earth

Google Maps gets YouTube videos, 'Chocolate Rain' not included

Google Maps and Google Earth may be two separate services, but the gap between the software and Webware apps is narrowing. Last night Google rolled out a new view in Maps, enabling users to view geocoded YouTube videos, something Google Earth users have been doing since October of last year.

The videos show up as small red dots, and can be played right on the map. To enable the feature users simply need to add the layer from Google's map add-ons directory, which has quickly grown to include more than 50 add-ons--many of which come from third parties.

One … Read more

Third-world lessons for recycling phones

SAN FRANCISCO--Jan Chipchase is a cell phone modification guru. A researcher at Nokia Design in Tokyo, he's seen cell phones modified to hold up to 16 SIM cards and plenty more in his role at the company.

Chipchase is a member of a team at Finnish cell phone giant Nokia that's trying to lower the cost of phones for emerging markets, an effort that's part market development and part recycling. The group of 15 has scanned bazaars and street shops in places as diverse as Ghana, Brazil, Iran, India, Egypt, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, China, and Mongolia to learn … Read more

Google Earth gets snail's-eye view

Part of the fun of Google Earth is flying over the virtual planet like Superman. But let's face it: we're ground-dwelling creatures, and the street-level view is useful, too. Even Superman has to land sometimes.

Enter Google Earth 4.3, due for release at about 8 p.m. Tuesday. It the Street View feature from Google Maps for a ground-level view of some areas, and a new navigation method makes the software more like a first-person video game, Google said in a statement.

The new version also lets users watch time-lapse views of sunsets and sunrises, either locally … Read more

Will social networking stop greenwashers?

Whether marking printers or produce, the increasing number of "green" claims on products can make it hard to separate sincere efforts at sustainability from marketing fluff.

Environmental watchdogs warn that corporate "greenwashing" will lead jaded consumers to abandon efforts to shop responsibly.

However, individuals can counteract the confusion and police the marketplace using online tools, according to Joel Makower, executive editor of GreenBiz.com.

"In this age of the Web, the blogosphere, and social media, I don't think greenwashers are going to get very far or that fraudulent, hugely misleading companies are going to … Read more

Google mapping spec now an industry standard

Members of an industry group called the Open Geospatial Consortium have approved Google's KML technology as an open standard for describing some geographic data.

KML is used to manage the display of geospatial information in Google Earth, the company's software for flying over the surface of a virtual globe. With its 3D coordinate-based system, people can create models of city buildings, draw a line showing where they hiked, or overlay their own custom place names on a generic map.

Google already shared its KML format openly, and others had used it in software products, but Google now hopes … Read more

Google Earth gets 'New York Times' news

Google has added a new layer to its Google Earth software that shows New York Times news linked to the region a person is viewing with the geographic software.

New York Times "placemarks" will appear on maps where there's relevant news, and showing the New York Times layer in the software will show a window with a month's worth of headlines, Google's LatLong blog said.

Google spokeswoman Kate Hurowitz said the company is open to partnerships with other media outlets and that extending such a feature to Google Maps--a much more widely used service than … Read more

Google SketchUp makes modeling easier

Long before I got into the business of writing about tech and Mac stuff, I worked with 3D graphics on Macs for my father's visual analysis firm. We were hired to create 3D models of architectural projects and superimpose them on photographs of a proposed site to study how a project would look before it was built and how it would affect its surroundings.

Some of our clients wanted to make the project look nice for city officials so it would get approved by city planning departments, while others wanted to prove that the new project would obstruct the … Read more

Google Earth to get Street View within 'weeks'

A source tells me that the Google Earth app will get the Street View feature, currently available only in the browser-based Google Maps service, within a few weeks. What's not clear is whether this refers to general release or internal testing.

Clearly, Google's goal is to offer users the capability to continuously zoom from space down to detailed views of houses and buildings.

Google launched Street View in May 2007 and continues to collect street-level imagery in new locations (including at least one nonurban location, Yosemite). Google has also been collecting middle-distance overhead imagery from airplanes, thanks in … Read more

Google goes dark for Earth Hour

Google made an environmental gesture today by turning the lights out on the U.S. version of its search page. The black background doesn't save energy, but it's Google's way of observing Earth Hour. The global event, created by the World Wildlife Fund, encourages people around the world to turn off their lights at 8:00 PM today, March 29, for an hour.