maps

The tech behind Google's Street View

I spent a good part of yesterday tooling around with the new Google Maps Street View feature. It's one of those Web services that just works. Here at CNET, we're also centrally located in one of the few cities (San Francisco) to have nearly all of its main thoroughfares Street View-enabled. The data for four of the five Street View-enabled cities comes from a company called Immersive Media. In addition to these interactive 3D pictures, they use the same technology for videos. Both use an 11-lens camera called Dodeca 2360 that captures an immensely large surface area of … Read more

Google buys Spanish geo-photo company

Google has acquired Panoramio, a community Web site that allows people to "map" their photos on Google Earth. The technology links the exact geographical location of where the photos were taken with that location on the map. Users can also view the photos in Google Earth and search and browse others' photos.

Panoramio has been a default layer in Google Earth since the beginning of this year. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but there is a bit more information at the Official Google Blog. The company will move its operations to Zurich, where Google's European … Read more

Georgia and Florida: They're smokin'

Nashville is hundreds of miles from the nearest forest fires. Recently smoke levels there were 20 times normal. Health officials in the southeastern U.S. can now look at maps showing where the smoke is, and where it's going.

This smoke forecasting is being done by the Center for Forest Disturbance Science in Athens, Ga. Both hourly forecast updates and daily peak values of smoke concentrations are available on the Internet.

The 6-week-old fires have burned a half-million acres. And they're still outta control. These fires are a record for Georgia. That's sparked debate over lack of … Read more

Looking for personal Google Maps Street View images

When I heard about the new Street View feature Google Maps unveiled Tuesday, the first thing I thought--after I discovered that anyone in the world could see my car parked in my driveway--was that the next great craze would be people posting images from the service showing personal details from their own homes, jobs or what have you.

Sure enough, I pop over to Boing Boing today and lo and behold, there's a posting about someone whose cat is visible through the window in such detail that you can even see that it's a tabby.

And I thought, … Read more

When Web 2.0 (Yahoo Maps) attacks

I'll start by confessing my curmudgeon-ness. I can't stand the new "broadband" Yahoo Maps interface. I find it totally clunky, hard to use, and overly graphical--the vast majority of the time I'm using a mapping site, it's to get driving directions that I plan to either print out or send to my phone, and it's usually just to double-check my GPS directions. I'm fine with simple text directions and a nice little map. So it's been fine for me to just click back to the Classic Yahoo Maps interface (since Yahoo … Read more

Zooming around online maps for real: SpaceNavigator

Here at O'Reilly's Where 2.0 conference, one of the few and the proud gadgets on the exhibition floor is 3Dconnexion's SpaceNavigator mouse. Calling it a mouse might be an insult though, it feels more like an airplane steering yolk.

Launched in November, the mouse integrates with big Web maps services like Google Maps and Microsoft's Live Maps. Users can navigate the maps with very little effort, pushing, pulling, and twisting the circular handle. I spent about five minutes with it on the show floor, and walked away from the booth dangerously close to purchasing one.… Read more

Garmin, MapQuest offer interfaces

Garmin and MapQuest want others to share the geospatial wealth.

In conjunction with the Where 2.0 conference in San Jose, Calif., both companies on Tuesday announced moves to share application programming interfaces (APIs) that let programmers take advantage of their products. For years, products or service APIs were often kept secret, but nowadays it's vogue for companies to share them in an attempt to become a vital part of a larger ecosystem.

Garmin, which makes GPS (Global Positioning System) devices that tell people where they are, announced a number of free and licensed APIs that permit sophisticated interactions … Read more

Listen to your maps with Wild Sanctuary

Imagine if you will a room full of several hundred developers, journalists, and curious onlookers sitting together listening to the sounds of monkeys. That was the scene here at Where 2.0 during a demo for Wild Sanctuary, a project that presents sound clips of nature as a layer on Google Earth.

Users can explore various sounds, and see their placement and contextual information on the map. What's interesting about these "soundscapes" is that they can show the difference in an area before and after environmental impact both with visual maps and sound as. Several examples were … Read more

Trulia gets real estate visualization

Trulia is a real estate search and information service. Users can search for real estate by zip code, or by filling in various search parameters like size, cost, and building type. Trulia also integrates several social features like a way to track buying trends, and a real-estate focused question and answer service.

Today, they've teamed up with Stamen Design, the same folks who do the eye candy for Digg Labs, to create a really neat way to look at housing trends called HindSight. Their new tool is a mix between historical real estate data, and a heat map to … Read more