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Google just announced a nice addition to its Street View feature in Google Maps. Starting today, you will be able to see the names of local businesses as you move through a town in Street View. A click on one of these names will bring up the standard Google Maps business listing with the name of the business, hours, phone number, address and reviews. According to Google, these new "local business annotation" in Street View are the first step in the company's plans to enhance the discoverability of content in Street View. Sponsor As Stephane Lafon, one of the software engineers on Google's Street View team points out, Street View will currently only highlight the top listings for the immediate area around your current position in Street View. The company plans to extend this coverage with more listing soon. Google also plans to incorporate transit location in this feature. Bonus Tip: Street View in 3D Earlier this month, we noticed that Google still offered the 3D version of Street View it announced on April Fool's day. To see this, just right-click on any Street View image and select "3D mode on." Google is clearly working hard on highlighting local businesses across its properties. Google Maps already shows the names of local businesses once you zoom in close enough and last week, Google announced Google Places , a new version of its Local Business Center, which allows local retailers and restaurants to claim and update their own listings. In addition, Google is also taking pictures of the in and outside of local businesses around the U.S. Discuss
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Google Street View Now Highlights Local Businesses
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If you want to map a locale or score some directions but want to avoid driving into a pole, you can now use your pipes . Google Maps now recognizes Search by Voice on Windows Mobile and Symbian S60 phones. Google introduced Search by Voice in 2008 and has been rolling that functionality out into different parts of the Googlesphere since. Now Google Maps 4.1 comes with voice search. Sponsor The categories of search that Maps will now recognize vocally includes the full spectrum of search fields already enabled for mobile. business name business category city, state ZIP code postal address intersection, city, state airport code latitude longitude Hands-free it is not, however. To start the search you still need to open Google Maps and hit "call" prior to making your search. The install is available on qualifying phones at m.google.com/maps . An interesting aspect of the language settings the ability to select not just your language but, if it's English, the accent you use. I wonder if this functionality will be available to Spanish-speakers or whether the different accents within Yue Chinese will eventually be recognized. Discuss
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Google Mobile Announces Search by Voice for Maps
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On April 1st, Google introduced a 3D mode for Street View in Google Maps. At that time, we just thought this was an elaborate April Fool's joke , but as of this morning, the 3D view is still available in Google Maps. To see these images, you will need a pair of old-fashioned red/cyan glasses, bring up Street View in Google Maps and click on the Pegman with 3D glasses on the left side of the screen. As far as we can see, this feature is available anywhere in the world where Google currently offers Street View. Sponsor Given that Google announced this update on April Fool's Day, we assumed that the 3D feature would have been gone by now. Instead, it actually looks like Google has expanded this program since April 1st. The 3D mode in Google Books , which Google also announced on April 1st, is now gone, however. We can only assume that Google was already calculating these 3D perspectives and using them internally. By combining shots from different angles, Google can use the stereo pair to calculate the distance between the Street View car and the buildings along the street. Google can then use this data to create better location data for these buildings and addresses. Update : As Barry Hunter points out in the comments , Google is actually using LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) to calculate the 3D images and is not calculating stereo pair imagery. This also explains why the resolution of the 3D view isn't very high. Give it a Try (If You Have 3D Glasses) If you still have some old 3D glasses, head over to Google Maps and let us know what you think of the new Google Maps 3D view in the comments. View Larger Map Discuss
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Google Street View in 3D: More Than Just an April Fool's Joke
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Microsoft is announcing two new features to Bing Maps today - an integration with Oodle to show rental property listings and another integration with Foursquare to visualize check-ins, tips and a variety of other data. Although the two seem only related by the map visualization aspect, they might be useful hand in hand to find that new apartment that's close to where everything (or nothing) is going on. Sponsor First, the Oodle map application, called Oodle Rentals, is similar to other mashups we've seen using Google Maps and Craigslist, such as HousingMaps . Hopefully Oodle Rentals doesn't have the same downfall, however, wherein rental agencies simply post listings with a zip code and no actual address, meaning you have 300 pins smack dab in the center of down and not where they really are. The application shows a listing of appropriate properties in a sidebar, allowing you to filter by criteria like pets, bedrooms, bathroom, rent and so on. As you move the map around, the available and appropriate properties appear on the map. As for "foursquare Everywhere", Foursquare data is pulled in, allowing visualization of check-ins, tips, badges and mayor "coronations" worldwide. So after you've found the perfect place to rent using Oodle Rentals, you can switch over to "foursquare Everywhere" and see where the happening night clubs, coffee shops, restaurants and various other venues are in the area. We have to say, we're fans of anything that suddenly offers a better visualization of what would otherwise be data we'd have to correlate on our own. Who wants to look through rental listings and then switch over and look it all up in a map? That's so 2000, not 2010. Now, if they would just get to offering a SimCity style view of map filtering, so we could see crime rates, traffic, pollution, noise, all aggregated together with rental listings and check-in data, then we'd be talking. Discuss
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Bing Maps Helps You Scope Out The Town With Oodle Rentals And Foursquare Integration
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What would you do if you heard a giant boom and you didn't know where it came from? If you're like thousands of people in Portland, Oregon, you might hit Twitter and Google Maps to participate in the city-wide exploration of a slightly frightening mystery. Last night at about 8 p.m., people in a big part of the city felt their windows shake and no one could tell them what caused it. Was it a sonic boom? An angry deity? Even the mayor himself tweeted this morning that he was looking into the sound. In the meantime, thousands of people were using the hashtag #pdxboom and adding themselves to a hastily configured Google Map showing where they lived and how loud the boom had been there. In just a few hours, a pattern emerged, with reports clustering around one city park. This morning the police found a detonated pipe bomb there and cited the Google Map in their announcement. Sponsor Pausing the Stream Reid Beels is a designer, geo-developer and one of the community organizers of Portland's forthcoming conference Open Source Bridge ("The conference for open source citizens"). Beels says he was sitting in a restaurant in southeast Portland when he heard the boom, and saw tweets streaming in about it within minutes. He searched Twitter for "boom" and "explosion," limiting the results by location. Within five minutes, he says, a hashtag had emerged: #pdxboom. What was the #pdxboom, people wanted to know? Some people said it sounded like thunder. Lots of people said it sounded like an empty trash Dumpster crashing on the ground. They mentioned their locations in their Tweets and Beels quickly grew frustrated that all this data was just streaming into the ether, lost from analysis. So he threw up a Google Map with instructions to put a pin in your location and describe how the boom sounded to you. Within an hour 100 people had placed pins on the map. Beels and developer Audrey Eschright came up with a color coded system to describe the intensity of the sound, and began retroactively coloring in pins based on any comments people left. Then they found out that Google Maps will only display the 200 most recent pins placed in a public map. Beels' friend Aaron Parecki wrote a script to download the map's data every fifteen minutes. That came in handy when a few hours later someone vandalized the map by dragging a large number of markers outside the town. It was trivial to roll back to the last valid data. The local TV news and the newspaper ran stories about the boom, and pointed their audiences to the Google Map. Thousands of people visited it, and just under 1,000 added a pin marking where they where and how loud the boom had sounded to them. It became clear that the boom originated near the Sellwood Bridge; a big cluster of red markers surrounded the area, especially to the east. Thousands of people are still streaming in to look at the map; at the end of the day it's now approaching 70,000 views, even if the mystery, if not the crime, is solved. Some people thought it was a precursor Earthquake Boom . (I woke up convinced my house was in an earthquake.) But the Portland police went to a park in the area most filled with red flags on the map and found a large detonated pipe bomb. A Portland police spokesperson said the maps and tweets were very helpful. A topographic view of the map made some inclined to believe that cliffs across the river and low-hanging clouds combined to make the sound travel as far across the city and in the direction that it did. That Was a Practice Run Beels says two big lessons came out of the experience for him. First, the tools they used were easy and fast, but they were also quite limited. Google Maps in particular was capable of multi-user collaboration but did poorly when it came to displaying a large amount of data. As Eschright wrote after the action, "It's not the best platform for a couple hundred people, many without prior experience editing maps, to be using all at once." Inspired by campaigns like CrisisCampPDX and the CrisisWiki , Beels says the community is interested in setting up an installation of open-source, crisis support software Ushahidi on standby in case a real crisis has to be dealt with. Beels says he's inspired not just by what was done in this situation, but by what it revealed about the future. "The community of people who will search for things online and go out of their way to try to figure out what's going on," he says, "is larger than you might think." Marshall Kirkpatrick is leading a webinar for Poynter's News University on Thursday about how location services are changing the news . It would be great if you joined us. Discuss
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Boom! Tweets & Maps Swarm to Pinpoint a Mysterious Explosion
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