Street View: Ski and snow

From the streets to the slopes, Street View in Google Maps recently updated its special collections to include a number of new ski resorts, so you can tour some of the world’s most beautiful ski terrain right from your browser. Whether you’re planning your annual trip to your favorite resort or hunting for an exciting new adventure, Street View can transport you to your desired destination. Tour a few of our favorite ski resorts below.

First stop off the ski lift is the world famous Squaw Valley, in northern California. Squaw Valley has been a ski destination since it hosted the Olympic Winter Games in 1960.

Squaw Valley Resort – Going down Gold Coast Face

Following a record setting 519 inches of snowfall last season, Breckenridge Ski Resort is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. Take a tour of this famous Colorado destination.

Breckenridge Resort, Looking down Four O’Clock

Last, but surely not least, you can tour Whistler Blackcomb, home of the 2010 Winter Olympics. We captured Whistler with our Street View cameras last year and made some recent updates. Located in the Coast Mountain range of British Columbia, Whistler, known for both its scenery and adrenaline-pumping runs, is one of the most famous ski destinations in the world.

Whistler Blackcomb, Whistler Peak

All snow view imagery was captured by the Street View snowmobile which made its debut two years ago at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver. To get a glimpse of a few more resorts you can go to the gallery or watch the video:

Whether you’re a snowbird, a beach bum, an urban adventurer or something else entirely, there’s something for everyone in our growing set of Street View collections. To see some of our favorite special collections, visit the Street View gallery.

Google Street View with a Date


The Google Earth Blog noticed that Google Maps Street View images now come with a date telling you when the panoramas were taken.

If you look at the bottom left hand corner of a Street View image you can now view the month and year when the picture was taken.

Another nice little feature I’ve noticed Google Maps testing recently is the highlighting of search results. For a while now when you search for a location in Google it has shown a map with the searched area highlighted. Google have been testing this feature in Google Maps as well.


This feature still seems to be very much in the testing stage. I noticed the feature was working this morning but this afternoon it no longer seems to be working for me.

Finally, in Chrome (but not in Firefox and IE for me) the satellite button in Google Maps now shows the satellite view directly beneath the button.

via:googlemapsmania

The number of claimed Google Places listings

It was a year ago April that Google made the first public announcement regarding the number of claimed Places listing. The number came in at 4 million worldwide. Yesterday at the BIA/Kelsey ILM West conference, Jeff Aguero noted that Google Places now has 8 million claimed Place Pages (out of 50MM worldwide). It was just this past March that Marissa Mayer, speaking at SwSX, noted that there were 6 million claimed Places.

The ability to claim a business listing was first rolled out in March of 2005 with the launch of Dashboard precursor, the Google Local Business Center. These four data points allow for some interesting analysis of the “run rate” at which Google is creating a direct relationship with business locations worldwide.

Here is a chart showing the growth since inception (U.S. data is estimated).

Some thoughts about the graph:

  • With 8 million sign ups Google has the largest direct relation with SMBS of any local service
  • This amounts to 16% of all business locations worldwide
  • The growth during 2010 was ~2 million,
  • Business were claiming their listing at a rate of 167,000 per month
  • From March of this year until today, Google added 2 million more businesses
  • The growth rate since March has been 250,000 new claimants per month

Obviously we are depending on Google for the numbers. We don’t really know how many businesses there are worldwide (I am sure that Google’s estimate is very approximate) and we don’t really know how Google is counting the 8 million. Does it include inactive accounts for business that are no longer active? Does it count twice businesses that have been claimed twice?

While there may be some questions surrounding the specifics of the numbers, the direction and rates seem pretty clear. As Everett Dirkson is purported to have said: A million here, a million there, pretty soon it adds up to real money. That certainly seems to be the case here.