Google Earth: New Imagery – December

Google Earth has just rolled out some fresh imagery for us!

paris.jpg

As is almost always the case, you can use Google Maps to determine for sure whether or not a specific area is fresh. This new imagery isn’t in Google Maps yet, so you can compare Earth vs. Maps to see what’s new; the fresh imagery is already in Google Earth, but the old imagery is still in Google Maps. If you compare the two side-by-side and they’re not identical, that means that you’ve found a freshly updated area in Google Earth!

  • France: Demigny, Paris — thanks ‘Andreas’
  • Germany: Angermunde, Delmenhorst — thanks ‘Andreas’
  • India: Chennai
  • Norway: Jorpeland — thanks ‘Andreas’
  • Romania: Oradea — thanks ‘bogdan’
  • Spain: Barcelona
  • Thailand: Ratchaburi — thanks ‘Andy’
  • United States: Arkansas (Pine Bluff), Georgia (Athens)

The Google Maps API is truly an international product

 

The Google Maps API is truly an international product with coverage from Hanoi, Vietnam to Lahore, Pakistan and everywhere in between. Like the extensive coverage of Google Maps (thanks in part to user generated edits via Google Map Maker), our developer community is internationally extensive as well! Google developers exist in just about every country and our Google Technology User Groups (GTUGs) have over 253 chapters around the world! To celebrate the global nature of Google Geo APIs and its developers, this month we’ve decided to highlight five great Geo API implementations from developers aus Deutschland! (that’s ‘from Germany’ for non-German speakers :)

Street View Live from Lufthansa

Lufthansa, Germany’s national airline, flies to many destinations in Europe. To help travelers discover Europe and encourage them to plan a vacation, Lufthansa has plotted all their destinations out on a map and linked them to famous spots via the Street View API. For example, by clicking on the Paris icon, users will be taken to Street View imagery of the Eiffel Tower to entice them to travel to the City of Lights.




 


Bikemap.net, built by Toursprung from Austria and Germany, allows cyclist to view and share bicycling routes from all over the world. Users can rate routes, mark their favorites, send the GPS coordinates to a mobile device, suggest changes to routes, and even share the routes on social media sites. Each route includes details about the distance, surfaces, and difficulty. To help cyclists better understand the terrain the site has an interactive elevation bar. A similar effect can be achieved using the Google Elevation API.

McDonalds Store Locator



 


The German online destination for McDonald’s features a very nice store locator built on the Google Maps API. Very similar to another store locator built by German company, Hugo Boss, this store locator uses the map as both its background and focal point. The store locator also features custom icons, category filtering (24hr, wifi, drive through, etc), and custom controls.

Mare Verlag – Interactive World Map



 

Maps become very powerful when they are used to add geo context to information. German magazine, Mare, is using the Google Maps API to geotagged their stories and display them on a map. You can use the map to focus in on a particular part of the world and the application will populate the map with the stories that occurred in that region.

Munich S-Bahn Live Tracking on Google Maps



 

 

What’s great about this map is that it shows Munich S-Bahn transit system in real time as the trains travel through the city. There are clickable custom icons for each train, representing their line and when clicked on display stop information in an infowindow. The Google Maps API is a great solution for real-time asset tracking for both transit and business applications. To find out more about using asset tracking for business applications, visit the Google Geo Enterprise website.

 

Google Places is Adding Upcoming Events via Rich Snippets

Reader Matt Feldman of Yelo.us has pointed out a new feature in Places where Google is now integrating venue events into their Places Pages. It allows an individual to add the event data to their personal Google calendar and to “invite friends using the ‘Add to calendar’ link that appears alongside the event”.

Google has confirmed that they are adding these events to venues “in a few major cities across the globe, including New York, San Francisco, London, Paris (and others)” and this “information is based on data from rich snippets markup“.

Wcities and Zevents events use the RDFa based Open Graph data structure. Other events appearing on the National Museum of the American Indian Places page from NYC.com are sructured with the event microformat (vcard) formatting. Although it does not seem to matter which format you are using, if you are operating a local site that includes events and you want your event information included in Places, you should be formatting the data with rich snippets.