Imaging America

Posted by Stephen Chau, Product Manager

I'm pleased to announce that we have acquired ImageAmerica, a company that builds high resolution cameras for the collection of aerial imagery.

Google Maps and Earth users are no strangers to ImageAmerica's work -- the company provided high resolution black and white imagery of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina.

We're excited about how ImageAmerica's technology will contribute to our mapping services down the road. Since we're in the research and development phase right now it may be some time before you see any of this imagery in Google Maps or Earth -- we'll keep you posted on this blog!

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NASA in Google Earth

Posted by Wei Luo, Senior GIS Specialist

A few months back, Google Earth team and NASA began a collaborative effort to bring awareness and promote knowledge of NASA's "earth" programs. After months of production, the "NASA" layer group is now live in Google earth.

Personally, I find it quite eye-catching. People are usually familiar with NASA's space missions, but not everyone knows that NASA also devotes a considerable amount of effort to Earth explorations. This new NASA layer group showcases some of their most interesting content.

The new "NASA" layer has three components:

• Astronaut Photography of Earth
• Satellite Imagery
• Earth City Lights

Beginning with the Mercury missions in the early 1960s, astronauts have taken photographs of the Earth. The "Astronaut Photography of Earth" layer showcases some of the best of photos from the online Astronaut Photography collection.



The "Satellite Imagery" layer highlights some of the most interesting Earth imagery taken by NASA satellites over the years. Some placemarks also offer the option of downloading additional imagery from different years or seasons and overlaying them on the earth's surface. Being a space program lover, I used to spend hours on the NASA website looking at these photos, so it's nice to have them at my fingertips. Be sure to check out the satellite image overlays of continuous eruption of Mt. Etna at 37.730000°, 15.000000° if you are a volcano lover like me.

"Earth City Lights" offers a new perspective on this popular image. One can identify some interesting urbanization patterns around the globe. I find it even more interesting to have roads and placename layers on at the same time as I fly over this layer. The United States interstate highway system appears as a lattice connecting the brighter dots of city centers. The Trans-Siberian railroad also shows up as a thin line stretching from Moscow through the center of Asia to Vladivostok. The Nile River can be viewed from a distance as another bright thread through an otherwise dark region. I really enjoy flying to different places around the globe, finding unexpected things and thinking about what the cause might be.

In other news, we've also updated the European roads in Google Earth, adding 15 new countries in Europe, as well as adding more content for the Netherlands, like business listings layers and country names in Dutch. Check out these new and updated layers if you are planning a trip to Europe.

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It's easy being green

Posted by Christopher Barry, Senior Vice President, Digital Media and Business Strategy, Sundance Channel

Here at the Sundance Channel, we recently launched a weekly programming block dedicated to the environment, called THE GREEN.

As part of this online environment, Google Maps for Enterprise technology offered us a great platform for developing the Eco-mmunity Map, an exciting interactive tool that supports our television shows and creates a community of users around eco issues. The Eco-mmunity Map allows you to list and search for green individuals, businesses, special attractions, and action points anywhere in the world through a customized site. The Google Maps technology makes it simple to share information about environmental causes and events in your community. You can input and search for green information based on four key category "markers" -- Individuals, Businesses, Green Action Points, and Green Attractions and Events. By posting markers with detailed descriptions, contact information, related web links, comments, ratings, and photos, you can share local knowledge and suggestions with others from around the world. So come on over to www.sundancechannel.com/map and start adding your content today.

Ultimately, our hope is that visitors to the Eco-mmunity Map will have the opportunity to share their knowledge and connect with others in the virtual green movement. We're grateful to the Google Maps for Enterprise team that helped make this online world possible.

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Armchair road warrior

Posted by Peter Birch, Product Manager, Google Earth

Ever imagined yourself diving in Chuuk, Micronesia? How about visiting the Mayan ruins of Yaxha, Guatemala? Well, maybe it's time you did. Though you probably won't make it to South America or the South Pacific in person before Labor Day, you can pay some quick visits to these and other exotic locales from the comfort of your computer, courtesy of Matt Harding, who has has been traveling to as many places in the world as possible, and dancing badly in all of them. Ten million YouTube views later, Matt has teamed up with the Google Earth crew to give us all a peek at some of his favorite stopping points. You can check out Matt's video below and, if you have Google Earth installed, explore lots of practical travel info (Yelp restaurant reviews for Las Vegas, for instance) by loading this Earth overlay file.

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Google Maps Mashups 2.0

Posted by Thai Tran, Product Manager

When we were building the original Google Maps site, we envisioned that it would eventually become a platform for navigating all kinds of location-based information, such as home listings and travel information. Within weeks of the launch of Google Maps, we were pleasantly surprised that an independent developer named Paul Rademacher released HousingMaps.com, a site that displayed housing listings from Craigslist on top of our interactive maps -- what is now known as a "mashup" -- without needing help from anyone at Google. Hoping to encourage even more of this type of innovation, we released the official Google Maps API in June 2005, and since then, developers have created over 50,000 Google Maps mashups.

However, we noticed many of these mashups simply displayed a static set of places on a map, such as the best bars in San Francisco, yet the authors had to set up a website and write Javascript code to generate the map, which is not something that we could expect the average person to do. We also noticed that much of this great content was not getting discovered, even though millions of users were coming to Google Maps every day and searching for [bars] and [homes for sale].

To address these issues, we started two major projects:

In April, we released the first version of "My Maps," which empowers anyone to create a personal map simply by dropping placemarks onto the map. These maps are hosted on Google Maps and can be shared with friends and family. When marked as "public," these maps are automatically included into the Google Maps search index so that other users can find them. Since the launch of the "My Maps" tab, over 4 million maps have been created.

While this drag-and-drop editor is a great tool, we still needed a solution to help with mashups that have dynamic content such as real-time weather conditions. Thus, we created the Google Mapplets platform, which enables any developer to create mini applications that overlay their content and services onto Google Maps. We announced a preview version of Mapplets in May, and over 100 developers submitted Mapplets within the first month.

Today, we've brought these two features together under the "My Maps" tab on Google Maps. You can now layer information from multiple sources on the same map as well as save content that's relevant to you into a personal map. For example, if you're looking for a home in Chicago, you can add Mapplets that display real estate listings and Chicago Transit Authority train lines so that you can find out which homes are near public transit. To get an even richer sense of the surroundings, you could also layer in photos of the neighborhood and local events (from Zvents). When you find a home that you're interested in, simply click on "Save to My Maps" in the home's info bubble and save a copy of it to your personal map.

To get started, check out this demo video and then head over to the "My Maps" tab to find great maps and tools you can add from the Google Maps Directory.

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Build Your Campus in 3D Competition - the results are in!

Posted by Allyson McDuffie, Education Program Development

Congratulations to the winners of Google’s Build Your Campus in 3D Competition!

An estimated 4,000 campus buildings were modeled and submitted from all over North America. In August, the winning students and advisors (41 people from 7 teams) will be flying to our headquarters in Mountain View for a 3-day visit and workshop.

Our panel of industry experts, which included Bobby Brooks of Walt Disney Imagineering, Ken Harsha of Electronic Arts, Janet Martin of Communication Arts Inc., Paul Seletsky of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and Gary Smith of Green Mountain Geographics, LTD selected the following winners:

University of Minnesota - Department of Architecture
Purdue University - Departments of Computer Graphics Technology and Education
Concordia University, Loyola Campus - Department of Civil Engineering
Stanford University - Department of Architectural Design
Indiana University Purdue University Fort Wayne (IPFW) - Departments of Engineering and Computer Science
Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering - Department of Engineering
Dartmouth College - Departments of Computer Science and Digital Art

Some thoughts from the judges…"Last week, we had the opportunity to watch college campus environments come alive with SketchUp and Google Earth. We couldn't help but be impressed with the effort put forth by the many teams and individuals who participated. The selection of finalists was the result of a lively discussion and a careful model review…You've set a very high standard and hopefully inspired those that will follow you."


Visit the official competition website to see the winning campus models.

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Real time traffic, now on your iGoogle page

Mark Tsui, Software Engineer

As most of you probably know, we offer real-time traffic information on Google Maps and Google Maps for mobile -- great for when you're looking directions and want to see what's really going on out there, or for when you're in your car already and want to avoid the traffic jam up ahead. We've found, however, that one of the best ways to use this information is to do a quick check before your regular commute, and we wanted to make doing that as easy as possible. To help with this, this week we enabled real-time traffic on the iGoogle maps gadget, so you can take a quick peek at what's happening on the roads any time you look at your iGoogle page. If you don't already have the maps gadget for iGoogle, you can install it here. In addition to real-time traffic information, it gives you quick access to a map and local search results, so it's useful to have around for quick access to a map any time.

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