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Where 2.0 – Day 2: Part 2

(don’t forget to read part 1 of today’s activities)
First up in this session we had Michael Arrington of TechCrunch and Tim O’Reilly. These two were fairly entertaining, but didn’t talk about geo much at all. Quite a bit about search, and some about Michael’s fear of Facebook.
That was followed by Othman Laraki of Twitter. He showed many examples of how geo has been used with Twitter over the last few years, even when it wasn’t explicitly capturing lat/lon. Some examples were James Buck’s famous “arrested” tweet, and the Atlanta Gas Shortage (#atlgas) in 2008.
After Othman we heard from Michael Halbherr of Nokia. They’re doing some cool stuff with their handheld maps. In particular, their Ovi Maps (turn-by-turn navigation) are now completely free and becoming very popular. Since their launch on January 19, they’ve been averaging nearly 100,000 downloads per day.
Lastly was Dennis Crowley of foursquare. He recognizes that tools like foursquare are used much more often when game elements are included, which explains the variety of badges and other toys in foursquare.
Also in this session Matt Gallaga officially released SimpleGeo, a place to host all of your geodata.
After lunch, I checked out “The Big Picture from the Big Players”. This was a discussion moderated by Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand, with a panel including:
• Dylan Smith of Yelp
• Blaise Aguera y Arcas of Bing Maps
• John Hanke, VP of Geo at Google
• Tom Wales of Yahoo Local
Some highlights:

  • Hanke and Aguera both felt that small businesses were moving to the web quickly, but that it was still in its relative infancy.
  • Fake reviews on sites like Yelp are a big problem, but with solutions out there. Hanke feels that larger crowds will help drown out self-promotion, and Aguera thinks that check-in models like foursquare will help grant ranking and authority factors to users, similar to the algorithms that rank web pages today. Wales says that even with some issues, the value is still worth it.
  • When check-ins were added to Yelp, they saw a 4x increase in photo uploads.
  • On how smartphones are changing things: Smith says on the web, Yelp can tell you “what’s good to eat in San Francisco” and that’s adequate. On a phone, you want to know what’s good right here.
  • Hanke says that most new features in Google Earth and Google Maps are used by less than 5% of the users.

Nothing groundbreaking, but a lot of good insights. After that session, I had a chance to ride in a Google Earth-equipped Audi, and a video of that is coming later this evening.
Tomorrow’s schedule looks to be solid, with topics behind led by people from DigitalGlobe, GoWalla, Facebook and others.

Links: New Panaramio app, Thematic Mapping, ARsights, Disaster Relief, First Pics from WorldView-2

Panoramio launches iPhone app: The team at Panoramio has just released their first iPhone app (iTunes link), to allow you to quickly upload photos directly from your phone. It’s a very simple app — open it, log in, and upload. New Panoramio images are pushed to Google Earth on a regular basis, so this is a simple way to add geo-referenced photos to Google Earth.
However, the app doesn’t allow you to view existing photos or browse for photos near you. For that, you’ll need to use an existing app such as Layar and have it pull the Panoramio photos into it. I’d expect a future update will have more features along those lines.
Using KML for Thematic Mapping: Bjørn Sandvik has just released his research paper on Thematic Mapping as a free PDF download. In his word: A thematic map displays the spatial pattern of a social or physical phenomenon, such as population density, life expectancy or climate change. The paper (PDF) provides an in-depth look at thematic mapping, while the link above gives a nice overview of the thesis.
ARSights: We discussed InGlobe technologies earlier in the year when they released their slick Augmented Reality program. Using your web cam, you could virtually show a 3D model on your desk. It was a neat program, but had some shortcomings: Windows only, and it only had a few 3D models to use. They’ve now built a Mac version of their program and introduced ARSights to hook into the Google 3D Warehouse to let you use any of the models in there. Below is a quick video to show how the process works:


Powerful IT for disaster relief: Earlier this month, Google held a day of workshops in Washington for over 20 various humanitarian organizations, to share ideas on how to improve humanitarian and relief efforts when disaster strikes. They covered a lot of topics, using tools such as Google Earth and Google Map Maker to handle various situations. You can read the full recap on the Google LatLong Blog.
First Images from WorldView-2 Satellite: Just twelve days after its launch, the first images from DigitalGlobe’s WorldView-2 Satellite are available. The first images are of a few locations in San Antonio, Texas, where the GeoInt 2009 Symposium will be held this week. The images look very crisp, and the quality is expected to improve as refinements and calibrations are made to the system. Below is an image that the WV2 captured of Dallas Love Airport. (via SlashGeo)
Dallas Love Airport

Links: Race My Race, Random Hacks of Kindness, WorldView-2

Race My Race – Designed for athletes that want to visualize an upcoming event (running, biking, etc), this uses the Google Earth plug-in and gives you a test drive of your event. It has some slick features — an elevation overlay as you go, start/finish gates, easily controllable speed. The downside is that many places are just flat. For example, I had it simulate the Boston Marathon, and the first 90% of the race is useless — just flat scenery with a few hills. The end of the race (shown below) is kinda neat, with the 3D buildings all around. This simulator would do well to offer the option of StreetView, as that would make many of these courses much more lifelike. Still, it’s a neat project. (via All Points Blog)

Boston Marathon Finish

Random Hacks of Kindness – Google is partnering with The World Bank to host a codejam called “Random Hacks of Kindness”. As they explain: Random Hacks of Kindness will bring technologists and relief workers together to develop technologies that enable disaster victims to help themselves and give first responders and aid workers the tools they need to better help victims–to reduce loss of life and to speed recovery.
Google has built a variety of geo-related tools to assist after major disasters, such as Tropical Storm Ketsana, the Cyclone in Myanmar, and even back as far as Hurricane Katrina. The results of this gathering should help make these tools even more useful in the future.
DigitalGlobe launches WorldView-2 satellite – Just over a year ago, the GeoEye satellite was launched to provide exclusive imagery for Google. The WorldView-2 satellite was launched a few days ago aboard Boeing Delta II 7920, and promises to bring even more great imagery to Google Earth. You can read more on the DigitalGlobe site, or view the launch of the Delta 2 below:

Use Google Earth on Earth Day

Earth Day in Google EarthToday is Earth Day. A time to sit back and think about our wonderful planet, and some of us will be out picking up some trash, or just enjoying nature. For those of you stuck inside due to weather, work, or other reasons – perhaps you might want to spend the day exploring our wonderful planet through the power of Google Earth. Here are a few links of stories from Google Earth Blog (GEB) describing environmental related content available for viewing in Google Earth:

  • About Google Earth Layers – Google has a ton of environmental content built into the Google Earth Layers. Read this article to learn about layers and how to use them.

  • Environment Layers – Greenpeace,
    ARKive (endangered species), Unicef (water and sanitation), UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme), and lots of environmental layers under the Ocean layer

  • Rising Sea Levels – Animations showing what would happen if ice melting caused seas to rise too high – e.g. New York City.

  • EPA Air Quality Report – US Environmental Protection Agency’s air quality report for Google Earth – called AirNOW

  • NASA Earth Day Photos – NASA released these photos in 2008 in honor of Earth Day.

  • Sea Ice Melting – Dramatic animation of data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center showing ice extents from 1979 through March of 2008 on both poles. See other GE data from NSIDC.

  • Google Earth Outreach Showcase – See environmental and science content for Google Earth.

  • Glacier Melt Survey – dramatic illustration of how fast glaciers are melting around the World.

  • Amazon Indians Using Google Earth – Primitive indians learn to use GPS and Google Earth to help protect their rainforest – true story!

  • Upper Green Valley – Issues of gas drilling impacting the environment in one location

  • Neighborhood Fights Logging With Google Earth – Neighbors in Santa Cruz, California successfully stop a logging plan by using Google Earth. Read the full story.

  • Blue Marble Add-On – This file lets you view a prettier image of the Earth from NASA for Google Earth. It shows the view of the Earth from space, with or without clouds, based on the current month. The clouds are closer to real time – updated every 15 minutes. The picture of the Earth and clouds disappear automatically as you get closer so you can see GE’s built in satellite imagery without interference.

[UPDATE Here is Google’s post on Earth Day with a new featured gallery of environmental and science GE content. ]

Google Earth Historical Imagery Update – 16-March-2009

Google has released a big update to the historical imagery feature available only through Google Earth 5. The historical imagery contains a massive amount of imagery which surpasses the data you already see when viewing Google Earth satellite and aerial imagery by default. Google has basically been archiving the imagery they used in previous releases of imagery since 2005, plus historical imagery they’ve acquired from many sources for some places going back decades old. It’s hard to express just how big this data really is – we’re talking many, many terabytes (terrabytes?) of data! One terabyte is 1,000,000,000,000 bytes.
When GE 5 was first released, the bulk of the new historical imagery was concentrated on the US. There were places with new historical imagery all over the globe, but it wasn’t pervasive. Now there is even more historical imagery all over the globe. Google mentions a few locations in their LatLong post to check out: watch the construction of the Dubai man-made archipelago known as “The World“, witness the deforestation of the Amazon forests, see what happened to New Orleans when Katrina flooded the city. Unfortunately, they neglected to include a Google Earth file so you could find and see the imagery yourself. So, check out all three of these locations here in a quick tour (you must have GE 5 installed, and turn on “Historical Imagery“).

Amazon deforestation comparison in Google Earth
Deforestation of Amazon

I haven’t been able to determine the full scale of this new update. But, there seems to be many more historical instances between 2000 and the present for rural areas around the globe (mostly strips of satellite photography from DigitalGlobe). Perhaps Google wasn’t finished with processing all of this data before the GE 5 release. But, now its there. If anyone finds other interesting locations with historical imagery, please leave a comment here. Particularly interesting ones I’ll write about in future posts and make tours so others can check them out.

By the way, I also discovered Google added the historical image of the predator drones in Pakistan which Stefan was talking about last month. Visit this location and check out the oldest historical image.