Google Maps

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Google Street View has taken us to some pretty funky places, including the world’s tallest skyscraper, the Eiffel Tower, a Bond villain’s lair, a trek up to the top of Mount Fuji , animal park tours, a Venice Gondola ride and visits inside Dr Who’s TARDIS, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider and a submarine.

But there are still some places Street View doesn’t yet reach, so if you have a favourite hike, cycle ride or rock climb you want to share with others, you can now create your own Street View style tours through Google’s Views community.

Have you ever tried to convey the feeling of walking through your favorite park? Or have you wanted to create a virtual tour of your business to attract customers? Well, starting today, it’s now possible for you to build your own Street View experiences to do just that. Using a new feature in our Views community, you can easily connect your photo spheres to create 360º virtual tours of the places you love, then share them with the world on Google Maps …

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Shortly after a Street View tour of London’s Gatwick Airport, Google has expanded its transit program to encompass 15 other airports, more than 50 train & metro stations – and even allows your virtual trips to take you right onto an airliner at Dubhai.

Google’s blog shows off a small selection of the new locations, including check-in at Madrid airport, arrivals at Tokyo airport, a walk though London’s Waterloo train station and locating your seat on board an Emirates A380 airliner.

The split view, showing both terminal map and Street View walk-thru, is particularly helpful for familiarising yourself with a transit airport in advance of a tight connection … 
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I sometimes wonder whether future generations will do most of their travel sat at their PCs, as Google’s Trekker backpack takes us to more and more interesting places. Latest on the list is the romantic Italian city Venice, built on a set of more than 100 small islands, connected by a network of canals and bridges … 
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Google just announced a few updates rolling out to the new Google Maps desktop app today. Users will now be able to highlight StreetView imagery, user-uploaded photos, and PhotoSpheres on the map by clicking a new pegman icon in the lower right corner of their screen (pictured above). StreetView imagery will be highlighted in light blue, Photo Spheres as darker blue circles, and indoor imagery as yellow circles.

In addition, the update brings a touch of Google Earth over to the Maps desktop app with new bird’s-eye view 3D Earth Tours for all WebGL-enabled browsers.

Explore beautiful, 3D imagery of buildings and terrain for thousands of locations from above with Earth Tours available right in your browser.* Wherever you see the Earth Tour icon, you can click, sit back, and get a virtual tour from a soaring angle. Dive into Boston or circle the Alps.

Google is also rolling out a new preview UI for directions. Now, when viewing individual steps for directions you’ll see StreetView imagery on each step where available, allowing you to get a better sense of your surroundings for an upcoming turn or exit. Google also notes that it has integrated real time traffic incident reports from its Waze acquisition like it recently did in its mobile Google Maps apps.

The new Google Maps desktop app is rolling out to all that opted into the new Google Maps preview today and to everyone else in teh coming weeks. Google also just released a video preview for the new Google Maps desktop experience that shows off some of the new features in today’s update:
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What you’re looking at is not a graphic, but a memorial built by relatives and friends of a DC-10 airliner brought down by a bomb in 1989, killing all 155 passengers and 15 crew on board. The memorial was constructed some eighteen years after the tragedy.

Flight UTA 722 was flying from the People’s Republic of Congo to Paris, France, when an explosion caused it to break up over the Sahara Desert. An investigation found that the cause of the explosion was a bomb in the forward cargo hold … 
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The HMS Ocelot, a 50-year-old British submarine has the distinct honor of being the first submersible to be offered up on Google’s street view. The Register reports the company mapped-out the control room, sleeping quarters and even some of the torpedo tubes, which are obviously out of service. There’s also a tour of the dockyard which launched the submarine and a set of 20  images of the exterior of the boat. I mean, this is a freaking submarine on Google street view, does it really get any better? Well, I suppose you might get more of a kick out of the Large Hadron Collider if you’re into that sort of thing, but for me, it’s a freaking submarine!

You can view the whole collection of images here.

Google’s ever-expanding set of virtual tours now include a boat trip down the River Thames in London, allowing many of London’s most famous sights to be seen from a new perspective, reports the Telegraph.

Ed Parsons, Geospatial technologist at Google UK, said: “The river also offers some of the most scenic and iconic views of London from arguably the best vantage points the city has to offer, and we are thrilled to be able to work with the PLA so that users from around the world can experience the Thames through Street View.” 
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Google announced today on its Google Commerce blog that it’s rolling out a new tool that will allow any business in the U.S. to create a Google Offer and display the promotions or coupons to user directly through Google Maps. Google first announced back in July that it was rolling out Google Offers to user searching for places on Google Maps for iOS and Android and on the across the web, but at the time only announced select retail partners. With Google’s updated tool rolling out over the next week all business in the U.S. can now easily create Offers that are displayed on Google Maps:

With this launch, your offer can reach customers on Google Maps when they are searching for places nearby or looking for local businesses like yours. Your business will be prominently displayed with a blue tag icon next to it, alerting customers to your offer.

Once a customer saves your offer, we’ll bring them to your door by sharing an offer reminder when they are near your store. We can help remind them when your offer is expiring too, through email and mobile alerts. Just create the offer; we’ll take care of the rest.

Google notes that businesses will “only pay when a customer saves your offer, and you keep the full value of the sales you make.” You can learn more on the Google Commerce blog here.

Google announced a mapping tool for small businesses. Dubbed “Google Maps Engine Pro,” the new software allows users to easily create maps based on any set of data they want, such as sales data, client offices, and more. Along with this new product the company announced a few additional features for the standard Maps Engine. These features include a new Android app that allows users to access their data on their mobile devices, as well as tools for importing data from older systems to the Maps Engine. These features are available to users of all versions of Maps Engine.

Google has also introduced a new account type that lets users test the features of Maps Engine for free before committing to anything. The “introductory accounts” function exactly like a standard account, but limit the number of map queries allowed each day.

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This one is a head scratcher: FastCompanyDesign named Google Maps for iOS a design award winner in the Interactive category. “The app’s continued polish is a testament to the power of focused iteration”.

If any of us ever took Google Maps for granted, that impulse ended the moment Apple released its mapping software. Apple’s PR nightmare reminded us all just how hard this whole navigation space can be. But Google Maps for iPhone not only rescued us from bad directions, it did so through a more refined UI than ever before. “I think Maps is iterative…but I don’t think we should penalize for that,” says Doug Bowman, creative director at Twitter. “It’s even harder to get folks’ attention when something has been up for a while…it speaks to what Google, as a large company, can actually focus a team on.”

Someone show them Maps on Android?

Google announced today on its Google Maps blog that it’s finally tapping into the talent and technology it picked up with its acquisition of Waze back in June to integrate real time incident reports from Waze into Google Maps. The new integration means that when Waze users report incidents for everything from accidents to road closures, Google Maps users on both iOS and Android will now be able to benefit:

Users of Google Maps for Mobile will now benefit from real time incident reports from Waze users. This means when Wazers report accidents, construction, road closures and more on Waze, the updates will also appear on the Google Maps app for Android and iOS.

The features will initially be limited to users in certain locations, including: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, France, Germany, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Switzerland, UK and the US. In addition, as Google first hinted back in June, the company will also be integrating Google Search into the Waze apps on iOS and Android, while the Waze Map Editor now has access to Google Street View imagery:
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One of the cornerstones of Google’s reputation for innovation – its 20% Time scheme – is now effectively gone, according to a report by Quartz, citing anonymous Google employees.

Google’s 20% Time allowed engineers to spend the equivalent of one day a week working on a personal project without having to justify it to anyone. Gmail, Google maps, Adsense, Google Talk and many other products were born from this scheme. Adsense alone is responsible for around 25 percent of Google’s annual revenue.

Now, says the report, it is all but dead … 
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