Group on Earth Observations Portal enables you to see forests and the trees

Did you know that deforestation and forest degradation account for almost 20% of global warming emissions? That is more than all of the emissions from global transportation combined! Yet, it has historically been difficult to integrate avoided deforestation and degradation into climate policy plans. Why? In part, because it requires a great deal of collaboration and technical expertise to make sure that the right data are collected and made accessible and that the right techniques are available to analyze and verify the data.

Scientists, NGOs and politicians have been working on this problem for a while, but only recently has a truly comprehensive international approach been attempted. The Intergovernmental Group on Earth Observations (GEO), mobilizing national institutions, inter-governmental organizations, space agencies and the research community, has worked to facilitate access to satellite, airborne, and in situ data, and create a framework to establish technical standards for a global network of national forest carbon tracking systems. GEO, with the help of the Google Earth Outreach team, has worked to develop a forest carbon tracking portal which will become a central point for online collaboration and data collection.

Today, the first version of the portal was launched at a GEO plenary. The portal itself runs on Google Apps. I worked with GEO to create a web page that uses the Google Earth browser plugin and Appengine. The page shows satellite data provided by several space agencies, as well as the first maps that can be used to detect deforestation. It is structured to also show other types of data and maps as soon they become available. Here's the map of Mexico forest types within the portal interface. You can zoom in to see individual polygons and click on them to see the corresponding forest type.


You can read a more complete description of GEO FCT (Forest Carbon Task) here.

I'd like to thank numerous GEO FCT participants for their feedback, as well as other Googlers who've provided technical help. In particular, kudos to Roman Nurik for his original KML layer example, as well as to Matt Hancher and Rupert Breheny.

Posted by Simon Ilyushchenko, Site Reliability Engineer

New cities, features added to Building Maker

A few weeks ago, we launched Building Maker, a new way to model buildings in 3D for Google Earth. Since then, we've been excited by the community's enthusiastic response and today, we're announcing that eight new cities can now be modeled with Building Maker: Brussels, Rotterdam, Cologne, Dortmund, Boston, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and San Jose.

We've also made some useful improvements to the product, including: the option of a Google Earth-view when you're choosing a location to model, the ability to save models as drafts before submitting them for review, and a new tool for tracing buildings.

For more information about this announcement, have a look at our post on the Google SketchUp blog.

Posted by Spudde Childs, Software Engineer

Online and offline globetrotting come together with voyage around the world

For the last three years I've been friends with the author of the Google Earth Blog, Frank Taylor. Besides being a Google Earth enthusiast, Frank is also quite the thrill-seeker; he didn't hesitate to let me fly his plane while he shot photos of the 2006 X-Prize Cup. However, Frank is about to embark upon a mission requiring even more bravery.

Frank is moving from virtual, to actual globetrotting - he and his wife are embarking on a five-year trip around the world in their sailboat, Tahina. But, Frank isn't leaving his passion for Google Earth on dry land. For the next five years, Frank will share maps of his GPS tracks, videos, 360-degree panoramic photos, aerial photography captured from a kite (see an example here), and more, with regular updates to Google Earth. You'll also be able to follow Frank's progress on his website, www.TahinaExpedition.com and, thanks to his partnership with National Geographic, on their site as well.

Frank has told us that one of the goals of his trip is to raise awareness about issues like climate change, pollution, coral reef disease, and the need to create more marine protection areas. We're excited to help him share his amazing trip with the world.

Frank, we wish you bon voyage and bonne chance, especially battling the sea, weather, boredom, pirates, and those sea monsters depicted on old maps.

Posted by Robin Ziegler, Community Development, Google Earth

An update to Google Earth for the iPhone

Just over one year ago, we unveiled Google Earth for the iPhone and iPod touch. Google Earth quickly became one of the most popular applications in the App Store, and after only six months, was the second most-downloaded free application overall. A big thank-you to the over 220,000 users have taken the time to write a review!

Today, we're proud to announce version 2.0 of Google Earth for iPhone. We've added some exciting new features, including the ability to view maps that you create on your desktop computer right from your iPhone, explore the app in new languages, and improved icon selection and performance.

View your maps wherever you go
Have you ever wanted to view a custom map with Google Earth on your iPhone? Well, now you can. By logging in directly to your Google Maps account, you can view the same maps that you or others have created, using the My Maps interface. Maybe you're on a trip and want to see where Tony Wheeler, the co-founder of Lonely Planet, most likes to travel. Or perhaps you're walking around looking for a restaurant and you want to see where world-famous chef Ferran Adrià likes to eat. All you have to do is click "Save to My Maps", open Earth on the iPhone, log in with the same account information, and voilà, you have your same collection of My Maps right in your pocket.



It's fun to create and view your own maps as well. Here's an example of a map that I created that shows the two attempts my friends and I made to summit Mount Ritter in the Sierra Nevada mountain range. As you can see, we didn't quite make it (the red line is the intended route, and the blue and green lines are our 2008 and 2009 attempts, respectively). Next year we'll get it for sure! I created this map by using the desktop version of Google Earth to read the tracks directly out of my GPS device, saving the resulting tracks as a KML file, and then importing into My Maps in Google Maps. You can learn more about My Maps here.

Browse businesses, photos, and places more easily

Browsing the world from the palm of your hand can be a thrilling experience, and viewing photos, Wikipedia articles, and place information is a great way to discover new parts of the globe. With the latest version of Google Earth for iPhone, we've made this even easier. Now, when you touch an icon, a small glow appears under your finger to let you know which icon you have picked. If your finger touches more than one icon, you'll be taken to a list of all icons, so you can select the one you are interested in.

New languages

We've also included new languages in this release, bringing the total to 31 languages from the original 18. The complete list of languages is: English (U.S), English (UK), French (France), German, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, Korean, Japanese, Russian, Polish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Arabic, Thai, Czech, Greek, Hebrew, Indonesian, Malaysian, Romanian, Slovak, and Croatian.

We hope you enjoy our latest release. Please note that the app will be rolling out around the world over the next twenty-four hours - if you don't see it immediately, be sure to check back soon. You can download Google Earth for iPhone here.

Posted by Peter Birch, Product Manager, Google Earth

Explore Valencia in 3D

[Cross-posted from the Official Google SketchUp Blog]
As of today, you'll be able to see Valencia, Spain in 3D by opening Google Earth and flying down to one of the most beautiful cities in Mediterranean Spain. When you have Google Earth open, make sure the "3D Buildings" layer is checked to get the full effect. Watch the video below to see a fly-through animation of Valencia.



If you want to see some impressive buildings in Valencia, we recommend flying down to these places:

• City of Arts and Sciences (open kmz file)
  
• Plaza de Toros (open kmz file)
  
• Saint Mary of Valencia Cathedral (open kmz file)

Posted by Nicole Drobeck, 3D Modeling Specialist

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