Twitter, Panorama View, 3D with 3D terrain views derived from NASA data, and personalized route recommendations via Navigon MyRoutes. The update is free, except for the Panoramic View 3D feature, which costs $9.99 via in-app purchase.

I found the new features useful, especially MyRoutes. Each time you enter a new destination, the app will present you with up to three suggestions clearly … Read more