Microsoft’s Virtual Earth has a phenomenal addition to Live Search Maps that allows users to create virtual aerial tours. Here’s an example using pictures from my trip to Kauai:
The tours can be exported as a video file and uploaded to a video sharing site (as above) or shared by link to Live Search Maps. Like many such links on AJAX sites, it doesn’t preserve the correct state. Click “Tour in 3D” in the upper left and “aerial” above the map for best effect.
Tours can be created manually by pushing pins into a map. The service also plays nicely with GeoRSS, GPX, KML or KMZ files. The above tour was imported from my flickr pictures. (Unfortunately, flickr caps geo exports to the most recent 20 pictures per search.)
Major cities, like San Francisco, benefit from 3D models of key buildings. The blue line in the video is the tracklog.
Both of these tours were created using the default settings. You can also customize the view shown at each location by rotating, tilting or zooming. I don’t see an option to playback the full tracklog.
Wall St. Journal Makes Politics Its Business (Washington Post) - Media critic Howard Kurtz takes an in-depth look at changes at the Wall Street Journal since its takeover by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. The biggest change is the increase in political coverage amid one of the most interesting political campaigns in recent history. The Journal, a rarity among newspapers, is increasing its news hole thanks to its new benefactor. via Howard Kurtz
Steered Wrong: Drivers Trust GPS Even to a Fault (WSJ) - For all their convenience, portable navigation devices and online mapping still have one big problem: the world’s road network is constantly changing and digital mappers can’t keep pace. Some countries in Europe even have signs at tricky intersections telling drivers to ignore their GPS’ instructions. Yet many drivers put their faith in technology and blindly follow their GPS’ instructions. Perhaps this is because their accuracy is oversold; a TomTom TV ad (see below) shows a couple driving across a bridge during the ribbon cutting ceremony. The typical map on a PND is a year old the day you take it out of the box. via Doris Truong
Eating away the innings in baseball’s cheap seat (USA Today) - What’s more American than baseball and Cracker Jacks? Possibly stuffing yourself silly. Faced with anemic attendance, some teams have come up with a new way to generate revenue: all-you-can-eat sections where you can eat all the hot dogs, french fries and soda you can stomach. At the Braves’ Turner field, the “typical all-you-can-eat customer downed: 3.35 hot dogs; one 20-ounce soda; one 7.9-ounce bag of peanuts; one 3-ounce order of nachos and 32 ounces of popcorn.” In unrelated news, the average seat at the Mets’ new Citi Field is 21 inches wide, 2 inches wider than those at Shea.
IRS making sure your rebate gets spent (Marketplace) - One of the big concerns about the “economic stimulus” package is that people will do something silly with it — like save it or use it to pay down debt. I suggested that the rebates be issued as VISA debit cards. Apparently the IRS is using lifestyle analysis to determine what taxpayers want and spending their $600 rebate checks for them. One couple received an air conditioner instead of the check they were expecting.
The Dash portable navigation device I wrote about earlier is now shipping. Dash has dropped the price $200 from the initial pre-order pricing.
It’s the first true two-way connected PND on the market, using cellular data for search, traffic and community features. Because I now work on automotive products, I’ll pass on reviewing it. The initial coverage from Walt Mossberg and The Washington Post are very positive. The Post story also goes into depth on how traffic services work.
It would’ve been nicer if The Ledger included pictures. Instead, they have descriptions like this:
North Pole scene with polar bears and igloos; forest scene with 15 lighted trees, Santas and deer; inflatable snow family; inflatable Santa; two Santas in sleigh with reindeer; nativity scene with shepherd, angels and wise men; Santa and Mrs. Claus and elves; candy canes and lollipops, 12 lighted trees; lighted deer; holographic snow family; wreaths; stars; lighted arches; eight-foot lighted star.
How many times does the “picture is worth a thousand words” have to be repeated for it to stick? Kudos to The Ledger, however, for allowing users to edit the map by adding their own favorite light displays.
Now if you had a Dash, you’d be able to see the map of light displays as you’re driving around.
Dash is now taking preorders for its next-generation navigation system. It’s one of the biggest breakthroughs in navigation technology and points to a time when we’ll all be connected as we drive down the road at 65 mph.
Unlike typical GPS devices, Dash is connected to the Internet via either a GPRS cellular connection or WiFi. (Some high end TomToms, like my new TomTom 920, can be paired with Bluetooth cell phones and use their data connections.)
Among the features this two-way connectivity enables:
More up-to-date content. You don’t have to worry about updating map and point of interest data; it happens automatically. Dash uses Yahoo! Search to find points of interest.
Additional content types. Want to see where the best Christmas lights are or what’s happening around town? The real-time connectivity allows you to search for the latest information. In theory, you’d be able to pull up images of your destination from flickr or Google’s Street View. Want to know how much that home you just drove by goes for? Pull up Zillow. Dash will offer support for GeoRSS and KML, making it easy for third-parties to provide content.
Live traffic. Dash uses other Dash units to help you determine what your commute will be like. Each Dash out there serves as a traffic probe.
Send-to-car. Send destinations to your car from your PC. I was driving the other day to meet my brother and he called to say he had moved since I last talked to him. I had to pull over to re-program the GPS. With Dash, he could have sent a new destination to my car.
See where your friends are. Although I don’t see this in the specs, a connected GPS could be used to show you where your friends are. (TomTom offers a similar feature.)
One way to think of Dash is as a location-enabled, mobile-optimized Web browser.
The biggest challenge Dash faces is pricing. All of these features and connectivity don’t come cheap. Prices on basic GPS units have almost fallen into the stocking stuffer category, with many units at $150 to $200.
Dash seems to be missing many of the features found in high-end ($400-$600) PNDs: Bluetooth hands-free calling, MP3 player, voice recognition and a picture viewer.
Dash retails for $600. In order to use the advanced features described above, you have to pay a monthly fee of $12.99. It’s $9.99/month if you prepay for two years, making the cost about $840. You won’t see that in many stockings.
Today’s release allows viewers to rate maps and leave comments. You can also see statistics on maps, including the number of views and the top referring links to the map.
My friends who’ve seen me walk around with a GPS as I take pictures on vacation or hikes think I’m a little bit odd. But apparently, I’m not the only one. In the 15 months since Flickr officially supported geotagging, more than 35 million pictures have been geotagged — enough that they can launch Flickr Places to show them off.
One of my big complaints with most travel sites is that they downplay the visual and visceral elements that make travel fun. At Flickr Places, that’s front and center. Places offers a gorgeous travelogue of places around the world. You can see pictures, Flickr groups about the location and connect with photographers.
A tag cloud shows the top tags for an area; this sounds more useful than it is. Most places I searched came up with words like clouds, sunset, people, church. It’d be nice if the universal words were thrown out and the focus places on words that are unique or much more common for an area.
I’d also like to be able to zoom in on the map and see where the most photographed places are. (There are some data quality issues with this, but they’re manageable.)
Flickr also changed the way maps are presented. Although the maps and overall presentation are more visually appealing, some key functionality was lost. In the previous version, the map represented your search. If you zoomed in or out, the new map defined the boundaries. As a result, you could see new pictures that didn’t appear in the other view.
The World Map view now provides a tag visualization that shows the latest tags from around the world. (See my earlier coverage of World Explorer from Yahoo! Research.)
Google’s latest changes to My Maps allows you to collaborate on personal maps with others in much the same way you can share a Google Document or Spreadsheet.
You can also allow anyone to edit a map.
Group editing is great for maps that are too hard for one person to scale. Before this release, I started maps of free Wi-Fi and restaurants with outdoor dining. Now I can invite my friends and the public to help build out the maps. Although some of these data is captured by vertical players such as JiWire and Skyhook, the integration with Google’s Local Search brings it to a much wider audience.
Google could use the same platform to have users build out vertical directories to augment data from providers like InfoUSA by actively soliciting users to contribute places on specific topics. This is already happening on an ad hoc basis as users follow their passions and create maps.
A longstanding problem with online maps and navigation devices is that your destination is often not where they say it is. When you reach the “destination”, you’re often a few hundred feet from where you wanted to be. There are three common reasons for this:
No one has walked every street and identified where each address is. Addresses are approximated based on standard numbering schemes. On a block that goes from 200 to 300, 250 will be placed in the middle.
Businesses sometimes use vanity addresses. The business may have an address on Madison Avenue in New York, but the real entrance is off less glamorous 54th Street.
The business address is incorrect or malformed in the database.
This is especially helpful for addresses that are incorrect in the Google database or can’t be accurately geocoded. These appear on Google Maps with a circle to mark the location and a warning.
The Pentagon Post Office is listed with an address of “The Penagon, Arlington, VA 22201″. As a result, it appears about three miles from where it really is. I was able to move it to the correct spot, on top of the Pentagon. Because this is more than 600 feet, the change will be moderated. I’ll be watching to see how quickly that happens. (Update: Google has since removed the Pentagon Post Office record altogether.)
If this feature takes off, it will make Google’s Street View feature much more useful. Right now, when you pull up a Street View of an address, there’s a good chance you won’t see the business you were looking for because it shows a view of the approximated location.
I travel frequently and have friends scattered throughout the country. I usually do a bad job of keeping track of who is where, who has moved, etc.
Last week I was in Boston. As I headed out to dinner, I updated my Facebook status:
Later that night, I got a Facebook message from a friend I haven’t seen since high school. He lives in Cambridge and wanted to get together.
Unfortunately, the message arrived after I had gotten back to my hotel.
This almost-connection was facilitated by Facebook’s social graph and status updates. Next time I’m in Boston, I know to look Chike up. Twitter, Jaiku (acquired by Google) and Pownce can be used in the same way. But none of them know geography; they require that someone look at the message and determine that Cambridge is nearby. A friend who lives in Los Angeles is just as likely to see that message as someone in Cambridge.
There are a number of companies trying to turn that missed connection into an actual connection. Among them are Loopt, uLocate and Whrrl. Google purchased a pioneer in the field — Dodgeball — but hasn’t done much with it. (Dodgeball’s founders very publicly left Google, complaining that they couldn’t get engineering resources.)
Although the details vary based on site, you can publish your location from the Web or a cell phone. You can also see where your friends are on a map. I could have checked a map before I headed to Cambridge to see which of my friends were nearby. Some services will even alert you when a friend is nearby.
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