Wow.. another new launch today from Where.. this time its popular real estate resource Trulia who’ve added truliahindsight – an amazing new way to visualize change and trends via a clever mapping UI with animations. The site is the result of a collaboration between Stamen Design (stamen.com) and Trulia. The animations you’ll access use the year the properties were built to show the growth of streets, neighborhoods and cities over time… interesting as you browse changes in San Fran and you’ll see how with a rise in price people tend to migrate to the hills and closer to the coast (as can be expected). What a great visualization tool and a fun experience for the user – check it out at http://hindsight.trulia.com/
Archives for May 29, 2007
Garmin announces plugin API and Garmin developer
Garmin has elected to use Where as the venue to announce a new API and a developer program – the objective is to help make GPS web development simple. The Garmin Communicator Plugin API is a browser plugin and JavaScript support code that allows developers to transfer location data – such as waypoints, track logs, maps and points of interest (POIs) – to and from a website and Garmin device. Additional information about these applications and the Garmin Developer website is also available at http://developer.garmin.com. Also available in Garmin Developer is a Content Toolkit, which lets developers compile secure POIs for Garmin GPS devices. Garmin Developer has been broken into 4 components: Device comms, Web services, Mobile services, LBS – FYI, the company is expected to sell some 9+million devices this year alone!
Listening to your Google Earth experience with Soundscapes
Imagine seeing and hearing wolves on your PC while you navigate in 3D through their natural environment, perhaps incorporating topo data layers and other images and data relevant to wolf habitat (watersheds, hydrographic features,elevation data etc…) Imagine seeing and hearing the sounds of the Galapagos, or humpback whales in Mauii, or perhaps adding sound to your experience while you navigate through Tanzania exploring Jane Goodall’s work in a 3D environment. The map has provide us with an immersive geographic experience but now with this vast collection of soundscapes we can all hear sounds from aournd the globe… even listening to now extinct wildlife habitats that were thought to be forever lost. Sound tells the truth… a soundscape is worth 1,000 pictures… this is very slick and I can’t wait to show this one to my kids – I think we’ll start by listening to a soundscape from Yellowstone Park! See http://earth.wildsanctuary.com – soundscapes have been recently profiled in the BBC and the New York Times
Yahoo! Maps making Google Trends yet
I just noticed that Google’s Zeitgeist was recently updated with Google Trends – intgeresting to see that Yahoo maps hits the list but google maps doesn’t. See for yourself on http://www.google.com/trends/
Mapquest, Jim Greiner provides usear research findings
Mapquest, Jim Greiner, Sr VP and GM took the stage to discuss some recent Mapquest research/survey findings. He asks…what benefits users? Research findings recently conducted regarding online map users. Success factors and Mapquest research survey findings – demonstrate value to users, give user the control, reinforce the foundation, don’t just provide data but help them make a decision, evolve with your users. Once users are shown a benefit of use then they will adopt the technology – only 18% of users are using advanced imagery but 47% plan on increasing usage. Interest in personalization increased from 49 – 68% once given examples of usage. Giving the user control – people want to save addresses or planned routes; people want point and click routing, 59% would share their custom maps only with their trusted network but less than 22% would post publicly (blogs)… only 23% want to add photos to a map. Don’t just give data – people want more info like is a road a toll road and if so, how much does it cost. Incident records like accidents and historical records are of interest to the user and help them to make decisions. Evolving with users – 41% want to send maps and routes to a mobile – of note: Greiner did not discuss the new API in his presentation
GeoPress location enabling plugin for bloggs (GeoRSS)
Updated today… GeoPress location enabling plugin for bloggs – a WordPress and MovableType plugin that allows users to quickly and easily embed location information in blog posts. You can then embed a dynamic map, Microformat adr and geo output, and adds GeoRSS to the RSS output, or use KML for viewing in GoogleEarth – see http://georss.org/geopress/
Google maps street view test drive
Have you test driven Google maps street view yet? Try searching on “san francisco, ca fisherman wharf” then zoom into Powel St. as an example. Click on a street that’s outlined in blue then get a popu-up window where you can navigate down the street, viewing high-res,360 degree imagery.. what’s what cool is as you move north, south, east or west down the street the address is updated. the you can pan side-to-side, zoom in, out etc… you can almost make out the car license tags!
mashing mashups with Google Mapplets
New today also… Google Mapplets from immersive Media – example, search Chicago for real estate information. Now using mapplets to mashup KML files using the Google Maps API. Mapplets enables third party developers to create mini applications that can be displayed on Google Maps, much like Google Gadgets are displayed on iGoogle. These Mapplets contain a variety of information, from housing listings to crime data, and tools like distance measurement
Google Goes Live With Street View – Hanke at where 2.0
Today Google has announced Street View (recall specualtion on this the other day)… street-level mapping via google maps. I’m now listening to Google’s John Henke show high-res imagery from San Fran (we’re reading the words on street signs!)… from the presentation… Half the World’s population is now covered with high-res imagery… imagine, tribes in the Amazon rainforest mapping their resources suing Google Earth! Today Google has Announced Google Streetview – street level immersive cartography. Launching with 5 cities… see the new streetview icon (try San Fran for an example or check out the Google campus – you can see teh development team). Now you can start driving the streets of your favorite places enjoying high-res images providing an experience similar to walking the street – google is working with Immersive MEdia on this project – see more in this post. Henke is excited about the opportunities that are available to build something signifigant – a more comprehensive and inclusive map that we can all build together – a map of annotations, a map of sound. Geo has become integral to what many people are doing where we can view anything on a map.
The geography of news and Topics.net
Rich Skrenta and The geography of news and how physical location matters – Topics.net is an innovative service aggregating news sources from 50k+ sources and blogs. Categorizing news down to the zipcode. Launched in 04, 10m unique monthly visitors, 332,500 local news pages. The software scans a story and figures out what I’ts about and where its about. Using their own algorithms The Approach… geographic entity recognition, disambiguation, supporting evidence threshold – this enables identification of content that is about a specific area, not just merely mentioning a geographic entity. Maps are provide to show comment activity – this as a heatmap and GeoRSS feeds are also available. As an example see news items about San Jose – http://www.topix.net/san-jose. Check out topix news at www.topix.net