Google Earth: More than one billion downloads!

How large is one billion? One billion hours ago modern humans were living in the Stone Age. One billion minutes ago, the Roman Empire was flourishing. If you traveled from Earth to the Moon three times, your journey would measure one billion meters.

Today, we’ve reached our own one billion mark: Google Earth has been downloaded more than one billion times since it was first introduced in 2005. That’s more than one billion downloads of the Google Earth desktop client, mobile apps and the Google Earth plug-in—all enabling you to to explore the world in seconds, from Earth to Mars to the ocean floor.

 


We’re proud of our one billion milestone, but we’re even more amazed at the way people have used Google Earth to explore the world. When we founded Keyhole, Inc. back in 2001 (the company was acquired by Google in 2004), we never imagined our geospatial technology would be used by people in so many unexpected ways. At www.OneWorldManyStories.com, we’ve collected stories from people all over the world who use Google Earth to follow their dreams, discover new and distant places, or make the world a better place.

 

 
Visit www.OneWorldManyStories.com to learn about people like Professor David Kennedy of the University of Western Australia, who’s used Google Earth to scan thousands of square kilometers in Saudi Arabia and Jordan. Professor Kennedy has discovered ancient tombs and geoglyphs dating back at least 2,000 years, all without leaving his desk in Perth. Architect Barnaby Gunning, after the April 6, 2009 earthquake near L’Aquila Italy, encouraged his fellow citizens to start rebuilding the city virtually in 3D. Their online urban planning will aid city planners and architects. Retired English teacher Jerome Burg created Google Lit Trips, which uses Google Earth to match places in famous books to their geographical locations, encouraging students to create connections between the stories they read in school and the world they live in.

 

We hope you enjoy the site, and that it illustrates how some of those one billion downloads of Google Earth have been making a difference. You can explore these stories right in your browser with the Google Earth plug-in or download the KML files to view in Google Earth.

If you have a Google Earth story you’d like to share, we’d love to hear from you. If you don’t have Google Earth, download it now and be part of the next billion stories. While it’s inspiring to see how Google Earth has touched the lives of so many, we know the best is yet to come.

by Brian McClendon

SketchUp World in 3D

 

A new website called Your World in 3D to help introduce users to the concept of geo-modeling – the term given to creating 3D buildings for Google Earth and Google Maps. Today, they’re releasing the Your World in 3D website in 15 additional languages: Czech, German, English (UK), Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Polish, Brazilian Porteguese, Russian, Turkish, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.

 

 

User generated models from around the worldBesides being fun, building your town in 3D is a great way to show civic pride, encourage tourism for your town, and promote your business. 3D modeling has also been used in crisis response situations as we saw in the grassroots modeling effort that happened after the earthquake in L’Aquila, Italy.

 

To see the site in another language, use the drop-down menu in the bottom of any pageYour World in 3D has all the tools you’ll need to start geo-modeling and features several examples of what fellow modeling. By releasing Your World in 3D in more languages, we hope that you and your friends from around the globe will join us to help build the most comprehensive 3D virtual mirror of planet Earth.

GoogleSketchUpBlog

Google Earth: Visualizations from Tuesday’s earthquake

 

A few days ago, the eastern United States was hit by a magnitude 5.8 earthquake. The quake did relatively little damage, though it was felt by a large portion of the country.

Data Appeal,  has built a few files to show the severity and reach of the earthquake.

The first KMZ file uses transparent spheres with volumeric values, similar to the demos we have seen from DataAppeal in the past.

 

volumetric.jpg 

Their second KMZ file shows the data with tall orange spikes, built using real data with dramatized height.

 

earth-quake-nyc-int.jpg 

These files are a great example of what companies like DataAppeal are capable of, as well an excellent way to show how fast they work. Being able to plug data into a system like that and get these kinds of results could be a powerful tool for a lot of organizations.