The microblogging site Twitter has emerged from a nice service to one to the biggest players for social networks. With only 140 employees and an estimated revenue of $400,000 in Q3 2009 the Californian company is on rank 12 of the most visited websites all over the world.
The people behind twitter have realized very early that location plays a critical role in their business idea and focused on this topic from the very beginning. In August 2009 there was a post on the official Twitter blog entitled: Location, Location, Location. (Compare the three L’s statement of Michael Goodchild)
ESRI recently announched the 2010map mashup challenge and invites developers to present a map mashup and tell the story behind their mashup. One interesting and creative example is the mapshup by Dave Bouwman – Visualizing Executive Compensation. The story behind this mashup:
Executive Compensation packages are so large that they are hard to comprehend. We gathered compensation data from the New York Times, county income data from the IRS, median household income data from ArcGIS Online and mashed it all together in the ESRI Flex API.
It was very hard to find the new stylish placemark icons of Google Maps Mobile 3 (GMM 3) in the web. Therefore I tried to create a icon which look like those optimized for mobile devices. In my opinion they look much more modern like the traditional placemark icons of Google Maps. You can download this icon and use it for your Google Maps mashup or mobile maps application.
For an optimal visualisation please re-size to 32 px or so.
Please tell me if you know where to find some more icons in this new style.
Google integrates StreetView in their driving directions to give the user an impression about the calculated route. Microsoft tries now tries to integrate videos in their driving directions and synchronize them with the map. According to the official research paper Microsoft Research Redmond and the University of Constance are working on this research project, but as you can see in the video and the test routes Microsoft Graz is also involved in this study (Even the camera car has an license plate from Klagenfurt). I think parts of this geospatial innovation are originating in Austria. Great!
The following videos shows how this method works.
Summary:
Driving directions to help us get from here to there are an important part of our lives, whether it’s to get to work, vacation, or to a friend’s house. The most common way to obtain driving directions is to go to Google or Bing maps and print them out. In the near future, one could say that driving directions will soon be solved via in-car navigation systems such as Garmin and TomTom. However, sometimes even these navigation systems fail: under tunnels, when map data is not up to date, etc. When in-car navigation fails, we often find ourselves under stress and this can make driving more dangerous. So how can we help drivers prepare for their drive and reduce stress when in-car navigation fails?
The key idea is to take advantage of our amazing capacity to recognize images/videos we’ve seen before. Studies have shown that humans can reliably recognize images they’ve seen before well beyond a year after viewing them! This ability also explains why it’s easier for us to navigate to a location the second time. So what our system provides is a video preview of your driving route, so that you can familiarize yourself with the route, before actually driving in the car. Creating such a video is possible by merging frames from Google Street View images, for example. When you’re in the car, you’ll be able to recognize landmarks you saw in the video, to aid you in your navigation.
Of course, if you’ve driving a 30 minute route, you don’t want to watch a 30-minute video. So we shorten the video to only the important parts (such as turns and landmarks) and speed up through uninteresting ones. We also filter the video to make it a smooth and continuous experience.
This work will be presented at User Interface, Science and Technology (UIST) 2009.
Monopoly City Street is a worldwide game of Monopoly using Google Maps as the game board. It will start on the 9th september and will be the biggest live game of monopoly in history. The goal to the classic Monopoly has not changed: Play to beat your friends and the world to become the richest property magnate in existence.
With this version it will be possible to own any street in the world, build humble houses, crazy castles and scyscrapers to collect rent. Keep up to date for the launch of Monopoly City streets: http://blog.monopolycitystreets.com Sounds interesting. I’ll give it a try. Definitifely.
Google has added 3 more 3d city models in Google Earth. They can be found in the 3D Buildings layer of Google Earth. In the post of “Google latlong” Google mentioned that these 3D models are mainly auto-generated and include several user generated 3D buildings.
Currently you can visit several major European cities including Munich, Berlin, Vienna, Zurich, London, etc., virtually and in 3D.
Yahoo has updated their Map Service for Europe. Now it is also possible to modify routes via drag and drop, as you know it from Google Maps. They included also an function to revert back to the original route and compare route distances.
In my opinion the user interface in not as intuitive as in Google Maps. You cannot see the route changing while moving the cursor. You have also take care to drag your cursor near an road, otherwise you will not be able to find a solved route. With this update Yahoo tries to close the gap to Google, but if you look at details you can identify some flaws not to mention real innovation in case of performance or user interaction.
According to Mapperz following additional updates were identified:
In response to users feedback Yahoo made some major improvements to Yahoo Maps
Faster loading time -No more waiting for the application to load - Dial-up mode removed
Language preference – Choose from one of the 5 European languages: English, French, Italian, Spanish and German*.
Interactive print page – Customize the print page to include only the information you need.
Personalised routing – Don’t like the route yahoo provide drag and drop the routes interactively.
Saved locations – For convenience, previously entered locations are automatically stored and available within Maps and elsewhere on Yahoo, such as Local and Weather.
Quickly look up places through auto-completion.
Waypoint support – Get driving directions for trips with multiple stops.
Save driving directions – Two places to save, Yahoo! Bookmarks and delicious
Zoom bar – now with the ‘+’ on top.
*Yahoo will be rolling out the same set of Maps improvements in Germany in the coming weeks.
Is it just another Maps API or is there something new?
Every big player in the Internet and mobile industry try to establish their own Maps API. Why is this so and what are characteristics of Nokia’s OVI Maps Player API? Without further details I’ll assume it is optimized for Nokia handsets and LBS on Nokia devices. I’m wondering if developers need such an amount of different Maps APIs but in case of innovation this is a good situation.
Maps Player is the name for the Ovi Maps API. Nokia describes the API as easy to use, and allows to integrate Ovi Maps functionality into your website. The appearance of the map can be changed from 2D to 3D including 3D landmarks or daylight situations to night situations. Look at the following video to get an demo about the API and Ovi Maps functionality.
Currently with an early registration developers can be part of the beta programme and get exclusive access to the API and documentation. Features of Ovi maps include over 200 country maps, location-based search and detailed place information. I’m not sure about the sucess of Nokia Ovi Maps. Most handset producers include Google Maps and their API into mobile applications. We will see if Ovi Maps is seen also outside the Nokia World?
The Google maps team added some new navigational tools to Geoogle Maps StreetView. The tool recognizes the orientation of objects and allow the user to jump directly to the position. It is much faster than using the arrows along the course of the road. With this new feature you can directly switch between streets, not only at intersections. The video shows how the new navigation can be used:
In my opinion this is the first step towards object recognition in Google StreetView. I think the Google Maps team is still working on this topic. To embed additional information such as building names in StreetView. For example the rectangle can be used to display facts about the building, street or address you are looking at.
New is also the possibility to visualized Photos showing the screen. Similar to Microsofts Photosync.
Pixelcase is an online service to create virtual tours. It allows to create impressive presentations about geographic places. By using photographs and panoramic views in a flash frame including functionality like zoom, rotate and pan a spatial feeling is added. Following example shows how Geoinformation can be presented in an entertaining environment: http://www.pixelcase.com.au/vr/2009/newyork/
You can jump between different places, so called hotspots, by using thumbnails on the bottom. This functionality could be enhanced by using direct links in the picture to jump from one hotspot to another. Maybe an navigation similar to Google Streetview can be added of cover all the different hotspots of a covered area.
