Google Earth offline

One of the neat snippets in Google’s recent blog post about training environmental journalists was that they’re now using the Google Earth Portable Server in real-world environments, though still in a closed trial.

Google has always been very responsive when disasters strike, and the Portable Server could allow them to assist to an even larger degree. The Portable Server allows you to pre-load data from selected areas so that you’re still able to access that data even if you enter an area with no internet connection, as is common after a disaster of any kind (flood, hurricane, tornado, etc).

Google explains it in further detail on this site, but their basic information states:

With the Google Earth Enterprise Portable solution your users can select and download portions of your private globe which they can serve and access locally from their laptop. Whether fighting fires or taking off in a plane, the Google Earth Enterprise portable gives your users the Google Earth experience when they are not connected to the Internet.

The portable solution consists of:

• A simple user interface to the Google Earth Enterprise system enabling users to extract portions of a globe based on a user-defined area of interest.
•A light-weight, cross-platform server that serves the extract globe on an end users machine.

For more information about Portable Earth Enterprise, visit the Google Earth Enterprise site or watch the short video below.

Where has Google shipped their Chrome notebooks?

Earlier this month, Google started giving away thousands of their “CR-48” test notebooks loaded with an early version of Chrome OS, their lightweight operating system that will officially debut next summer.

The netbook can’t yet handle the Google Earth plugin, so we’ll have to look at that in the future if/when it becomes available. However, when free laptops are being sent out it tends to gain a lot of attention, and thousands of people have been keeping a close eye on this unofficial CR-48 tracker created by “A. Gamer” to see when some might be coming to their zip code. I’ve personally been referencing the tracker quite a bit to check on potential shipments for friends and family.

A Google Earth user named Jesse Belcher then worked with the folks behind the CR-48 tracker to visualize all of the laptop shipments in Google Earth and the result is pretty cool:

chrome-counts.jpg

You can view that data on his website using the Google Earth Plug-in, or download one of his KMZ files to view it in Google Earth.

The notebook has a few major shortcomings (the lack of the Google Earth Plugin being one of them), but it’s really a fairly impressive device. I wrote up some early thoughts about it on my personal blog a few weeks ago if you want to see more about what I think of it.

They’re still accepting applications and giving away more of the laptops, so sign up here to apply for one if you haven’t already.

For those of you that were lucky enough to receive one already, what do you think of it? Do you think Chrome OS will be a viable alternative in the future?

doubleTwist – a powerful tool for wireless synchronization of Android platform

During these days, consumers’ attention is directed to product doubleTwist, a good alternative to the popular use iTunes, which offers a new useful feature, called AirSync.Used in conjunction with the Android-version of the client doubleTwist, which mechanism provides fast and accurate synchronization of multimedia content (music, videos and pictures) between smartphone and PC wirelessly. Desktop version is available for Windows and Mac.

The creators of the site LaptopMag published a report on test results AirSync. The study involved: 15-inch MacBook Pro, a desktop Windows PC and Smartphone Nexus One included in a Wi-Fi network.

The link is implemented as follows:after starting doubleTwist all platforms involved in synchronization, Android-platform launch of a new button and the program generates AirSync 5-digit code, for entry into the customer’s PC.After implementation of this simple procedure doubleTwist establishes a wireless connection between devices and provides access to library data carriers, allowing transfer of content.

Status bar shows the amount of free disk space.Of particular note is the high speed file synchronization. Testers from LaptopMag find that just a few minutes to transfer about one gigabyte of music smarfona Nexus One.

Incidentally, recently the possibility of wireless synchronization of multimedia data have also been introduced in the popular media player Winamp.