The New War Horse Interactive Map on MSN

Many of you have heard of Steven Spielberg’s latest hit movie War Horse, which came out in USA theatres on December 25 and is launching in Europe in January. What you may not have heard of is the War Horse Journeyon MSN. It’s a tool that allows you to explore the journey of Joey (the war horse). For more on the Journey tool, check out this MSN Blog Post. We at Bing Maps just wanted to call out our partner in the UK, Shoothill, who worked with the movie to create a true one-of-a-kind mapping experience!
Here’s a quick overview of the Timemap in the War Horse Journey, but nothing can compare with just spending time in the map itself. The Timemap combines present day maps with WWI era imagery all in one place! It has 3 components: video/photos, aerial photos and historic maps. The fade slider functionality lets you compare maps from WWI with today. Take a look…
Villers Bretonneux, France
December, 1917
Villers Bretonneux, France
Present Day
Historic trench map of Kemmel, Belgium
April, 1917
Belgium landscape today
Go spend some time playing around with the Timemap and the War Horse Journey. The Timemap is an incredible way to explore history and shows the lasting mark WWI has made on our world.
Note that the War Horse Journey is available for a limited time only, so get out there and experience history today!

Google Map data updates for Europe

 

With over 600,000 sites actively using the Google Maps API, more people around the world view maps provided by the Maps API than any other source. For this reason it’s vitally important that Google Maps provides the most accurate and up to date map data possible. For this reason we’re happy to introduce updated maps and the “Report a Problem” tool to France, Luxembourg, and Monaco.

As with previous updates in countries such as the U.S.A., Australia, and parts of Europe, this update utilizes a wide range of authoritative sources such as the Institut Geographique National. In addition, the “Report a Problem” tool on Google Maps allows you to let us know if some aspect of the map that needs correcting, and we’ll do our best to address it quickly.

These map updates will roll out over the next 24 hours across all our Maps APIs and related services. As with previous updates we do ask that you refresh any data that you have previously obtained for these countries using Maps API Web Services, and cached for use in your Maps API application. If you have any questions or concerns relating to this, please post them to the Google Maps API forums.

 

The Voice Actions for Android in the UK, France, Italy and Germany

The Voice Actions, a series of spoken commands that let you control your Android phone or tablet with your voice. You can call businesses and contacts, send texts, browse the web and complete other common tasks, all just by speaking into your phone.

Today, we’re pleased to announce that users in the UK, France, Italy, Germany and Spain can now use Voice Actions in British English, French, Italian, German and Spanish.

To use Voice Actions, tap the microphone button on the Google search box on your home screen, open the Voice Search app, or press down for a few seconds on the physical search button on your phone to activate the “Speak Now” screen. You can see how it works in this video.

Speak any of these commands to perform a Voice Action on your phone:

  • send text to [contact] [message]
  • call [business]
  • call [contact]
  • go to [website]
  • navigate to [location/business name]
  • directions to [location/business name]
  • map of [location]

And of course, you can still conduct a Google search using your voice.

Use Voice Actions to get directions, or send a text using just your voice

Voice Actions is available on phones and tablets running Android 2.2 and higher. If you don’t have Voice Search on your phone yet, you can download it from Android Market – if you do have Voice Search, you can just start using Voice Actions.