Posts Tagged “travel”
I’m a big fan of traveling and being outdoors. As a software engineer on Google Earth, I rarely go outside without bringing a GPS so that I can plot my adventures in Google Earth. That’s why I’m excited to tell you about the new features in Google Earth 5.2 that make it easier than ever to relive your journey.
In earlier versions of Google Earth you could see your GPS tracks as lines or points on the map. That has worked pretty well, but I’ve always had a nagging feeling that we could do much better, creating animations that show exactly how you move around the world.
With Google Earth 5.2, you can now import existing GPS data as a new kind of “track.” With a track, you can move the time-slider to animate time and retrace your journey. Google Earth will draw an icon so that it is properly positioned for the given time that you are viewing. As you move through time, the icon will animate along your path. You can also select a window of time which will highlight the corresponding section of your trip.
In Google Earth 5.0, we introduced Tours: cinematic, narrated flights around Google Earth. With one click you can make a tour based on your track, which will fly you along your journey from a bird’s-eye view. You can play back the tour like a video and share it with friends.
The best way to explain the power of the new track feature is just to show you some examples. I’ve always had a passion for flight, and earlier this year I decided to take flying lessons. I took a GPS along with me, and imported my tracks into Google Earth. Next, I found a model of a Cessna from the Google 3D Warehouse. Finally, I created tours of those tracks to move the camera along the path of my flights. Voilà!
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In addition, a powerful aspect of the new track feature is the ability to show multiple tracks at the same time. If you load multiple tracks into Google Earth that take place in the same period of time, then you can use the timeslider to animate all the tracks simultaneously. For example, if you have GPS tracks for several people in a race, you can use Google Earth to reply the event.
Importing your own tracks
Importing GPS tracks is simple in Google Earth. Just connect your GPS device to your computer and choose “GPS” from the “tools” menu. Alternately, you can download your GPS data from your handheld unit onto your computer as a .gpx, .nmea or .log file and then drag it into Google Earth or open it from the file menu. The GPS data will convert into a KML track and display in the 3D view. If you move the time-slider, you should see your icon move through time.
Making a tour of your track
It’s easy to create a tour of your track. Simply highlight your track in the left-panel, and click on the “Create Tour” button which looks like this: Google Earth will fly you along your track, and move the time-slider to animate your object.
Elevation profiles
While I was obsessed with animation, another engineer on the team, John Rohlf, was interested in visualizing the elevation gains of his hikes and ski trips. He wrote the elevation profile feature, which will graph the elevation of any line or track in Google Earth. For tracks, you can also use the elevation profile to graph speed or any other data that your GPS device records, such as heart rate, cadence, temperature, etc. To see the elevation profile of any line or track, right-click on it in the left-hand panel and select “View Elevation Profile.”
The profile-view will pop up in the bottom of the window. If you move your mouse around the graph, a big red arrow in the 3D view will show you the corresponding point in 3D. You can also view other graphs by clicking on the names of the other data types. If you select just a portion of the elevation profile, you can get statistics for just that section, such as the average grade of a climb. Try it out! You can see how high you hiked, or how fast you drove… just be careful. We won’t pay your speeding tickets.
Example tracks
Here are some examples to get you started:
Biking on Twin Peaks in San Francisco
Peter’s bike to work ride
Dan’s flight
For more information
For more advanced track usage, including instructions on how to incorporate 3D models into your KML, see the KML reference guide.
Download Google Earth 5.2 today at http://earth.google.com.
Posted by Dan Barcay, Software Engineer, Google Earth
Tags: google, google earth, travel
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Sometimes you want to explore a place for yourself, and sometimes you want to get a sense of how other people experience it. With our newest update to User Photos available within Street View, you can seamlessly do both. Now when you’re browsing a location in Street View, you can see user-contributed photographs directly overlaid within the panorama.
The new feature places thumbnails of relevant photos on top of the Street View imagery when you click the “Photos” option at the top right of the panorama. When you move your mouse cursor over one of these thumbnails, a photo appears which matches the content of the panoramic view. Using the overlays you can quickly preview several photos without changing your viewpoint or losing track of where you were. And if you click on the photo, you enter our interactive photo browser to explore additional pictures taken by the community.
It is now even easier to inspect architectural details and close-up quirks, or see what is happening at a place at more than one time of the day. Start to explore this new world through the eyes of other travelers with some of these locations:
See how Bundesplatz in Bern comes alive during the summer
Explore Ponte Vecchio in Florence from a new perspective
See the sun rise over Notre Dame
Posted by Daniel Cotting, Computer Vision Team, Google Zurich 
Tags: google, travel
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Fox’s Glee sounds like a fun bit of TV, and it’s true to life in that it features lots of scenes in which people who care passionately about art end up copying the works they’re inspired by, and share their copies. But what does it mean for Rupert Murdoch’s Fox to bring us all these positive messages about remixing the culture around us as a natural part of life and creativity, even as Rupert and his family are travelling the globe, calling every act of copying theft, declaring that fair use is illegal and will be eliminated, and that every use of work, no matter how trivial, must be compensated?
Christina Mulligan, a visiting fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, guest-posts on the Balkinization blog:
In one recent episode, the AV Club helps cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester film a near-exact copy of Madonna’s Vogue music video (the real-life fine for copying Madonna’s original? up to $150,000). Just a few episodes later, a video of Sue dancing to Olivia Newton-John’s 1981 hit Physical is posted online (damages for recording the entirety of Physical on Sue’s camcorder: up to $300,000). And let’s not forget the glee club’s many mash-ups — songs created by mixing together two other musical pieces. Each mash-up is a “preparation of a derivative work” of the original two songs’ compositions – an action for which there is no compulsory license available, meaning (in plain English) that if the Glee kids were a real group of teenagers, they could not feasibly ask for — or hope to get — the copyright permissions they would need to make their songs, and their actions, legal under copyright law. Punishment for making each mash-up? Up to another $150,000 — times two.
The absence of any mention of copyright law in Glee illustrates a painful tension in American culture. While copyright holders assert that copyright violators are “stealing” their “property,” people everywhere are remixing and recreating artistic works for the very same reasons the Glee kids do — to learn about themselves, to become better musicians, to build relationships with friends, and to pay homage to the artists who came before them. Glee’s protagonists — and the writers who created them — see so little wrong with this behavior that the word ‘copyright’ is never even uttered.
You might be tempted to assume that this tension isn’t a big deal because copyright holders won’t go after creative kids or amateurs. But they do: In the 1990s, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) asked members of the American Camping Association, including Girl Scout troops,to pay royalties for singing copyrighted songs at camp. In 2004, the Beatles’ copyright holders tried to prevent the release of The Grey Album – a mash-up of Jay-Z’s Black Album and the Beatles’ White Album — and only gave up after massive civil disobedience resulted in the album’s widespread distribution. Copyright holders even routinely demand that YouTube remove videos of kids dancing to popular music. While few copyright cases go to trial, copyright holders like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) don’t hesitate to seek stratospheric damage awards when they do, as in the Jammie Thomas-Rasset filesharing case.
Copyright: The Elephant in the Middle of the Glee Club
(Thanks, Mike!)
  
Tags: family, travel
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As people spend more time on the Internet, they want greater control over who has access to their online communications. Many Internet services use what are known as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) connections to encrypt information that travels between your computer and their service. Usually recognized by a web address starting with “https” or a browser lock icon, this technology is regularly used by online banking sites and e-commerce websites. Other sites may also implement SSL in a more limited fashion, for example, to help protect your passwords when you enter your login information.
Years ago Google added SSL encryption to products ranging from Gmail to Google Docs and others, and we continue to enable encryption on more services. Like banking and e-commerce sites, Google’s encryption extends beyond login passwords to the entire service. This session-wide encryption is a significant privacy advantage over systems that only encrypt login pages and credit card information. Early this year, we took an important step forward by making SSL the default setting for all Gmail users. And today we’re gradually rolling out a new choice to search more securely at https://www.google.com.
When you search on https://www.google.com, an encrypted connection is created between your browser and Google. This secured channel helps protect your search terms and your search results pages from being intercepted by a third party on your network. The service includes a modified logo to help indicate that you’re searching using SSL and that you may encounter a somewhat different Google search experience, but as always, remember to check the start of the address bar for “https” and your browser lock indicators:
 Today’s release comes with a “beta” label for a few reasons. First, it currently covers only the core Google web search product. To help avoid misunderstanding, when you search using SSL, you won’t see links to offerings like Image Search and Maps that, for the most part, don’t support SSL at this time. Also, since SSL connections require additional time to set up the encryption between your browser and the remote web server, your experience with search over SSL might be slightly slower than your regular Google search experience. What won’t change is that you will still get the same great search results.
A few notes to remember: Google will still maintain search data to improve your search quality and to provide better service. Searching over SSL doesn’t reduce the data sent to Google — it only hides that data from third parties who seek it. And clicking on any of the web results, including Google universal search results for unsupported services like Google Images, could take you out of SSL mode. Our hope is that more websites and services will add support for SSL to help create a better and more consistent experience for you.
We think users will appreciate this new option for searching. It’s a helpful addition to users’ online privacy and security, and we’ll continue to add encryption support for more search offerings. To learn more about using the feature, refer to our help article on search over SSL.
Posted by Evan Roseman, Software Engineer
Tags: gmail, google, internet, travel
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Today the Local Business Center is becoming Google Places. Why? Millions of people use Google every day to find places in the real world, and we want to better connect Place Pages — the way that businesses are being found today — with the tool that enables business owners to manage their presence on Google.
We launched Place Pages last September for more than 50 million places around the world to help people make more informed decisions about where to go, from restaurants and hotels to dry cleaners and bike shops, as well as non-business places like museums, schools and parks. Place Pages connect people to information from the best sources across the web, displaying photos, reviews and essential facts, as well as real-time updates and offers from business owners.
Four million businesses have already claimed their Place Page on Google through the Local Business Center, which enables them to verify and supplement their business information to include hours of operation, photos, videos, coupons, product offerings and more. It also lets them communicate with customers and get insights that help them make smart business decisions.
Google Places will continue to offer these same tools, but the new name will simplify the connection with Place Pages. This reflects our ongoing commitment to providing business owners with powerful yet easy-to-use tools.
We’re also introducing several new features:
- Service areas: If you travel to serve customers, you can now show which geographic areas you serve. And if you run a business without a storefront or office location, you can now make your address private.
- A new, simple way to advertise: For just $25 per month, businesses in select cities can make their listings stand out on Google.com and Google Maps with Tags. As of today, we’re rolling out Tags to three new cities — Austin, Atlanta and Washington, D.C. — in addition to ongoing availability in Houston and San Jose, CA. In the coming weeks we’ll also be introducing Tags in Chicago, San Diego, Seattle, Boulder and San Francisco.
- Business photo shoots: In addition to uploading their own photos, businesses in select cities can now request a free photo shoot of the interior of their business which we’ll use to supplement existing photos of businesses on Place Pages. We’ve been experimenting with this over the past few months, and now have created a site for businesses to learn more and express their interest in participating.
- Customized QR codes: From the dashboard page of Google Places, businesses in the U.S. can download a QR code that’s unique to their business, directly from their dashboard page. QR codes can be placed on business cards or other marketing materials, and customers can scan them with certain smartphones to be taken directly to the mobile version of the Place Page for that business.
- Favorite Places: We’re doing a second round of our Favorite Places program, and are mailing window decals to 50,000 businesses around the U.S. These decals include a QR code that can be scanned with a smartphone to directly view the mobile Place Page for the business to learn more about their great offerings.
Over the past few months we’ve also added the ability for business owners to post real-time updates to their Place Page. You might want to promote a sale, a special event or anything else that you want customers to know right now, and this feature lets you communicate that directly to your customers. You can also provide extra incentive by adding coupons, including ones specially formatted for mobile phones.
To keep track of how your business listing is performing on Google, we offer a personalized dashboard within Google Places that includes data about how many times people have found your business on Google, what keywords they used to find it and even what areas people traveled from to visit your business. With the dashboard, you can see how your use of any of these new features affects interest in your business and make more informed decisions about how to be found on Google and interact with your customers.
One out of five searches on Google are related to location, and we want to make sure that businesses are able to be found and put their best foot forward. We’re excited to announce Google Places today, as it’s just the beginning of what’s to come from our efforts to make Google more local. If you want to learn more about Google Places, we’d like to invite you to an upcoming overview webinar, or you can visit our newly updated Help Center. We’ll also be posting on the Lat Long blog throughout the week to give a deeper dive into many of our newest features. To get started now, go to google.com/places.
Posted by John Hanke, VP Google Maps, Earth and Local
Tags: google, travel
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Google Earth will fly you along your track, and move the time-slider to animate your object.
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