What is special about Geospatial?

In Youtube now you can also search for videos from a special region or location. To use local search you can enter the name of one location in the search box of YouTube. In most cases there appear a small map with 3 videos form the local search linking to an map interface. If you cannot see this map on the search results you have to specify the location in the advanced search.

The local search uses a Google Maps which is located directly above the search results. The maker and the buffer (as red circle) shows the region where videos are searched. One drawback until now that there is no direct linking between the search results and the map.

The marker in the map can be changed to search for another region.

[via GWB]

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Typing on a mobile device my be very cumbersome. Google also recognized this disadvantage and provide a voice search for Google Maps for mobile devices. They give a short tutorial how to do voice search. unfortunately it is only available for some blackbarry phones, but I assume it the service is accepted by the user, more phones will be supported.

But how it is written on the site?

“Using your voice is optional. You can always type your searches as usual.”

[via: http://www.google.com/mobile/blackberry/maps/voicesearch.html]

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Austrozoom is an Geoportal form the Telekom Austria. It is based on Google Maps and provides georeferenced information about Austria. It contains:

• areal- and satellite images
• city- and streetmaps
• more than 300.000 Points of Interests (POI)
• Content of 100 Info categories.
• search functionality
• route planning - public transport
• route planning - streets
• actuall traffic conditions (every 15 minutes)
• classifieds and real estates

Link: austrozoom.at

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Last February Google has introduced their Static Maps API, where you can enbed maps, as static picture in your website. Now there was the first update on this API. The functionality has been enhanced. Beside Placemarks also Lines and Polylines can be represented. Furthermore the language of the map can be selected:

Example:

All news in more detail:

Placemark Settings:

The size of one maker can be set with four levels from normal to very tiny. Additional the color can be changed (until now only 8 colors are available). You can add also Letters or Numbers to the placemark.

Paths and Lines:

Lines with up to 50 Points can be added to the map. the color, width, alpha-intensity of the Line can be changed.

Picturetype:

Until now only a GIF export of the map was possible. Now the fileformat of the map can be changed also to PNG or JPG.

Language of the map:

The Language of the map can be changed. According to the area the map displays the language changes to the local language by default.

All in all nice new features.

[via GWB]

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Mapchannels has developed a great Google Maps and Virtual Earth hack, which allows to navigate parallel.

You can see my example here:http://www.joesonic.com/2_dualmap_en.php

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With the Static Map API everyone can embed a Map into a webpage.

The Wizard allows to generate the code. Here you set only your parameters and the map can be pasted as image into an webpage.

Try it out it’s simple.

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Google has extended their Transit Service for Google Maps. Chicago was newly added to this service. Google Transit is available mainly in the United States, but also in Japan, UK and in Switzerland, where a lot of stuff concerning Google Maps is developed. I hope transit will be soon available in more countries. It’s great to plan trips with public transportations, for example if you are new in a city.

[via GWB]

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The portal swisstrains.ch is trying to provide real time train poistions on the internet. It is planned to record the locations of the trains via GPS and visualize the location on Google Maps.

Currently the site is in ALPHA-phase, we keep on developing. The current view is based on the Swiss traintimetable, and does not yet show the actual GPS-positions of the trains. But, as Swiss trains are almost always on time, most of the time the position is accurate.

In near Future this is a good tool especially if these can be visualized on your mobile phone. I think this is very usefull for Location Based Services (LBS) and Location Based Decision Support (LBDS).

[via www.swisstrains.ch]

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Most of the people don’t want to see themselfs on Google Streetview but the Developers of Google Maps and Streetview do. Here you can see them new the Googles Headquater in Mountain View.

View Larger Map
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Apple introduced the Software Development Kit for their iPhone. Programmers can now produce third-party software for the Apple-Smartphone.

Apple has opened their iPhone for software applications of third party companies. Up to now all applications where closed and controlled by Apple. Apple CEO Steve Jops introduced Thursday the Software Developer Kit (SDK) for the iPhone. Additionally Apple wants to make the iPhone more applicable for business users. They are now in direct competition with the canadian Smartphone manifacturer Research in Motion (RIM).

With this SDK also LBS and mapping appication can be developed for the iPhone. I’m curious to see some of these appications for the iPhone. The official homepage of the SDK is currently (10.00 pm GMT+1) offline, but as soon as I can get some information I will blog about features that can enable LBS or mapping applications. Maybe there is something like in the Android SDK which manage location. The Location Manager is part of the Application Framework.

I think they are in direct competition with RIM but I’m not sure if they are also in competition with Google’s Android platform. On one side they use Google Services like Google Search or Google Maps on the other side both sites want to sell mobiles with their own platform. The future in the mobile sector is very interesting these days. All big companies want to be recognized on this market. If you think about the fact that more than 3 billons mobile phones are out there worldwide this is a big market for all business fields - there are also great challenges in the GIS and mobile mapping sector.

More and more people will get in touch with the internet the first time using a mobile device!

[apple.com]

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