Where in the world is...

Greetings from the Imagery Team,

We've been hard at work processing imagery for everyone to enjoy, and we've just released a large amount all over the world. To help guide you to some of the interesting places getting updates, here's a short quiz with update hints in it. Stay tuned for the answers and a more complete listing of updates.

1) The large 'satellite dish' from Golden Eye is now visible in high res.

2) Undergoing a name change in 1996, this city was established in the 17th century and rapidly grew into a major urban center.

3) Check out how construction is going on the giant palm tree island.

4) Once a major maritime power, this former republic is now threatened by rising tides.

5) Now the second largest city in its country, this city was a major port of emigration.

6) This city holds the Guinness World Record for most remote city from a body of water.

7) The westernmost city in Africa received an imagery update.

8) This cosmopolitan and economic powerhouse metropolis started out as a simple Crown Colony back in 1842.

Posted by Matt Manolides, Senior Geo Data Strategist

Announcing the Design It: Shelter Competition

[Cross-posted from the Official Google SketchUp Blog]

We teamed up with the folks at the Guggenheim Museum to create a design competition that's open to people everywhere. Design It: Shelter Competition challenges participants to create a simple shelter for a specific geographic location anywhere in the world. Entries are 3D models designed in Google SketchUp, geo-located in Google Earth and uploaded to the Google 3D Warehouse.

Visitors to the competition website are able to view images, animations and descriptions of entries all in one place. With the help of the Google Earth plug-in, the 3D models themselves are visible right on the page. For the first time, you won't need to download a model to be able to see it "in the round".

The inspiration for 'Design It' comes from Frank Lloyd Wright's iconic assignment for the apprentices at Taliesin, his architecture school in Arizona and Wisconsin. Students design and physically construct shelters – small, simple buildings – as part of their studies. Then they live in them.

This competition coincides with the Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward exhibition currently on view at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Also on display is Learning By Doing, which focuses specifically on the student-built shelters at Taliesin. If you're in the area, be sure to check them out.

This video talks about what you need to do to get started:



Submission
To enter the competition, you need to fill out the submission form on the Guggenheim website. You must provide:

• information about yourself (name, email, country, etc)
• a description of your shelter
• a link to your SketchUp model on the Google 3D Warehouse
• at least one, and as many as four, JPEG images of your shelter
  
• a link to a video of your shelter on YouTube (this is optional, but highly encouraged)

Program
Competition entries should:

• provide a place for someone to study and sleep
  
• be sited anywhere on Earth
• have no more than 100 square feet (9.3 square meters) of enclosed space
• be no taller than 12 feet (3.6 meters) high
• not include water, gas or electricity
  

Timing
The competition starts today, June 8th – Frank Lloyd Wright's 142nd birthday. The deadline for submissions is August 23rd of this year. Two prizes will be awarded: the People's Prize, decided by public vote, and the Juried prize, selected by the members of a panel of architecture and design experts. Public voting for the winner of the People's Prize runs from September 7th to October 10th, and winners will be announced October 21st – the 50th anniversary of the Guggenheim Museum.

Judging
The judges will consider entries in light of five major criteria:

• The relationship of the shelter to the built or natural environment around it
• Innovative design
• Thoughtful use of materials
• Adherence to the project specifications
• Quality of the SketchUp model

Prizes
Two prizes will be awarded:

The People's Prize: Current students from the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture will select ten shelters from among all of the entries. The public will choose one of these ten to receive the People's Prize by voting on the competition website.

The Juried Prize: A panel of architecture and design experts will choose the winner of the Juried Prize from among all competition entries.

Both prizes include:

• airfare and two nights' accommodation for two in New York City
• behind-the-scenes tours of both the Guggenheim Museum and the Google office in NYC
• complimentary admission to selected NYC museums
• a Google SketchUp Pro 7 license

The winner of the Juried Prize will also receive USD$1000.

Questions? Check out the competition FAQ. Good luck, and have fun.

Posted by Aidan Chopra, SketchUp Product Evangelist

Why we need to see the sea

The ocean is a vast, deep, dark place. It has long been a source of mystery and fascination, inspiring epic tales. Early attempts to measure and better understand its depths involved dropping a rope overboard until the end hit bottom, then hauling up the line hand over hand, counting the lengths. The length of rope between a person's hands when outstretched - roughly six feet - was known as a fathom, and the verb 'to fathom', as a result, came to mean to measure the depth of something and ultimately, to comprehend it. After all, once we measure something, we immediately know something about it and can start to understand it.

But can you imagine measuring the entire ocean with lengths of rope, when some parts are nearly seven miles deep? Not only would it be practically impossible, but it's a project that's difficult to even imagine pursuing. You might even say it's unfathomable. The truth is, even with the help of today's satellites, the most sophisticated global maps of the ocean floor are really just guesswork. Satellites can hardly see past the surface of the water, let alone the ocean floor, and so the ocean remains relatively opaque to our eyes, our technology, and for the most part, our understanding.

Given how hard it is to study the ocean, it's important to make the most of what we do know. We believe a key step in understanding is visualization - this is one of the main reasons we added the oceans to Google Earth. Miles of rope, and the mysterious depths they measure, now fit on a small computer screen. Maps are, of course, just one form of visualization. Sometimes it takes a piece of artwork, something less literal and more symbolic, to make that which might seem overwhelming easier to understand. No matter what form a visualization takes, it offers promise as a starting point for comprehension, which hopefully will lead to more informed choices.

Visualizing the ocean is especially relevant today, the first UN-recognized World Oceans Day. The UN's chosen theme is "Our Oceans, Our Responsibility," which might seem like it ought to read "big oceans, big responsibility." To help get our heads around the watery part of our planet, we've collected a few visualizations of both issues facing the ocean and cutting edge science. Have a look at the problem of plastics in our oceans, find out about where currents might take your trash, the health of the world's fisheries, and what the latest satellite data says about the state of the ocean. If you find yourself wanting more, you'll also see a ticker at the bottom of the page with World Oceans Day news, and a custom search box in the upper right to help you navigate through the rich content on some of our partner sites.



Ready? Go see for yourself.

Posted by Steve Miller, Product Manager, Ocean in Google Earth

Featured Modeler: Newfangled

[Cross-posted from the Official Google SketchUp Blog]

Newfangled is a 3D Building pioneer. From the earliest days of modeling with SketchUp for Google Earth, Christian (aka "Newfangled") started creating the buildings in his home town of Edmonton, Alberta in the Great North of Canada. In fact, part of his motivation for modeling was to put North America's most northern city on the map. To date, he has placed over 150 models in the 3D building layer of Google Earth and Edmonton's metropolitan status is easy to see.


"I got started after a trip I took to Calgary," Christian said, "I was actually looking for a place for dinner, and when I searched in Google Earth all these buildings started popping up. I thought it would be cool to have the same thing in Edmonton. I actually got in contact with IntoTheWest, who put up the buildings in Calgary." You may remember that Andrew (aka "IntotheWest") was our first Featured Modeler.

"The first model I created was my apartment building," Christian continued, "and once that was done I realized how easy it was and started doing the surrounding buildings. I walk to work, so I took pictures along the way, modeled those buildings, and from there I figured I might as well do the whole downtown."


Having Edmonton on the map remains a prime motivator for Christian, but he also enjoys the process of modeling in its own right. "It's relaxing. I'm a Gen-Y guy, so a lot of my friends play XBox or World of Warcraft, but what I do for fun is make buildings."

Christian is a mechanical engineer so he was familiar with CAD before he got started. After watching some of our online video tutorials and getting some hands-on practice, he was up and running.

"I picked up SketchUp pretty quickly. And once I got the hang of taking pictures that would make good textures, the process was pretty smooth, although some of my earliest buildings make me cringe a little now. Getting around trees and power lines with the camera isn't easy, so I use GIMP (a free image manipulation tool) to edit the photos before I apply them to my models in SketchUp. And I also use repeating textures to cover tall buildings."


In addition to modeling Edmonton as it exists today, Christian has begun reconstructing historic locations.

"I like the idea that I can reconstruct something that is no longer there. Using historic information I am able to bring buildings back to life." His collection on Historic Edmonton can be found on the Google 3D Warehouse. Along with a collection of proposed structures in his Future Edmonton set. "You guys should allow Google Earth to show past, future in addition to current buildings." He's right, we should.


"Recently I completed a local River Boat attraction and our Convention Center. It's great that someone planning a trip here could do a search and get informed about what's around." Christian is planning to keep on building, in fact, the mission statement on his blog is "Edmonton - one building at a time... Or maybe sometimes two."

Posted by James Therrien, Google SketchUp Team

Introducing smart navigation in Street View: double-click to go (anywhere!)

Street View is a great way to see panoramas of streets from all over the world. We've launched some great improvements to this tool, including most recently overlaying user photos and the ability to view Street View in fullscreen. Until now though, the usual way to navigate through Street View has remained the forward and backward arrows along the roads which move you to the next immediate panorama.

Today, we are really excited to introduce a new mode of navigation which liberates you from the road arrows and gets you where you want to go in just a few clicks.  You can now use Street View's smart navigation to travel to a new place just by double clicking on the place or object you would like to see.  We have been able to accomplish this by making a compact representation of the building facade and road geometry for all the Street View panoramas using laser point clouds and differences between consecutive pictures. 

As you move your mouse within Street View, you'll notice that the cursor now has lightly-shaded geometry attached to it - it will show an oval when your mouse is following a road and a rectangle when moving across the facades of buildings. We affectionately refer to this cursor geometry as the "pancake" because it has the appearance of a pancake laying flat to the object where the mouse is pointing.  By giving you a sense of depth,it makes the flat image almost feel three-dimensional!

Double clicking on the pancake transports you to the best panorama in that direction.  For instance, if you pick the front door of this church, you will be taken to the view shown below. Sometimes the pancake shows a little magnifying glass in the bottom right to indicate that double clicking will zoom in on the current image rather than transport you to a closer location. This happens when we've determined that the current panorama has the best view of the selected location. 

And in case you changed you changed your mind about the place you jumped to, you can hit the return arrow shown in the Address Box to get back to the previous location. Now you can wander through Street View imagery and not worry about getting lost!

The Googlers who have been playing with and testing smart navigation have found it completely addictive. Not only is it an easier way to browse cities in Street View, it allows you to do superhuman things like jump from one side of a river to another to see a faraway building. Here are some examples of places that are fun to browse:

View Larger Map

View Larger Map

Grotere kaart weergeven

We hope you find it just as fun and useful, so to get you started we have put together a video to show you all the things you can now do with smart navigation. Enjoy!

Posted by Daniel Filip, Computer Vision Tech Lead, Google Zürich

Your country on Google

You've heard it before: Google is interested in partnering with government agencies to include specific types of mapping data in Google Maps and Earth. We've recently been focusing this partnership effort on national governments of developing world countries as well as international organizations active in these countries. We hope to complement the work of Google Map Maker's users, now rapidly mapping many developing world countries, by incorporating the authoritative data - such as political boundaries, aerial imagery and road centerlines - that governments and other public sector organizations are well positioned to provide.

If you belong to or are involved with one of these public sector organizations, our message is simple enough: Hundreds of millions of internet users have turned to Google Maps and Google Earth to better understand and navigate their world. We know that these users expect to find a complete and accurate map, whether they're looking for the location of a store in a major city in Europe or the route to a village in a corner of Africa. And so our goal is to provide accurate mapping data all over the world and present it in the world's most common langauges. 

If you find that we don't offer a complete or accurate map of your country or a country where your organization operates, and if you have better data to share, we want to hear from you.  Some concrete examples of the benefits of sharing your mapping data:

• Tourism and economic development: high-resolution imagery and vector data exposes your country's diverse landscape to the rest of the world on Google Maps and Google Earth, encourages visitors, and improves our existing data. One popular way users interact with Google services is by posting photos of places they have traveled to so that others can see pictures of interesting places they'd like to visit, such as Machu Picchu in Peru, or the Sphinx in Egypt. 

• Trade: high-resolution imagery of modern, urban and commercial areas as well as imagery of natural resources can encourage interest in foreign direct investment. Vector data of populated places, points-of-interest, roads and other important data gives investors valuable information about how to navigate your country. For instance, in Panama, the recent promotion of Panamanian real estate to the international market could be supported by geographical data and visibility to the targeted audience through Google products.

• Emergency services coordination: accurate mapping data like roads and place names is crucial for relief aid work in times of crisis and emergencies, such as natural disasters, and civil and international conflicts. For example, when Cyclone Nargis hit Myanmar, Google was able to publish data on Google Maps that helped disaster response teams quickly provide aid to the regions that needed it the most.

• Cultural heritage promotion: sometimes place names are in two or three different languages, dialects, or scripts; we can display them in each. Some examples are Belgium and Thailand.

It's also simple to work with us. In some cases, we are able to communicate with you in your local language and we may be able to work under local law when entering into a content license agreement. 

If your organization or government agency has high-quality basemap data that you're interested in contributing to Google to improve the coverage and accuracy of geographic information available for your country, contact us and tell us more about your organization and your data. Help us give the world the opportunity to discover and understand your country as well as you do.

Posted by Naureen Kabir, Strategic Partnerships

Bringing the power of Google's data to local businesses

Today the Local Business Center team is rolling out a new feature: a dashboard that will provide you with information on how Google users are interacting with your local listing in Google Maps and Google Search.

We're pretty excited about this new feature. If you're a local business, you probably already know that Google Maps drives traffic to your website and to your business. While you may be tracking usage metrics on your website, you don't always get as much information from that as you'd like. For example, a user may search for "pizza," click on your business listing, look at the reviews, and decide to pay a visit to your Italian restaurant without ever visiting your website or calling you. The new LBC dashboard feature will change all that, making this data easily accessible to business owners by introducing a new "dashboard" tab in your Local Business Center (www.google.com/lbc) account. So if you're a business owner who maintains one or more physical locations, and you're curious about what people are searching for when they see your business listing and where your customers are coming from, the dashboard will answer many of those questions for you. Data available in the dashboard will include the following:

• Impressions: The number of times the business listing appeared as a result on a Google.com search or Google Maps search in a given period.
• Actions: The number of times people interacted with the listing; for example, the number of times they clicked through to the business' website or requested driving directions to the business.
• Top search queries: Which queries led customers to the business listing; for example, are they finding the listing for a cafe by searching for "tea" or "coffee"?
• Zip codes where driving directions come from: Which zip codes customers are coming from when they request directions to your location.

So how will you use the dashboard? The first thing you'll need to do is make sure that you've claimed your listing in the LBC. Even if you hadn't claimed it until today, you'll be able to use the dashboard, since we're automatically populating it with data from the past month. When you log in to the LBC, you'll notice a new "View report" link right under the statistics that we provide:

Clicking on the link will take you to the dashboard page, where you'll find several features. At the very top, you'll see a timeline tracking the number of "Impressions" and "Actions" that your business received on Google. "Impressions" refers to the number of times that users saw your listing appear as a local business search result; "Actions" refers to how many times users interacted with your listing. You can change the date range selected to view more or less data.

Right under the graphs, you'll see a summary for the date range you've selected, along with a breakdown of the various types of "Actions" that users took:

Below that, you'll find a list of the top search queries people are using when they discover your business listing. For example, do people tend to find your Italian restaurant more by looking for "pizza" or "pasta"? Do more customers seem to find you because of your reputation as an affordable hotel, or as a quiet hotel? This gives you valuable insight into the ways that your potential customers are looking for you, and what terms are associated with your business. To protect any potentially personally identifiable information, queries with a very low search volume are put into the "other" category, and we filter addresses out of the queries (for example, if a someone searched for "bakery near 5873 Maple Ave," you would only see the "bakery" term.)

Finally, you'll also be able to see a breakdown of zip code starting points for driving direction requests to your business. To protect privacy, we aggregate these requests at the zip code level. If you hover over the counts inside the map, we'll highlight the area represented by that count. This lets you find out where there's an interest in your business, which can help inform advertising strategies or future growth.

As we mentioned above, your dashboard will be populated with data for the previous 30 days at launch. After that, we'll add fresh data daily, so you'll want to be sure to check back often to see how things are going and how various strategies (like your latest offline ad campaign or the addition of a photo to your listing) affect your traffic.

If you want to learn more, you can read our post on the Official Google Blog or watch the video below. Otherwise, head to http://www.google.com/lbc to dive in to your new dashboard!

Posted by Amer Shahnawaz, Software Engineer, Local Business Center