Plan a trip in one click

Why should trip planning be any more complicated than opening your browser and entering the name of your favourite city? Six months ago we launched City Tours on Google Labs with the goal of making vacation planning as easy as searching the web. After all, Google knows the top sights in many cities around the world and we've been providing directions on Google Maps for years, so Google Labs seemed to be the perfect way to test out a combination of these two capabilities, with our computing power thrown in to sift through the thousands of possibilities.

Though City Tours is still in Google Labs, the purpose was clear and the demo was popular, so we've continued to work on it over the past few months to take into account the hundreds of suggestions from users all across the globe. Now you'll find several handy additions:

1. Show complete walking directions. Until now, we've simply estimated the travel time between destinations based on the distance between them. Today, we start providing complete pedestrian routing information for every step of your tour, taking road types, bridges and bodies of water into account just like a regular Google Maps walking directions search. We still try to minimise the time you spend walking and we still won't recommend a visit to an attraction when we think it's closed but, now, the suggested tours are a whole lot closer to reality.
   
   

2. Import a My Map as a tour - because we can't always guess what you want to see! Maybe last time before you went on holiday you created a My Map of all the things you wanted to see when you got there. Now, next time you're planning a trip, you can import that My Map into City Tours: we'll try to schedule a visit to every feature in your map, just as if you had entered the city name into City Tours' search box.
   
   Alternatively, maybe the last time you came home after holiday you created a My Map of the best attractions you saw. If you've made your My Map public and listed, once a user has found it they can import it into City Tours with its link and re-live your tour, customised - of course - for the dates on which they're visiting. In the mood for literature in the Big Apple? You'll want to try out this walking tour of New York bookshops.
   
   

3. Finally, we've made a whole bunch of small user interface improvements both to help usability and make City Tours behave just a little more like the Google Maps site you're used to.

We're confident that these additions will make City Tours a whole lot more useful to a whole lot more people, although it should be noted that City Tours remains a Google Labs product and is still far from complete. We hope to continue tweaking and improving it over the coming months, continuing our goal of making planning a trip as easy as doing a Google search.

Posted by Trevor Johnston, Software Engineer, Google Zurich

Indigenous Mapping: A new Google technology workshop for tribal peoples

Indigenous people worldwide face special challenges in planning, policy and advocacy work. Issues such as cultural preservation, sovereignty, land use management, and handling mineral rights are just a few that they have to tackle. Recognizing this, we're happy to announce that Google and the Indigenous Mapping Network are teaming up to put on a two day workshop on the Google campus to teach people from native communities how to use Google's mapping technologies.

The mission of IMN has been to empower native communities by connecting them with the tools they need to protect, preserve, and enhance their way of life within their aboriginal territories. And they endeavor to bridge the gap between traditional "mapping" practices and modern mapping technologies.

On February 25th and 26th, 2010, Google and IMN will host a workshop on the Google campus for members and staff of indigenous groups who want to learn about Google geospatial and mobile technologies. This hands-on workshop will approach Google technologies with the special concerns of indigenous communities in mind, and will focus on the technical aspects of using Google Earth, Google Maps, Sketchup, Android mobile phones and Open Data Kit, among other technologies. Special attention will be given to:

• privacy and security of data
• mobile data collection
• data conversion from proprietary to open formats
• case studies blending geospatial technologies and traditional knowledge (see our previous posts: Tribe Teams with Google to make stand in Amazon, Trading Bows and Arrows for Laptops)
• Google Earth as a new storytelling medium: how to create compelling narrative-driven visualizations

We are very excited to be hosting this event, and look forward to a long relationship with IMN. For more information and to register for this workshop, go to the IMN website.

Posted by Mano Marks, Geo Developer Advocate, and Rebecca Moore, Manager, Google Earth Outreach

Now, Dasher! Now, Dancer! Track Santa and his sleigh with NORAD

[Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog]

Sipping warm cider, watching the snow fall, unwrapping gifts — these holiday traditions always seem to produce many of the year's sweetest memories. Several years ago, we added another holiday tradition to our list — helping NORAD keep tabs on Santa every Christmas Eve.

NORAD's Santa-tracking dates back to 1955, when a Sears and Roebuck magazine ad in Colorado Springs accidentally directed readers to call NORAD instead of the 'Talk-to-Santa' hotline they were advertising. Embracing the holiday sprit, the folks at NORAD provided callers with Santa's location according to their radar and have tracked his journey ever since. Many years later, in 2004, the same holiday spirit inspired us to use Google Earth — it was called "Keyhole Earth Viewer" back then — to display Santa's voyage around the world on Christmas Eve. We hosted the entire tracker on a single machine and were excited to have an audience of 25,000 following St. Nick's flight with us that night.

Our scrappy Santa tracker has come a long way since 2004. We added "Santa-cam" videos for select locations around the world, 3D SketchUp models of Santa's sleigh and his North Pole home, the official feed of Santa's location from NORAD headquarters and several other improvements. With more technical resources to support this richer experience, and the wonderful efforts of our Santa-tracking team, 2008 was the biggest year ever for NORAD Tracks Santa — more than eight million people tuned in to track Santa last Christmas Eve.




As soon as he returned to North Pole last year, Santa and his elves began planning for his 2009 flight — and we were no different. We thought hard about the different ways we could improve the Santa tracker and after a year of planning, we think this year's will be the best one yet. As usual, we'll display Santa's location, according to NORAD, in Google Maps and Google Earth at www.noradsanta.org. But we've made a few improvements to make tracking Santa even easier. Namely, we'll display Santa's journey with the Google Earth Plug-in, directly on the NORAD Tracks Santa site, instead of using the Google Earth client. As a result, you'll be able to follow Santa in Google Earth's immersive, 3D environment directly within your web browser. For more information about the plug-in and why we chose to use this tool to track Santa, have a look at our blog post on the Google Geo Developers Blog.

We're also excited about the many different ways you can keep track of Santa's location this Christmas Eve. Like last year, Santa will be trackable by visiting m.noradsanta.org on a mobile device, or searching for "Santa" on Google Maps for Mobile, available for most mobile phones (read more on the Google Mobile Blog). Santa's location will also be updated on Twitter with @noradsanta and you can keep up with news about Santa's flight with our real-time search feature.

To track Santa, visit www.noradsanta.org starting at 2am ET on Christmas Eve. There, you'll see a Google Map that will display Santa's location over the course of the day. To visualize Santa in Google Earth, just click "Track Santa in Google Earth" and you'll see St. Nick flying through Google Earth in your browser. If you don't have the Earth plug-in, click here — it will be installed automatically when you download Google Earth 5.1.

We hope you enjoy tracking Santa with us this year. And on behalf of everyone at Google — happy holidays and have a happy new year!

Posted by Brian McClendon, VP Engineering and Bruno Bowden, Senior Software Engineer

The Royal Botanic Gardens' discoveries now in Google Earth

At the UK's Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew Gardens, you'll find more than 250 plant and fungi species discovered by their botanists, including: giant rainforest trees, gorgeous rare orchids, spectacular palms, minute fungi, wild coffee species, and even an ancient aquatic plant. To celebrate the botanical organisation’s 250th year, they’re making information about these new species available for nature-lovers and curious web explorers via Google Maps and Google Earth. Kew has mapped all 250 of the newly discovered species on this special Google Earth layer:www.kew.org/science/new-discoveries/250-species.kml.

The new species come from a wide-range of fascinating locations, including botanical frontiers such as Ecuador, Madagascar, the Amazon, Cameroon, New Guinea, Mozambique, Amazon, and the heart of Borneo. Nearly a third are believed to be in danger of extinction.

Following in the footsteps of their famous botanical predecessors such as Sir Joseph Banks, Sir Joseph Hooker, and Charles Darwin, taxonomic botanists at the Royal Botanic Gardens continue to explore and study the world’s plant and fungal diversity, making astonishing discoveries every year. Their work involves a combination of fieldwork in remote and exotic parts of the world, and research in the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew’s Herbarium, a vast scientific collection of over seven million dried plants specimens, perhaps the largest of its kind in the world. This work has never been more relevant and pressing than in the current era of global climate change and unprecedented loss of biodiversity – especially as we count down to the UN’s International Year of Biodiversity in 2010.

We spoke to the team at Kew (whose stunning grounds you can also explore on Street View by the way!), and they told us that there is so much of the plant world yet to be discovered and documented – and that by using Google Earth they can highlight this to the public. Steve Bachman, a Plant Conservation Analyst, says he believes Google Earth and Google Maps have revolutionised the way Kew presents this important plant and conservation data to decision makers, scientists and the general public. After all, in order to promote conservation, you need to know what's out there and where it's found.

We’re thrilled to see the folks at Kew sharing their intricate and important work of plant and species identification via our mapping technology and look forward to hearing about more new discoveries we're sure they'll be making in the coming year!

Posted by Laura Scott, Google London

More to see in 3D

​
A few weeks ago we released new 3D models with more detailed facades for 5 California cities. Even though we’re based in California, we know there are a lot of beautiful cities with amazing architecture elsewhere around the country, so we’re adding 4 new cities scattered from coast to coast. Now you can fly through Portland, Austin, Chicago, and Philadelphia and see vivid, detailed 3D models throughout the cities.

While the list is quickly growing, some of our favorite spots are Portland’s Pearl District, South Street in Philadelphia, Austin’s 6th Street, and the restaurants along Rush Street in Chicago:

Portland, OR

Austin, TX

Chicago, IL

Philadelphia, PA

For the full effect, you should explore these cities for yourself in Google Earth. As you browse through these cities you’ll also see a number of great buildings creating by users using tools like Sketch-up and Building Maker. Here’s a video preview of the interactive experience:

Posted by Manish Patel, 3D Modeling Team

Going for gold with Google Earth

The 2010 Winter Games are just around the corner, and at Google, we're getting pretty excited.

Last week we shared some maps of local experts' favorite locations in and around Vancouver with the help from our Google Canada team. Today we've introduced photorealistic 3D building models for all nine venues of the Winter Games. Producing these models is a multi-step process involving both aerial and ground-based imagery.

Before we could begin we needed to obtain high quality aerial imagery for the Vancouver region. The new aerial imagery, now available in Google Earth and Google Maps, is pretty amazing, and provides a close-up look at this beautiful region. We then obtained ground-based photos of all nine venues. The combined ground-based images and aerial imagery are then used to construct highly detailed photorealistic 3D building models for the venues. All the models were developed by hand using SketchUp. As you'll see, we modeled everything from the gondolas to the spectator bleachers. We even included 3D trees to add a bit more realism. We'll be making a few more improvements prior to the commencement of the Games, but you can begin touring this beautiful area of the world via Google Earth today.

My personal favorites are the Whistler and Cypress Mountain ski areas. Whistler will host the alpine skiing events, and the Whistler Sliding Centre will host bobsleigh, luge, and skeleton events. Cypress will host all of the freestyle skiing and snowboarding competitions: moguls, aerials, ski cross, half-pipe, snowboard cross and parallel giant slalom.

Whistler Creekside, Vancouver, BC

The best part? You can leave the winter parka in the closet, throw a log on the fire, and visit the games from the comfort of your home. I'll be watching closely, and rooting for Team USA!

Posted by Bruce Polderman, Product Manager

Reflections on our Africa Adventures

[Cross-posted from the Official Google Africa Blog]

From late October to early November, the Google Earth Outreach team, along with Googlers from our Africa and Geo teams, participated in several events in East Africa.

During the AfricaGIS 2009 conference in Kampala, Uganda, plenary sessions by Google Earth Outreach Manager Rebecca Moore and Geo Evangelist Ed Parsons spoke to the importance of access and and development of geographic data in Africa, and encouraged people to attend some of our 14 workshops on various Google Geo tools. Our colleagues from Save the Elephants, Mapping Africa's Protected Areas (MAPA) and the UN Environment Programme presented on a panel and answered questions from the audience about their Google Earth Layers. What struck us about these workshops was the high level of interest and excitement from the huge number of attendees we had at every workshop, and their desire for greater access to geospatial information and adoption of cutting-edge technologies developed weeks earlier, like the Google Fusion Tables map visualization tools.


Google Earth Outreach launched our program to most countries in Africa, also releasing an Africa microsite specially for African users. The Google Earth & Maps for Non-profits grants program is now available in most African countries, and NGOs are encouraged to apply for software grants. If you're an African NGO, apply now!

Posted by Tanya Keen, Google Earth Outreach

Finding your way in India with landmarks

In the past few months, you may have noticed that Google Maps directions have been using some new phrases such as "Take the 2nd right" rather than just "Turn right". We're using phrases like this because they're natural concepts that relate to the way we think about navigation in real life. They're the way a friend might give you directions. This week we're taking this concept further for users in India, using landmarks to help drivers get their bearings.

During a trip to the Google engineering office in Bangalore, our driving directions engineers got a chance to learn firsthand how drivers navigate in India. We discovered that street signs or names tend to be less important than landmarks such as civic buildings and gas stations. A friend giving you directions might tell you to "Turn left at the school" or "Go past the convenience store". In India, we have a lot of great landmark data available through user-entered "Points of Interest" in Google Map Maker.

Our new algorithm determines which of these landmarks are most useful for navigation, based on visibility, importance, and closeness to the turns that you're making. We now combine landmark data, counted turns ("the 2nd right"), intersection names, and road names, and try to use whatever information is most relevant and useful. We're using landmarks in two ways: to identify where users need to turn, and to provide confirmation that they're on the right track. You can read more about the research that went into this feature on the Official Google Blog.

Landmarks now appear in both desktop and mobile directions. As a result, we hope that our users in India will have an easier time getting to their destinations using directions in Google Maps -- and you can improve our directions by adding more POIs in Google Map Maker!

Posted by Dave Walker and John Leen, Software Engineers

Our final imagery update of 2009

We just launched our final imagery update of the year for Google Earth and Google Maps. Check to see if any of your favorite places have gotten an update! You can view the updated areas highlighted in red below. Alternatively, you can download this KML for viewing in Google Earth or you view the updates in Google Maps.


Updates are noted with a red frame.

We're excited to provide you with the freshest, most current imagery in Google Earth again next year, in 2010.

Posted by Matt Manolides, GIS Specialist

Google & Audi take Google services in a car to the next level in the new Audi A8

Nowadays, it seems like everything is connected to the Internet: mobile phones, laptops, netbooks, portable game consoles, personal navigation devices. Think of how applications such as Google Maps for mobile have changed the way you find locally relevant businesses or addresses, or real-time traffic along your route. We can even get online from 35,000 feet while on an airplane, or while traveling at 300 km/h on a train. Google has worked with the automotive industry to bring services like Local Search into cars in the past - now we're teaming up with Audi to bring an entirely new type of technology into the car: Google Earth.

With their newly unveiled Audi A8, Audi is the first car manufacturer to bring Google Earth directly into the vehicle and to combine that with a set of useful Google services. We've worked closely with them to create a compelling in-car experience integrated with the Audi navigation system. You'll be able to enjoy 3D satellite imagery, terrain information and a wealth of additional geo information relevant to your current location: layers like Wikipedia to learn more about your surroundings or Panoramio images to get another view.

To help you figure out where you want to go and how to get there, we've also brought Google Maps and Local Search into the A8, and linking it to your desk. You can send business listings directly from Google Maps to your car: search for an address at your desk, send it to the car, and by the time you go to the parking lot your car will know where to go. While in the car, you can use Google Local Search in the same rich quality as at your desk. Imagine you get hungry on the way or want to find a cinema – simply perform a live Google search on your car navigation system and immediately get up-to-date, rich and relevant results.

Ghirardelli Square, San Francisco - Send popular destinations directly from your desk into your car

Google Earth has come a long way from when it received "oohs" and "aahs" during its demonstration for Googlers and the public in 2005: it has now been downloaded over 500 million times on the desktop, is available in 41 languages, and has a mobile version for iPhone. As Germans, with a natural born passion for cars, we're very excited about this newest milestone and we hope that drivers will have that same "ooh" and "aah" reaction when exploring Google Earth from the Audi A8.

Cabo da Roca, Portugal - Pushing your car navigation display to the next level

Our mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful is paid into by the efforts of Google's automotive team - they always are trying to find new ways to make relevant information accessible and useful - now also in your car.

Herzlich willkommen, Audi!

Posted by Jens Redmer, Principal, New Business Development and Wieland Holfelder, Engineering Director; Google Germany

Earth Engine, powered by Google

(Cross-posted from the Official Google.org Blog)

I'm here in Copenhagen this week, at the COP15 International Climate Change Conference. Whether you're attending in-person, or reading news headlines from home, you can't miss the fact that addressing climate change requires the world to solve a mind-boggling mix of science, policy and political issues. These are formidable challenges, but new technologies can help provide solutions for these complex problems. For example, one of the most promising areas of compromise has been an accord to compensate countries for preserving forests and other natural landscapes that play a crucial role in reducing emissions. Implementation of the agreement, known as Reducing Emissions From Deforestation and Forest Degradation, or REDD, will require the ability to accurately track deforestation at a regional and global level.

Despite the widespread availability of global satellite imagery through products like Google Earth and Google Maps, it hasn't been easy for tropical nations to understand the state of their ecosystem, and to quantitatively monitor changes in forest coverage or other key indicators. That's why I'm proud to announce a new computational platform for global-scale analysis of satellite imagery: Earth Engine, powered by Google.

At an event today hosted by Avoided Deforestation Partners, global leaders from the President of Guyana to the Prime Minister of Norway expressed their support for REDD. Earlier today, the U.S, Australia, France, Japan, Norway and Britain pledged $3.5 billion over the next three years to protect rainforests. At the event, I demonstrated a prototype forest monitoring application built on top of Earth Engine that we developed together with the Carnegie Institution for Science, IMAZON and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Traditional forest monitoring is complex and expensive, requiring access to large amounts of satellite data, lots of hard drives to hold the data, lots of computers to process the data, and lots of time while you wait for various computations to finish. Our prototype demonstrates how Earth Engine makes all of this easier, by moving everything into the cloud. Google supplies data, storage, and computing muscle. As a result, you can visualize forest change in fractions of a second over the web, instead of the minutes or hours that traditional offline systems require for such analysis. The prototype applications running on Earth Engine aren't yet available to the public, but you can see screen shots in our earlier blog post.

We want to ensure this technology is widely available when it's ready, so today I formally announced Google.org's commitment to provide our Earth Engine free to tropical countries to support their forest monitoring programs. I believe that this is just the first of many Earth Engine applications that will help enable scientists, policymakers, and the general public to better monitor and understand the Earth's ecosystems.

Posted by Brian McClendon, VP Engineering

Map Maker's Global Mapping Competition

Let the mapping begin! Google's first Global Mapping Competition runs from December 15 - January 31, 2010. During this period, the mapper who adds the most universities, schools, hospitals, and medical clinics with high quality into Google Map Maker will win a $50,000 UNICEF donation to benefit the country of their choice for work empowering young people through technology. Google Map Maker is available in more than 170 countries and allows users to become "citizen cartographers" by adding and editing map features. To foster participation from coutnries around the world, we have versions of the site in several languages: English, Spanish, French, Russian, Romanian, and Vietnamese.

"We are delighted that Google is supporting UNICEF's efforts to

help build a world fit for children. We know that mapping is a proven method to enhance community development. Google Map Maker is a powerful tool to create better situational awareness for both young people and communities at large. It will enable organizations like ours to better deliver services, respond to crises and adapt to change," said Gerrit Beger, leader of UNICEF's innovation drive focusing on youth.

For your mapping additions to get published on Google Map Maker and eventually make it into Google Maps, other users will have to moderate (approve or deny) your changes. You will, in turn, moderate others' changes, which is why it's often helpful to map with a partner or in a small team. Moderation quantity and quality are also an important criteria for judging competition entries so don't forget to moderate as much as you map.

This global competition comes on the heels of the Latin America mapping competition that ended yesterday. More than 50 teams from all over the world registered for the Latin America mapping competition, and we've seen more than 500% mapping activity increases for several Latin American countries during the competition period. We're very excited about this participation level and are looking forward to announcing the competition winners on January 8, 2010.



The Global Mapping Competition, kicking off this week, was first announced the Global Mapping Competition at an event organized jointly by the United Nations and Google at Google's office in New York. During that event, 80 United Nations delegates from more than 20 UN agencies, including UNICEF, met with various Google product teams to explore how Google's wide array of products and services can further the UN mission and help foster innovation and new thinking.

We invite mappers everywhere to register for the competition and map for a good cause over the holidays and into 2010.

Posted by Jennifer Mazzon, Maps Community Organizer

Mapping India on Google's Internet Bus

Throughout December, Google Map Maker team members are touring around India with Google's Internet Bus to show people how to create maps of their local villages and towns. The Internet Bus Project is an initiative to educate people about the Internet, and how it can be beneficial to their lives. The customized Internet-enabled Google bus travels to towns and cities across India and takes the Internet experience to the people.

interior of the bus

When the Google Internet Bus last week made its grand entrance into the province of Kerala (after having completed the journey through Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka), the paradise of waving palms, sprawling backwaters and wide sandy beaches, bus visitors were able to view their home and neighborhood and use Google Map Maker to map their home towns and favorite destinations.

You can see other pictures of this leg of the Internet Bus tour here. The bus is traveling through the following cities throughout December:

• Kochi/Ernakulam - December 5, 6, 7, 8
• Allapuzha - December 10, 11
• Kollam - December 12, 13
• Thiruvananthapuram - December 14, 15, 16, 17
• Thrissur - December 19, 20
• Pallakad - December 21, 22
• Kozhikode - December 23, 24, 25
• Thalassery - December 26, 27

If you are from Kerala or visiting Kerala during this time, hop along for the ride and discover the art of map making on the Google Internet Bus!

Posted by Ajith Kumar, Google Map Maker Program Manager

Go beyond just a few stars: See what makes a business shine

Today, we launched a new feature to rank and show distinguishing aspects for businesses on their Place Pages. By taking a look at a Place Page, you can quickly get a better sense of what people are saying about a business and view relevant snippets about each specific aspect (say, the price, the service, or the infamous deep dish pizza) from all over the web. You can then dive deeper by going to the source and reading the full reviews. The new color-coded bars will give you a simple numeric overview of the how the business rates on each feature.

Let's say your in-laws are visiting over the holidays and you want to take them to a nice dinner while they're in town. You've heard that a new restaurant has great steak, but you want to be sure the ambiance and decor meet your standards for a special occasion.

You can check Peter Luger Steakhouse Place Page to see what reviewers are saying:

Or what if you want to get your sister a spa day for the holidays -- you may want to know if the spa specializes in massages, facials, or pedicures -- and of course, you want to make sure it rates very high on service to make sure she's pampered.

Here's what people are saying about Kabuki Springs and Spa:

Looks like a great place to get a stone massage!

In order to help you find the best of what people are saying, we've improved our ability to find reviews of places, searching more quality sources of information from across the web. We look for pages that talk about particular places and analyze content on those pages that express a sentiment (i.e., a positive or negative comment) about that place. We display snippets of the sentiment to help you discover the best sources of information about the specific topic of interest.

Place Pages help to organize and make accessible all the world's information about a particular place. We hope that these sentiment snippets will help make your browsing - and maybe even your holiday planning - a little easier.

Posted by Andrew McCarthy and Diego Nogueira, Local Search team

More information, fewer clicks

Earlier this year, we proclaimed that "1000 is the new 10" when we began showing small dots on the map for all your local search results. This has been a great way to get a better understanding of the density of certain listings - for example, figuring out where the theater district is in a city you want to visit - but sometimes you may realize that one of the dots seems to be in the exact spot you'd like to go. We've now added the ability to hover over items on the map to quickly get more information about a place without clicking.

For example, if you search for "blueberry pancakes in san francisco", you'll find that there are a lot of options available. Hovering your mouse over these results now gives a tooltip, giving you enough information to let you decide if you want to click to investigate further. When hovering over a cluster of multiple results, a list of everything underneath the mouse pointer is shown, including the number of stars for a business listing. This makes exploring large sets of search results quicker and easier.

Here's some information about an option in Russian Hill:

And here are two options next to each other near Lombard Street:
This also works for many other things on the map, including transit stations, photos, and more. Next time you're searching, just hover and discover!

Posted by Michael Bürge, Software Engineer

Exploring climate solutions: One tour at a time

As part of the lead-up to COP15, we have been releasing a series of Google Earth tours that illustrate climate change issues and solutions. Many of these include tours created by NGOs, which guide you through their efforts to tackle some of the impacts of our changing climate on human life, wildlife, and our environment.
Recently, we have added six new tours to the series, and they cross a wide breadth of issues, including climate change science, human health, renewable energy, wildlife migration and ocean conservation.

View them now at www.google.com/cop15.

• In Projecting Future Climate Change, Stephen Schneider, climate scientist and professor at Stanford University, introduces us to the factors that affect future climate change, how scientists make projections, and what we can do to prevent the worst impacts.

• In Climate & Health in Africa, the International Research Institute for Climate & Society (IRI) guides us through some of the work they are doing to project where meningitis may impact humans in the future under a changing climate, and illustrates their work with groups on the ground in Africa.

• In Harnessing Coal River Wind in Appalachia, the Coal River Wind Project describes a more renewable energy option -- wind farms -- in the Appalachian Mountains that they are fighting for as an alternative to mountaintop removal for coal mining.

• In Greenfreeze and SolarChill, Greenpeace describes Greenfreeze, a market-proven, revolutionary environmentally-friendly refrigeration technology that doesn't release greenhouse gases. The SolarChill project brings solar-powered fridges to Africa for food storage, and a refrigeration method that meets the WHO standards for vaccine storage.
  
  

• In Protecting the Arctic Ocean, Oceana guides you through the problems that the Arctic Ocean is facing due to climate change, and introduces you to the positive changes that have been made due to policies protecting certain parts of the Arctic from commercial fishing and other activities.
  
  
• In Saving North America's Wildlife in a Warmer World by Freedom to Roam, learn about wildlife corridors for some of the continent's flagship species to enable them to migrate north and to higher altitudes as the globe warms.

Get started now - go to www.google.com/cop15 and pick a tour.

Posted by Karin Tuxen-Bettman and Tanya Keen, Google Earth Outreach

The Motor City goes 3D

[Cross-posted from the Official Google SketchUp Blog]

A few of us on the SketchUp team either have roots in Detroit or grew up there, so we're especially happy to announce that Detroit, Michigan as been added in 3D to Google Earth. From sports venues like Joe Louis Arena (home of the Red Wings) and Comerica Park (new home of the Tigers), to great watering holes and eateries, like The Old Shillelagh and the legendary Lafayette Coney Island - home of the world's best 2am coney dog - they are all there in 3D.



Being able to cruise through Detroit in 3D reminds us of how much history this great US city has. We're excited that users around the world will now be able to discover this city virtually, for themselves.


Posted by Chris Dizon and Steve Dapkus, Google SketchUp Team

Mars in Google Earth imagery update

We just launched new imagery and terrain for Mars in Google Earth! If you have the Google Earth plugin installed, you can view the updated areas highlighted in red (imagery) and white (terrain) below. Alternatively, you can download this KML, for viewing while using Mars in Google Earth.

The updates are from the High Resolution Stereo Camera aboard the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter. With these updates, nearly half of the martian surface is covered by imagery having a nominal resolution of 25 meters per pixel. As such, there are many exciting, newly-visible surface features to see. We've indicated some of these sights with color-coded arrows on the globe below:

Red arrow: Layered deposits on the floor of Hebes Chasma.

White arrow: Voluminuous lava flow fields adjacent to, and associated with, the Tharsis volcanoes Ascraeus and Pavonis Mons.

Blue arrow: New imagery of Olympus Mons' Aureole and the huge glacier-like structures along its north-west flank.

Yellow arrow: New images of the Shalabanta Valles (a deep canyon) section north of Orson Welles Crater showing huge landslides that occurred with such force that the debris (having an area the size of Chicago) flowed half-way up the other side of the canyon.

Green arrow: Dust and ice layers that comprise one of the Mars' most active geologic features, the ice cap of the north polar plateau, Planum Boreum.


Imagery and terrain updates are noted with a red and white frame, respectively

As a reminder, you can view Mars in Google Earth by clicking the 'planets' button on the toolbar:


Click here to find out more about Mars (and Moon!) in Google Earth.

You can also share your cool new imagery finds with us using Twitter! After looking at the updates in the viewer above, tweet your cool finds and add the #GEarthIMG hashtag to your tweets.

Posted by Eric Kolb, Geo Data Strategist

Local Experts share a few spots in Vancouver

Voted the most livable city by The Economist, Vancouver fronts the Pacific Ocean in British Columbia, Canada. This February it will host the 2010 Winter Games, and beforehand we wanted to share the favorite (or "favourite", for Canadian readers) places of some notable Vancouverites.

Vancouver is the first Canadian city we're adding to the special local experts version of Favorite Places on Google Maps, our insider's guides to great cities around the world. For this edition, every expert has been given the same Maple Leaf pin as the city warms up for the Olympics. Take a look at their top Vancouver picks for eating, shopping, playing and more:

Gordon Campbell - Premier of British Columbia
Ross Rebagliati - Olympic Gold Medallist, snowboarding
Simon Whitfield - Olympic Gold & Silver Medallist, triathlon
Rob Feenie - Food Concept Architect for Cactus Restaurants, Iron Chef champion
Bif Naked - rock singer-songwriter, breast-cancer survivor
Kit Pearson - children's book writer, Governor General's Award winner
Monte Clark - owner of Monte Clark Gallery
Rebecca Bollwitt - Vancouver's Best Blogger & Top Twitter User for Miss604.com
David Eaves - public policy entrepreneur, open government specialist


View Ross Rebagliati's Favorite Places in a larger map

And if you need an expert travel writer, John Lee from Lonely Planet provided contributions this past October (see other Lonely Planet Contributions).

Further explore the city with Street View for Vancouver, where you can click on "Street View" for any of these favorite places to see how they really look. Recently, we also launched new aerial imagery of Vancouver, Squamish and Whistler in Google Maps, Google Earth, and Google Maps for mobile and added thousands more 3D buildings in downtown Vancouver to Google Earth:



Posted by Tamara Micner, Google Canada & David Kim, Google Maps Marketing

Where on Earth? Place Pages for Google Earth

When I'm exploring my neighborhood or planning a trip, I often find places I want to know more about. That's why I love using Place Pages for Google Maps to see lots of great information about a place on a single page. I can browse photos of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney, write a review of a favorite restaurant in my neighborhood, or learn about popular places in Lucerne, Switzerland.

Starting today, you can see the same rich Place Page content in Google Earth, while browsing the world in 3D. You can see a summary whenever you click on a business or place of interest, and then click the View more information » link if you'd like to see more. Today, I explored some of the landmarks in Dubai:

You can also expand individual sections to see more reviews, photos, web pages, or user content. When I noticed a beautiful user-contributed 3D model of the Florence Cathedral, I wanted to see photos of the interior so I browsed through the photos section of the Place Page:

If you're a business owner, you can update your details in our Local Business Center, to ensure we're showing the most accurate information to people searching for your business in both Google Maps and Google Earth. We hope you enjoy exploring the new Place Pages in Google Earth and find them to be a helpful way to learn more about all the interesting places you see during your virtual browsing

Posted by Matt Holden, Associate Product Manager, Google Earth Team

Changing your perspective

As an avid travel planner or discerning house hunter, you might always be looking for another view of a location before you make your final decision. On the Google Maps team we're always looking for ways to make search experiences like this more useful for you. This is what inspired our plans to provide a new type of mapping imagery.

Starting today, developers will have access through the Google Maps API to high-resolution overhead imagery that is presented in a new aerial perspective. This is currently available in 2 spots in California: San Jose and San Diego. This new perspective gives users the ability to tilt their view of the world. In addition to seeing hotel rooftops like in our current "satellite" view, users can now see both the rooftop and sides of the hotel at an angle. In fact, users can rotate around all the sides of a hotel to get 4 different views from back to front.

While the imagery is great to look at, we wanted to make sure it was also a useful tool for users. Consequently, we decided to stitch thousands of images together so that users can smoothly pan across the map in perspective. This makes it especially easy to maintain context while viewing what buildings look like from the ground and where they're located.

Since it's often easier to show than tell, a few of our travel and real estate partners have added this imagery to their Google Maps implementations. Whenever you're checking out this new feature, be sure to rotate the ring around the compass to see all the various perspectives of the property.

Orbitz uses this new aerial imagery within its search experience for hotels. Search either for San Diego hotels or San Jose hotels, then click on the "Map" link within any individual hotel card and zoom in from the Satellite view. You'll quickly see how valuable this will be for your next hotel booking:

Online real estate brokerage Redfin presents an "angled" view of their properties with an embedded Google map that utilizes this new aerial imagery to help home buyers get a much better sense of an entire lot and neighborhood. They include it within the property details for homes in San Diego and San Jose (scroll down to the map and select "Angled"):

Trulia integrates this new imagery on profile pages for all real estate listings, recently sold homes, and property records in San Jose and San Diego. They present this as "Perspective view" for these homes to complement photos, which you'll find located below the default map for each property:
We're very excited about how these new perspectives on a property will help to improve your geographic searching, whether it's for a new home, a great hotel for your next trip, or any of the other cool uses that developers come up with.

If you're a geo developer, please read our the Geo Developers Blog or review the implementation documentation that will explain how to quickly add this to your Google Maps API implementation. What's great about this new imagery is that all of your existing data and Google Maps services like driving directions can be displayed on your map with no extra work. This is a result of a lot of code and computing power that reprojects the imagery to make it easy to overlay data on the map given lat/lon locations like in any other Google Map type. The result is a great user experience together with easy display of data on the map.

In the coming months, we'll be working hard to improve the existing imagery and release more cities. We can't wait to see what creative mashups and tools the Maps API development community creates with it!

Posted by Randy Wilson and Manish Patel, Google Imagery Team

Find what's nearby and try Labs features with Google Maps for Android

Just before Thanksgiving we made Google Maps Navigation available on Android 1.6 (Donut). Before we head out for the holidays, we wanted to launch one more update to Google Maps for Android-powered phones to help you get around during your holidays. With today's release of Google Maps 3.3 for Android, you can now easily find out what businesses are nearby, try several experimental Labs features, and report problems with map data right from your phone.

What's nearby?
If you're visiting an unfamiliar place, you can now easily see what businesses are nearby. Just long-press on the map, tap on the bubble, and look for "What's nearby?" in the menu.

The menu item shows a nearby business, and you can click on it to see more nearby places. You can also access this feature from the My Location menu or from address search results. When you're meeting friends, it's a great way to find the nearest shops, cafes, or other places to get out of the cold.

Google Maps for mobile Labs
We hear a lot of feature requests for Google Maps for mobile, and we're constantly brainstorming ideas, too. To help us innovate faster and experiment with new features, we're following in the footsteps of Google Labs and Gmail Labs by introducing Labs to Google Maps for Android.

To access Labs, just press the menu key, then "More", and then "Labs".

You'll find several stocking stuffers under Labs. You can now:

• display a scale bar on the map, to get an idea of how far apart things on the map are
• show a terrain layer, to help plan your hike or cross-country ski trip
• search for popular categories, so you never have to type in "Vietnamese restaurant" or "bowling alleys" again
• turn the blue My Location dot into a compass arrow that shows the direction you're facing when stationary
• add a Layers button to the screen so you can quickly toggle layers like Traffic, Satellite, Latitude, and Transit Lines

Report problems in Maps

One of the advantages of using Google Maps on your phone is that you automatically use our latest map and business data downloaded over your phone's Internet connection. But keeping up with real world changes is a challenge, and sometimes our data isn't up-to-date.

If you find that what's shown on your phone doesn't match what's on the ground, you can now report a problem to Google. For problems like getting the wrong number when you call to order a pizza, or finding that the store you were going to is now out of business, just click on "Report a problem" in the listing menu. For problems you can see on the map, like a newly built street that's missing or a road with the wrong name, first long-press near the spot on the map. Then just tap on the bubble, click on "Report a problem", and type in a description of the problem. If you want, we will even e-mail you to let you know when it's resolved! (Reporting map problems is available in the United States; see Your world, your map for more information.)

You can download Google Maps with these new features from Android Market on Android-powered phone, as long as it has Android 1.6 (Donut) or higher. If you have a Droid from Verizon or a T-Mobile myTouch 3G or G1, then this means you!

Happy holidays!

Posted by Elliot Schwartz, Software Engineer