For all US Americans who are by law prohibited from setting foot in Cuba, you can now experience Havana virtually via over 100 high-resolution georeferenced 360-degree panoramas, just published to 360 Cities. In Google Earth too, of course:
What a wonderful snapshot in time. Havana is bound to change immensely in the next decade or two.
Tags: Panorama
Google today added walking directions to Google Maps. An option to view walking directions now appears when you ask for directions for a journey of 10km (6.2 miles) or less. Google say “we’ll try to find you a route that’s direct, flat, and uses pedestrian pathways when we know about them.”
Google announced that this new feature is in ‘beta’ as “we don’t always know if a street has a sidewalk, or if there’s actually a special pedestrian bridge for crossing a busy street.” In other words Google’s walking directions might not actually always return the shortest route for pedestrians.
This is an excellent new feature from Google Maps and I’m sure that walking directions will improve over time. Hopefully soon we will get cycling directions as well.
Via: Google LatLong: Pound the pavement
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Tags: Google Maps
It’s summer in the Northern Hemisphere, and when it’s not too hot, it feels like a waste of gorgeous weather to get behind the wheel or hop in a cab. Doubly so when you’re traveling to a city you’d love to explore, and you’re pretty sure that you could walk from your hotel to the aquarium, if only you could figure out the way. You could try to use driving directions from Google Maps, but city centers are always a maze of one-way streets and no-left-turns. These driving directions from a local hotel to the Seattle Aquarium require numerous contortions in order to obey one-way streets and find a route under the freeway, taking you out of the way of where you could go by foot:
Now, we’ll give you step-by-step directions for the portion of your trip on foot:
Walking is a great way to learn about a place, to get around, and to get some exercise when the weather is nice. You’ll notice shops, parks, and public art that you’ve been accustomed to zooming past, and come away feeling like you’ve really gotten the insider’s take on a neighborhood or city. Of course, don’t get too caught up in enjoying the sights! Please be careful, and be particularly attentive in high traffic areas. Just like if you were driving, follow road signs and signals along your route, and use good judgment about streets that can’t be walked (there are many useful websites containing safety tips for pedestrians).
Tags: Google Maps
Walking Directions Beta Now in Google Maps
Traditional Driving Directions take you around Hyde Park, London
Map Directions (Car)
Longer Distance (3 miles but shorter time for the journey 12 mins)
**(excludes finding parking, pay for parking and sitting in traffic waiting for parking)
Switching to ‘Walking’ Beta Mode shows it’s much shorter to Walk than Driving taking only 8 minutes longer than Driving .
Map Directions (Walking)
Shorter Distance (1 mile for the journey but 20 minutes in duration)
*** Use caution when walking in unfamiliar areas.
Tags: Map Directions
UK Incinerator Map
UK Without Incineration Network (UKWIN) has launched a Interactive Map that show existing and potential new sites for Household Waste Incinerators - Grey markers represent existing incinerators. Brown markers represent potential incinerators.
UKWIN, in collaboration with Friends of the Earth, has developed an interactive map of existing and potential household waste incineration sites.
“The map, which was unveiled today (July 22), documents 23 existing sites and outlines 150 locations that have been scouted for around 80 more facilities to be built and includes a table listing every facility with its location, type, capacity, operational notes and active campaign groups opposing that particular site.
Large urban areas are identified as the areas with most incineration facilities - Birmingham, London, Liverpool and Leeds all accumulating high numbers - while smaller areas such as Invergordon, Inverness, and Jersey’s proposed St. Helier facility expose the range of the research undertaken.
UK WIN explains that it placed each location on the map based on facility post codes for accuracy.”
Source:LetsRecycle.com
Related: Channel 4 News - 30 new rubbish incinerator plants planned for the UK
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The Skyneedle is an 88m tower in Brisbane, Queensland, that was constructed for the World Expo ’88.1 During the course of the Expo the tower shone a beam of light upwards that could be seen from 60km away.
After the Expo ended the tower was supposed to go to Tokyo Disneyland, but successful local hairdresser Stefan Ackerie felt that the Skyneedle should stay in Brisbane. He felt so strongly in fact, that he bought it himself and had it moved just 500m to his company’s headquarters.
The tower light was originally only used on special occasions, as it could potentially cause havoc for aircraft headed to the nearby Brisbane Airport, but in 2006 an electrical fault caused a fire near the top of the tower, and today it’s unclear if the light works at all.
There’s a bizarre bonus sight at the back of Stefan’s building too - an 8.5m long tennis racket, which was purportedly designed as a giant catapult?
Just what hairdresser Stefan planned to catapult is anyone’s guess.
More information on Expo ’88 and The Skyneedle at Wikipedia, and Stefan himself at his corporate website.
Thanks to Ashley Thistlethwaite.
See what they did there? ?
Locations: Australia / Categories: Towers, Weirdness
Tags:
On July 1st, Starbucks announced they will close about 600 stores around the US. Since that time, many caffeine lovers in those areas have started petitions to keep their favorite location from losing its juice. And, the markets have had their reaction that this is yet another sign of a collapsing economy. But, even more interesting is that Starbucks released a list of all the locations in a PDF file. Last week, Keir Clarke at GoogleMapsMania took the PDF and scraped the locations into a spreadsheet. Then he used batch geocode and the Google spreadsheet mapper tool to quickly (30 minutes to do the whole ) create a Google Maps map of the closures. I was kind of disappointed Keir didn’t take the step to add a line of code to make his map available in the Earth API as well.
Fortunately, someone else scraped the same PDF and put the Starbucks closures into Finder!. Finder! is an excellent free browser-based service which lets you find, organize and share geospatial data in common formats. Including Google Earth’s KML format. So, here’s the Google Earth view 
of the Starbucks closures.
If you zoom into the placemarks, you’ll find it’s not always easy to find the particular store based on its address. Geocoding from addresses is usually not accurate - and sometimes places you a block away (or even more).
Just for fun, you can get a quick look at the same KML file in the Google Earth API plugin. Read below the fold to see it.
Tags: Google Earth·Starbucks
Stuart Nixon? The guy who founded ER Mapper, now part of ERDAS.
NearMap? The company he founded in Australia after leaving ER Mapper. It offers technology, including the HyperPod aerial camera system, to take and process high resolution images ortho and oblique, far more cheaply and quickly (a city in a few days) than other solutions. The vision: imagery for mapping portals, governments real estate, etc. no older than 1 month.
Now, the news: Ipernica acquired NearMap for AU$4 million plus shares and options and a AU$1 million investment.
- ITWire
- Western Australian Business News (includes official announcement)
Tags:
Spain, now a fully integrated member of the European Union, once was considered so alien to the rest of Europe that Alexandre Dumas is known to have remarked that “Africa begins at the Pyrennees” (see #22).
The Pyrennees are a prime example of how geography is destiny. This mountain chain that so neatly divides the Iberian peninsula from the rest of Europe also seems to have cut it off for so long from the European cultural, political and economical mainstream. It’s certainly true that many casual observers of history (like me) will be hard pressed to tell you anything about Spain between Columbus and Franco.
This map dates from towards the end of that timeframe, and comes as a bit of a surprise. Published in 1852 after the First Carlist War (whatever that may have been), it shows a subdivision of Spain many would only associate with the era after the death of Spanish dictator Franco in 1975 and the subsequent democratisation and decentralisation of political life.
And yet it clearly already shows the Basque Country (in the north) and Catalonia (in the northeast) as two separate entities. In all, it shows Spain as being divided into four different areas, each retaining particular laws and institutions.
Not knowing my Spanish history very well, I’m stabbing in the dark here; but I guess the regionalism shown on this map is not an early form of modern Spanish federalism, but an ancient form of local privileges later to be suppressed in the wars and oppression that were to follow. Regional nationalism in Spain was only allowed to resurface in the post-1975 era, which gives this rather old map a quaintly modern feel…
Many thanks to Joan Camp for showing me this map, from Francisco Jorge Torres Villegas’ “Cartografia hispano-cientifica” (1852), which can be found here at Wikimedia Commons.
Tags: Spain
Heli Tours (GTA IV) from VIP3Rz on Vimeo.
Grand Theft Auto IV (abbreviated to GTA IV) is a sandbox-style action-adventure video game developed by Rockstar both the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360. Typical of the franchise it features some of the best free roaming city visualisations around, creating a believable sense of location and place thanks to interactive traffic models and pedestrian movement.
The game is set in ‘Liberty City’, a fictional city that is based heavily on modern day New York City. The movie above provides an insight into both the architecture of the city and the ability to freely visualize the urban skyline.
Below provides a further look at the city:
Freefall (GTA IV) from VIP3Rz on Vimeo.
In a report last year in the New York Daily News City Councilman Peter Vallone, chairman of the Council’s Public Safety Committee, stated that “Setting Grand Theft Auto in the safest big city in America would be like setting Halo in Disneyland”. The article continues that “The mayor does not support any video game where you earn points for injuring or killing police officers,” said Jason Post, a spokesman for Mayor Bloomberg.
The city map for GTA IV is pictured below, you can view an interactive ‘Google Maps’ style version here.
Now we are not going to get into the debate about violence and games based on real locations.. suffice to say the Mayor of London didn’t pass comment on The Getaway (see our movie) which allows you, amongst other things, to hijack a bus at gun point and attack passers by, but these are changing times.
With games increasingly leading the way in the creation of digital cities, and the move towards photorealism, it looks like this is the first shot across the bows of game creators in what looks like a long running debate.
We can’t help wondering how different it is however to film, how many violent films have been set in New York and depicted it in a negative way? From the Lights of New York in 1928 (the first Gangster film to feature sound) to the latest blockbuster - New York is often portrayed as a crime ridden city due to its gritty urban environment and architecture. GTA IV is simply following a similar path.
GT4.Net has a great write up showing comparisons between in-game images and the architecture of New York.
Also see the 86 page thread on GTAForums.com
CriminalSearches
CriminalSearches is a new website that lets citizens view a Google Map of their neighbourhood with all those with a criminal record who live in the area tagged on the map.
The Neighborhood Watch feature of CriminalSearches.com allows users to quickly discover if anyone with a criminal record is living in the surrounding community. Users simply enter a full address, or city and state, and are presented with a map identifying people in the area with criminal records. You can then click on the map to view detailed information about the identified criminals including name, age, current and previous addresses and complete criminal history. Different types of criminal are given different tags.
This Google Map is of course going to be of great interest to just about everyone. I’m sure you will be checking out your neighborhood in the next few minutes (if you haven’t already done so). Moreover I can see this being a great tool for people looking to move house. Wouldn’t you want to check out the criminal records of your future neighbors if you could? And if you had been thinking of buying a property in the area in the screen-shot above wouldn’t you change your mind after seeing that map?
There are already a whole host of other crime and sex offender Google Map mash-ups. Check out the links in the right hand column of this page.
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Tags: Criminal
Drijo
Drijo is an interesting concept in ride-sharing on Google Maps that allows people to auction off available seats in their car or search for free seats in other people’s cars.
If you are looking for a ride you enter your starting point, destination and the date you wish to travel. Drijo then searches for rides that have been offered on that route and lets you enter a bid for the journey as you would for an item on e-Bay.
Like e-Bay the auction has a time limit and it is possible to view the highest current bid.
Drijo also allows users to submit car-pooling routes or search them in order to find others to start carpooling for regular routes to regular destinations. The site is available in English, Spanish, French and German.
RoadSharing
RoadSharing.com is another car-pooling service that provides an easy way to find someone to share a trip with. RoadSharing provides a meeting point between those offering lifts and those in search of a lift.
You can add a route or search for existing routes on a Google Map. Currently most of the available routes seen to be in Italy. However the site is available in English, Spanish, French and Italian so could easily become popular in the rest of the world.
Other Carpooling Google Maps
eMotorPool.com - Google Maps carpool search
Carpool - Google carpooling Mapplet
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Tags: Sharing Maps
14.3 TB of new imagery for Microsoft Virtual Earth. Save money on gas….use Live Search Maps powered by Virtual Earth.
Ortho
United States (UltraCam, Microsoft Proprietary)
Austria
Belgium
Denmark
Finland
Germany
Ireland
Norway
Portugal
Spain
Sweden
Switzerland
Satellite
International
Oblique (Bird’s Eye)
North America
Europe
CP
Tags: Virtual Earth
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