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

Explore a whole new way to window shop, with Google and your mobile phone

[Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog]

What if you could decide where to shop, eat or hang out, with a little help from local Google users?

It might take you a while to ask them all, so to make it easier we've launched a new effort to send window decals to over 100,000 local businesses in the U.S. that have been the most sought out and researched on Google.com and Google Maps. We're calling these businesses the "Favorite Places on Google" and you'll now start to find them in over 9,000 towns and cities, in all 50 states. You can also explore a sample of the Favorite Places, in 20 of the largest U.S. cities, at google.com/favoriteplaces. Each window decal has a unique bar code, known as a QR codethat you can scan with any of hundreds of mobile devices — including iPhone, Android-powered phones, BlackBerry and more — to take you directly to that business's Place Page on your mobile phone. With your mobile phone and these new decals, you can easily go up to a storefront and immediately find reviews, get a coupon if the business is offering one, or star a business as a place you want to remember for the future. Soon, you'll be able to leave a review on the mobile page as well, just like on your desktop.


To scan the codes, you'll need a phone with a camera andan app that can read QR codes. For Android-powered devices, including the Droid by Motorola, we recommend using the free Barcode Scanner app. For iPhone, we have found the $1.99 QuickMark app to work best, and starting today, we're partnering with QuickMark to offer the app for free for the first 40,000 downloads. For other devices, we recommend searching for "QR reader" in your app marketplace, if it has one, or searching for the model of your phone and [qr reader] on Google. BeeTagg and NeoReader are two other apps that we've found to work well with the decals.

Here's a video that shows you how this all works:


This launch is part of our overall effort — online and offline — to provide you with the best local business results whenever you're trying to figure out where to go, whether it's a trendy Cuban restaurant in Philly, a comics shop in LA, a hip hotel in NYC or a little bit of photographic history in Rochester, NY.

We plan to periodically send out new waves of window decals to qualifying businesses. If you own or manage a business and were selected as a Favorite Place, you may have already received your decal or, for most of you, it will arrive by mail in the next 1-2 weeks. If you weren't selected in this round, your first step is to claim your listing with Google's Local Business Center for free. That will help us determine that your business information is correct. Then, you can enhance your local business listing by adding enhanced content like photos and videos.

To explore a gallery of several hundred Favorite Places in 20 U.S. cities, to learn more about how to use the QR codes and to find out how your business can get involved, check out google.com/favoriteplaces.

Posted by Ryan Hayward & David Kim, Product Marketing Managers

Sometimes eight screens are better than one

Back in June of 2008, some of my fellow engineers and I got to thinking: how could we recreate the experience of seeing the impressive imagery from our geo products in a more seamless way? We scrounged some spare Linux workstations, and in our 20% time we modified a video player to play sequences of Street View shots in sync across three screens, like the Tour de France flipbooks we created in 2008. It worked! Playing back the panoramas like a flipbook made it feel like we were zooming through the streets of the world.

Next, we started brainstorming about how we could build a case for the screens. One weekend, while we were hanging around the shop and looking for a woodworking project, we started building a sort of gazebo out of 2x4s and plywood to display these screens. Here's what we came up with:


The wood gazebo was a bit awkward to carry around, so Ji Lee, a mechanical engineer on the team, offered to design a steel frame that we could disassemble and take to conferences. We finished it just in time for Google I/O in June of this year.


We wanted to try visualizing other cool geo displays, so in July, Dan Barcay, one of the engineers on the Google Earth team, modified a Google Earth client so that it would synchronize views across multiple computers. The effect was pretty stunning: all of a sudden, flying around in Google Earth really felt like flying, and exploring the ocean trenches was like piloting a submarine. When you splashed through the sea surface you cringed slightly, expecting to get wet. You could even command your own lander down to the Moon or Mars. It was amazing to all of us how much more impressive Google Earth felt when we were surrounded by screens and able to turn our heads to look around (and even walk around). It felt more like a ride than a computer program, something between an observation-deck and a glass-walled spaceship. As a result of this totally seamless, immersive experience, we decided to name it the Liquid Galaxy. With the Liquid Galaxy, we could fly through the Grand Canyon, leap into low-Earth orbit, and come back down to perch on the Great Pyramid of Giza without even breaking a sweat.


It's still a 20% time project for us, but we're excited about the Liquid Galaxy and we're working hard to improve it. And we still love bringing it to conferences so that more people can try it out. We just finished setting up our latest creation at the COP15 conference in Copenhagen.


Hopefully we'll see you there, at AGU this December, or in one of the Google offices with a Liquid Galaxy.

Posted by Jason Holt, Software engineer

New Building Maker cities

[Cross-posted from the Official Google SketchUp Blog]

Today we added six new cities that can be used to model with Building Maker. They are:

• Stockholm, Sweden
• Nuremberg, Germany
• Hiroshima, Japan
• Saitama, Japan
• Miami Beach, FL USA
• Orlando, FL USA

Tip: There are two methods to identify available cities in Building Maker. You can either click on a placemark icon, or use the "Available locations" drop down in the upper-right corner.


If you're not familiar with Building Maker, it's a new 3D modeling tool for adding buildings to Google Earth. It's fun to use, and an easy way to get on the 3D map. Oh, and be forewarned, it can be addictive!

Happy Modeling!

Posted by The Building Maker Team