Saving the world, one line of code at a time

The whole thing started last spring at the first-ever Crisis Camp in Washington DC where we heard about the challenges that NGOs, governments, and first responders face during disaster response.

We discussed these challenges with colleagues from Microsoft, and Yahoo. We all agreed that we could provide technological development. But, even for large companies, resources are finite. So, the question became, “How do we make this happen quickly?”

We decided to reach out to our active development communities. Out of this effort, Random Hacks of Kindness, a hackathon for humanity, was born. Random Hacks of Kindness, jointly sponsored by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, NASA, and the World Bank, aims to build an active developer community around disaster response and humanitarian relief.

This weekend, benevolently-inclined hackers will listen to a keynote from FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate. Then they’ll churn out some of the most important open source code on the planet—code that saves lives and mitigates human suffering. They'll address problems like, how do we crowdsource information from local citizens to aid first resonders? How do we quickly collect and publish fresh aerial imagery of an affected area? How do we create a comprehensive missing persons finder after a disaster?

Their work will have a positive, lasting impact on the state of the human experience, not just here in the U.S, but all around the globe.

While it’s no exaggeration to call these coders modern-day superheroes, they’ll be going home with just a T-shirt for their efforts. It's a nice T-shirt, but perhaps masks and capes would have been more appropriate.

For more information, visit http://www.randomhacksofkindness.org

Posted by Jeff Martin, Google Crisis Response Team

Google Latitude, now with Location History & Alerts

[Cross-posted from the Google Mobile Blog]

Since the launch of Google Latitude earlier this year, we've been getting a lot of feature requests. One of the most popular ideas was for Latitude to keep track of location history, allowing you (but not your friends) to see where you've been at any point in time. Another popular idea was to notify you when you're near your Latitude friends so you can easily meet up or grab lunch. Today, we're happy to introduce both Google Location History and Google Location Alerts (beta) to let you do even more with Latitude.

Google Location History
Whether you're taking a road trip across the country, backpacking across Europe, or just going out for a night on the town, it's fascinating to look back at where you went, and for how long you stayed. Enable Google Location History to store, view, and manage your past Latitude locations. You can visualize your history on Google Maps and Earth or play back a recent trip in order. Of course, you can always delete selected history or your entire location history at any time. While working on Location History, I found myself going back in time to discover things that would have otherwise been impossible. For example, I stopped at an awesome BBQ place on my way back from Lake Tahoe this summer, but I couldn't remember the name when my friend was asking about it a few months later. I pulled up my location history for that weekend, found where I was stationary on the drive home, and the restaurant name showed up in Google Maps: Drooling Dog Bar BQ. Check it out below:



Google Location Alerts (beta)
People also want to know when their friends were nearby, but it's not always convenient to keep checking Latitude to see if a friend has recently shown up near you. After working on this for a while, we realized it wasn't as straightforward as sending a notification every time Latitude friends were near each other. Imagine that you're Latitude friends with your roommate or co-workers. It would get pretty annoying to get a text message every single time you walked in the door at home or pulled into work. To avoid this, we decided to make Location Alerts smarter by requiring that you also enable Location History. Using your past location history, Location Alerts can recognize your regular, routine locations and not create alerts when you're at places like home or work. Alerts will only be sent to you and any nearby friends when you're either at an unusual place or at a routine place at an unusual time. Keep in mind that it may take up to a week to learn your "unusual" locations and start sending alerts.

To enable these features, go to google.com/latitude/apps. You must first be an existing Google Latitude user; if you're not already, sign up here. You must explicitly enable each feature, and of course, you can disable it at any time. Learn more in the Help Center about Location Alerts and Location History, suggest and vote on ideas in the Mobile Product Ideas page, or report problems in the Mobile Help Forum.

Posted by Posted by Chris Lambert, Software Engineer, Google Mobile

More views in more countries

It's been a very busy week for the Street View team! Not only have we made Hawaii the 50th state to get Street View imagery but we've also been hard at work mapping other stunning locations around the world. Now you can explore around huge swathes of Spain, an extra 30 towns in Netherlands and 5 cities in Mexico.

In my home country of Spain, I think we may have created what could be the the first ever virtual pilgrimage: Street View imagery is now available for the Camino de Santiago in commemoration of the year Xacobeo 2010 (the holy year of Saint James).

People can "wander" virtually along the French route from Auritz to Finisterre, through significant points as Pamplona, Estella, Logroño, Nájera, Santo Domingo de la Calzada, Astorga, Ponferrada and Santiago de Compostela. Potential visitors can also plan their entire trip thanks to a customized "mapplet" on Google Maps, created by Consumer Eroski magazine, where tourists can see hotels, hostels and restaurants located along the Camino de Santiago. Make sure you also visit other amazing Spanish sites such as:


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Alhambra of Granada


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Aqueduct of Segovia


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Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao

In the Netherlands, you can now explore the many iconic windmills of Kinderdijk. We tried to guess how many windmills there must now be in the Dutch imagery but we were stumped. We want to hear your guesses but we think it could be in the hundreds. Don't believe me? Here's another example:

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Of course, the Netherlands has much more to explore than just windmills -- here's a virtual tour through some other beautiful places:


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Utrecht


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The Hague

But who'd have thought Street View would be able to get my taste buds going too! I've been reminiscing about all that gorgeous Mexican food by checking out the many taco stalls of Mexico City and wishing i could order an enchilada or find my true favourite a 'Gordita'. You can tour other amazing places around the wolrd in our new gallery of global landmarks.

Posted by Isabel Salazar, Google Spain

Trike finalists announced!

Last month we asked you to submit nominations for places that you want our Street View Trike to visit. We were inundated with more than 25,000 suggestions across all categories, with university campuses making up 44% of all suggestions.

Starting today, you can cast your vote for your favorite place within each category to tell us which locations you'd most like to see on Google Maps. The finalists in each category are... drumroll please:

University Campuses

Arizona State University

Michigan State University

Princeton University

Rochester Institute of Technology

Stanford University

Parks & Trails

Boulder Creek Bike Path, CO

Capital Crescent Trail, MD/DC

Centennial Trail, WA

Schuylkill River Trail, PA

Stevens Creek Trail, CA

Pedestrian Malls

Faneuil Hall Marketplace, Boston, MA

Navy Pier, Chicago, IL

Pier 39, San Francisco, CA

Landmarks

Alcatraz Island, San Francisco, CA

Central Park, NY

Millenium Park, Chicago, IL

Kennedy Space Center, FL

National Mall, DC

Theme Parks & Zoos

Bronx Zoo, NY

Busch Gardens, VA

Detroit Zoo, MI

Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago, IL

San Diego Zoo, CA

Universal Studios, FL

Visit www.google.com/trike to vote! You can vote as many times as you like until the deadline at 11:59pm PST on Monday, November 30th. We'll then work on getting all the winners into Google Maps, and of course we'll work closely with the relevant organizations to collect images of any privately-owned locations. It takes a bit of time to ride a 250-pound bike around the country, but we're excited to see which locations get your votes.

If you're anxious to see some new places in Google Maps right now, you happen to be in luck! Today we've added imagery of my home state Hawaii, making it the 50th state featured in Street View. In honor of this launch, we've created an online gallery to showcase some of the amazing new imagery from Hawaii, as well each state capitol building from across the United States. You can read more about today's launch on the Official Google Blog. To get you started exploring this amazing new imagery, here's an image from Kailua Beach - I first learned to surf at the island offshore:

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You'll find much more waiting for you to explore in the Street View Gallery. You'll notice it also has a collection of locations photographed by the Trike -- you can help determine which places will be included in the future by submitting your vote!

Posted by Laura Melahn, Product Marketing Manager

NYC subway system on Google Maps

My wife and I moved out to New York last week, and we sure put Google Maps to use in our housing hunt. With Real Estate listings to help find a place, Street View to scope out the neighborhood, directions to help us find our broker, and local search to find nearby amenities, just about the only thing that we needed another source for was to see where the extensive subway lines ran. Until now!

We're happy to announce that you can now see New York's subway lines drawn out directly on Google Maps as part of the transit layer. To turn it on, just point Google Maps to somewhere in New York, click on the "More..." button at top-right, and select "Transit":

The colorful lines aren't just pretty to look at, they're also interactive. When you click on any station name, a bubble pops up with the names of the line that service the station, and all the other lines on the screen fade out.

This new feature compliments the New York transit directions we launched last September, for all services offered by the MTA, including bus, ferry, commuter rail, and of course the subway. We cover much more than the Big Apple, so look for the transit layer in other cities like Paris and Tokyo, and use transit directions with over 436 agencies around the world.

Having the MTA in the transit layer will certainly help me get my way around my new hometown, as I start to familiarize myself with the nation's largest public transit system. I can even pull up the layer on my mobile phone while on-the-go (read more on the Google Mobile Blog). We're happy to say that we found a great place in Brooklyn — and based on the leafy green trees and walk-up brownstones in Street View, some friends back in California are convinced we're moving to Sesame Street!

Posted by Jesse Friedman, Associate Product Marketing Manager

Historical Imagery Updates for Berlin

With Historical Imagery in Google Earth, we've made it possible to use Google Earth imagery to see how the world has changed over time. We've been adding imagery since the feature launched in February, and today we announced on our Google Germany Blog that we've added historical images of Berlin from 1945 and 1953. To view these new images, you'll need Google Earth 5.0. Historical imagery can be accessed by clicking on the clock icon in the top menu bar. Here's a sample of what you'll find as you explore the imagery:

Berlin 1945

Berlin 1953

Berlin 2009

Posted by Stefanie Schneider, Google Germany

Featured Map Maker: Mihai

Name: Mihai Voiculescu (Cartograful)

Day job: Web programmer at itbox.ro

Region mapped: Romania



Until last month, Romania wasn't on Google Maps. Users started a Facebook Cause and a Twitter Petition to get Google's attention on adding Romania to the map. "I found out about Map Maker opening in Romania over Twitter -- I follow Google Maps on Twitter," says Mihai Voiculescu. Mihai is now the #1 mapper in Romania with more than 5,000 map edits made since Google Map Maker opened in Romania in August, and as of last month many of those edits are now live in Google Maps for the world to see.

Like many mappers, Mihai started by mapping his hometown -- Târgu Jiu, the city in the southwest of Romania where sculptor Constantin Brancusi lived and where several of his large works of sculpture have become tourist attractions. From there, Mihai went on to help map Bucureşti (Bucharest) -- the video below shows how the map of Bucharest grew quickly from 5 highways to a complete city over a two week period:

Mihai runs a Romanian travel web site (itbox.ro) that uses the Google Maps API, and says that having a detailed and accurate map of Romania on Google Maps is important for local tourism. "Many people who came to Romania asked me why Romania isn't on Google. People think that Romania is empty, like a desert. Having Romania on Google Maps is a big plus." Mihai also uses Panoramio and has had some of his photos published in Google Earth; "I love the Web, programming and travel," he says.



Normally, Google Map Maker mappers use Google's satellite imagery to draw roads and locate schools, parks and businesses. When the satellite imagery isn't clear enough (due to clouds or low resolution) to trace from directly, Mihai uses a GPS device to create GPS tracks for roads or to locate hotels, then exports the tracks as KML files and uses the Map Maker Overlays feature to draw the roads and hotel locations accurately. He also uses KML files to locate hotels on the map for his travel web site.

Mihai collaborates with other Romanian mappers and co-created a Romania Map Maker discussion group. "I met these people online," says Mihai. However, he will soon be getting together with his fellow mappers in person as they have scheduled a Map Maker training event and mapping party in Bucharest at the Bucharest Academy of Economic Sciences on November 14th (a Google team member will also attend the event in person). "I want to thank all the people from Romania who contribute to build the map on Google."

Posted by Jennifer Mazzon, Maps Community Organizer