Google Developer Day coming to a city near you in 2011

 

As Vic Gundotra announced previously, Google Developer Day (GDD) will be coming to eight cities in 2011. Please save the date, as we prepare to bring our world tour of GDDs to a city near you.

  • September 16: Sao Paulo, Brazil
  • September 19-20: Buenos Aires, Argentina
  • October 10: Moscow, Russia
  • October 18: Prague, Czech Republic
  • November 1: Tokyo, Japan
  • November 8: Sydney, Australia
  • November 13: Tel-Aviv, Israel
  • November 19: Berlin, Germany

Google Developer Days are a chance to learn about our latest developer products and meet the engineers who work on them. As in years past, we will have an application process when registration opens, so stay tuned, as we will continue to bring you updates.

13 European countries with Live traffic information

Since introducing the live traffic feature on Google Maps in 2008, our team has been working hard to make this feature available to more users in more countries. Just in time for summer travel, we’re delighted to announce that today we’re making traffic available in 13 countries in Europe. The new road traffic information is in the traffic layer on Google Maps and Google Maps for mobile, and Google Maps Navigation (Beta).

Today we’re announcing new coverage in Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia, Spain and Switzerland. Coverage includes all freeways and highways, as well as large roads in major cities. Users in the UK will also benefit from a finer grain of street level coverage.

 

Our Maps team in Zurich is especially excited about this release because many of us will now be able to personally benefit from the expansion of this traffic feature. For example, although I take public transit to work every day, I enjoy weekend drives to the Austrian Alps or the Italian lakes region, and having live traffic available on my phone helps me avoid the traffic at the Gotthard tunnel.

Traffic in Gotthard Tunnel, Switzerland
The live traffic layer is regularly updated to show information for traffic events from the last 5-10 minutes. Finally, you can learn more about typical traffic conditions for specific times and days of the week by clicking the “change” link in the traffic legend on Google Maps, and setting the day of week and time.

Holiday Trees throughout Google Earth

Now that Google has introduced 3D trees to Google Earth 6, they’ve decided to take it a step further and drop decorated trees in various places around the globe.

tree-at-30-rock.jpg

According to their blog, these special trees can be found in 14 different locations. However, they’ve only revealed 11 of them. Here are the 11 that they’ve shown:

• Boston Common, Boston, MA
• Skyline Park, Denver, CO
• Grove Plaza, Boise, ID
• Alster Fountain, Hamburg, Germany
• North Capital of Texas Highway, Austin, TX
• Place Du Parvis Notre-Dame, Paris, France
• Old Town Square, Prague, Czech Republic
• Red Square, Moscow, Russia
• Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY
• Pier 39, San Francisco, CA
• Trafalgar Square, London, England

I tracked down those 11 trees and loaded them into this KMZ file for you. Now, who can find the other three?

Below is the video that shows off the first 11. Leave a comment if you’re able to find any of the others.