Science Archives

February 8, 2010

Where 2.0 2010 coming in March; Discount for GEB Readers

For the past few years (2009, 2008, 2007, 2006), Frank has attended the Where 2.0 conference. I had the pleasure of attending with him in 2007 and we had a great time. Now that he's busy sailing around beautiful places like Bonaire, I'll be taking his place this year.

Where 2.0 happening March 30-April 1, 2010 at the San Jose Marriott in San Jose, California. Where 2.0 brings together the people, projects, and issues building the new technological foundations and creating value in the location industry. Developers, technologists, CTOs, researchers, geographers, academics, business developers, and entrepreneurs come together to debate what's viable now, and what's lurking just below the radar. Register before February 9 and save $300. Take an additional 25% off when using discount code: whr10ge

I recently had a chance to speak with Brady Forrest, Program Chair for Where 2.0, to talk about some of what we can expect at this years event.

You can find the full list of speakers on this page, but here are a few that he felt were worth pointing out:

• Dennis Crowley from FourSquare, Josh Williams from Gowalla and Jeremy Stoppelman from Yelp will all be there. Many people expect location-based services to explode in 2010, and these three companies are leading the way. Increasingly interesting game mechanics are expected to be developed this year, as turning these services into a more game-like experience will help to draw in more casual users.

• Speaking of Twitter, Elad Gil, Raffi Krikorian and Othman Laraki will be there. Of note is Ryan Sarver, formerly of Skyhook Wireless, who will be speaking on the "Increasing Usefulness of Location Data Geostreams".

• John Hanke of Google will be there. In the past, Google has been known to release some major developments at Where 2.0, such as the release of StreetView in 2007. No word on any big announcements, but it's always a possibility.

• Blaise Agüera y Arcas, the "Architect of Bing Maps" and the creator of Photosynth will be there to discuss user-generated and crowdsourced maps.

• Sean Askay, who created the very impressive "Map the Fallen" KML will be discussing his work on that project.

There are literally dozens of other speakers and events, and it should be a great week. If you plan on attending, leave a comment or send me an email and we can try to meet up. Hope to see you there!

Posted by mickmel at 7:21 AM | Comments (0)

February 4, 2010

Some parts of the ocean are now high-resolution

We mentioned it briefly a few days ago, and Google has now released some of that new data for the ocean in Google Earth.

As Google explains in their blog, most of the underwater terrain is generated use satellite extrapolations of water surface height. This technique has allowed them to create the undersea terrain for most of the planet, but it's rather low-resolution.

However, a handful of organizations are able to collect high-resolution data using other techniques, and some of that data is now available in Google Earth. This data is collected using echosounding sonar from ships, and it much more detailed than the standard ocean terrain in Google Earth.

This new data has come from a variety of sources, including:

- The Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping - Joint Hydrographic Center
- The Living Oceans Society
- The California State University at Monterey Bay
- Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI)

Google has produced a short undersea tour to show off some of the new terrain. Download it Google Earth File. You must have GE installed. and check it out. They'll continue to add more data as time goes on, so the data and imagery will keep improving over time.

Posted by mickmel at 8:15 AM | Comments (1)

January 13, 2010

Imagery Layer for Haiti Earthquake has been released

Google has been working with GeoEye over the last 24 hours to get fresh imagery from Haiti to help aid relief efforts. They've just released a KML file for it, which you're encouraged to download. The file is actually a network link, so Google can push additional imagery to you without having to release another KML.

The imagery is remarkably sharp, and shows some amazing scenes such a a soccer field turned into a make-shift camp (shown above), and smoke continuing to billow out of some buildings.

Google has done similar things in the past, with events such as the Myanmar Cyclone or Hurricane Katrina.

In addition to the KML file, Google has set up a crisis response page for the earthquake with lots of information. Specifically, those that are able are encouraged to give donations to help rebuild lives and communities.

Posted by mickmel at 11:06 PM | Comments (3)

January 4, 2010

Deforestation of the Amazon is uncovering Geoglyphs

700 years ago, for reasons that are still unknown, ancient people sculpted hundreds of geoglyphs in the Amazon. One of the most famous geoglyphs is the Nazca Lines Google Earth File. You must have GE installed. in Peru. Recently, a combination of deforestation and high-resolution satellite imagery is beginning to expose many more of them.

Because of their huge size, geoglyphs are almost impossible to discover from ground level. It's only when you get high in the air can you begin to see the shapes coming together in a pattern. A quote from TreeHugger:

One of the factors that contributed to so many geoglyphs being undetected prior to the aid of satallites is their enormous size. According to leading geoglyph scientist Alceu Ranzi, his latest discoveries -- five sets of geometric shapes, with circles, squares and lines -- can measure more than a mile from one extreme to another.

As Ogle Earth noticed, the TreeHugger article didn't actually point out the exact location of any of the geoglyphs. However, GloboAmazonia found some of them, which you can view below, or download the KML file Google Earth File. You must have GE installed. to view directly in Google Earth.

View Amazon geoglyphs in a larger map

While discovering more of them may help to eventually find out why they were created, further deforestation may be the only way to reveal them. To again quote TreeHugger, " if it takes more clear-cutting in the Amazon rainforest to find out the answer, hopefully it will always remain a mystery."

Posted by mickmel at 8:50 AM | Comments (7)

December 30, 2009

The year 2009 in Google Earth

We've already showed you the 10 most popular stories on our site for 2009, but we thought it'd be fun to look back through the year at the newsworthy stories for each month.

It's been quite a year for Google Earth, with tons of new features, imagery, 3D buildings, StreetView releases and much more. Here's a look back at 2009:

January

- New view of the Ocean Floor
- New imagery in Washington, DC
- Obama Inauguration in 3D
- Vancouver in 3D in Google Earth

February

- Google Earth 5 Released
- Google Chrome supports the Google Earth Plug-in
- Imagery Update (February 28)

March

- New 3D cities (Lucerne and Santa Rosa)
- Update to Google Mars
- Historical Imagery Update

April

- Google Earth 5 Plugin Released
- Imagery Update (April 11)
- Updated terrain
- Great Lakes Underwater features added to Google Earth

May

- Imagery Update (May 9)
- 3D Buildings Update; 11,000 new models
- New Business Layer for Google Earth and iPhone Google Earth

June

- Major StreetView Upgrade - 3D features
- New Imagery (June 6)
- New 3D cities (Tokyo, Osaka, Kobe, Kyoto)
- New 3D cities (Warsaw, Prague, Oslo, Toronto, Indianapolis)