With a group of Googlers living in Australia, it would be long for these new to be true: Google is now adding Australian maps to Google maps. Another corner of the world is integrated into the already large database of Google maps.
Now, you can also find local pizza places, restaurants, music stores, and even Zoos in Australia! Good news for our Aussie friends, as well as for tourists visiting this nice area of the Southern hemisphere.
Link
When Google launched its "Google Local" web page, it was the simplest way to find businesses in your local neighborhood. Just type your addess in Google maps, and click on local search to find whatever type of business you need. Classical example: find pizza!
Finding books on the Internet has become easier thanks to Google book search. This search service gives lots of information about new and old books. You can find free books that are out of print, but there is also a lot of data about new books that you can buy online or in your local bookstore.
Now, Google is even integrating their maps technology into Google book search. If you search a book that mention several different places, you will see a world map, and resulting listing what places in the world the book is referencing.
This doesn't seem very useful for most books, but certainly there are some books where it will be interesting to see where the action occurs. In the Google book search blog you will see a better example, involving different foods over the world:
As of yesterday, this sort of information became a lot easier to find as well as visualize: there's now a Book Search feature on the "About this book" page which shows readers the places mentioned in a particular book and pinpoints them on a map. Clicking around on the map for Extreme Cuisine, I quickly found out that dogs are on the menu in Seoul, Roman emperors enjoyed dormice, Melbourne residents serve up emu and crocodile, and Mopani worms are available in Johannesburg!
Google has been revolutionizing the way we find information for a few years now. Fist with web pages, then with images and maps, they are ready to take the game to the next level.
The latest improvement is the Google Transit service. With Google transit, you can quickly find your way with some major cities. New cities have been added to the support list of google transit:
Google maps is probably one of the most successful web sites created by Google in the last few years. As recently noted, few features other than the search engine itself are a killing for Google, but Google maps has done pretty well to keep the high moral for the guys at Google.
The new features released recently involve mostly tweaks in the user interface, with little changes that will make the user experience even better.
The most perceptible change in the web site is the addition of new underline tabs. They are labeled "search the map", "find businesses", and "get directions", and represent the three main uses of Google maps (also known as Google local). It is interesting to notice that this is a new element of the user interface that may well migrate into other Google web sites -- maybe in the future the Google engine will have its own tabs for different features.
The next improvement is the zooming options. Now, you can speed up the zooming process by double clicking. A double click means "increase zoom". A double click + control button means "reduce zoom" or "zoom out".
With these two features, Google shows that it is constantly working to improve the user experience in its web sites. We hope that such user-focused approach will continue for a long time.
Google is the heavy weight of search, but not so much in the realm of productivity software. Despite the successful launch of some software such as gmail, Google is still trying to find its way in the area of office software.
It is, however, trying hard. Only this year we saw Google buying writely, a novel company with a online service that imitates Microsoft word. Now, they released an online spreadsheet, called, for lack of better name, Google Spreadsheets.
First, we should say that the service is not a replacement for excel, especially if you are a heavy user of more advanced features. However, Google spreadsheets has some nice features, of which I think the more appealing are:
1 - Allow easy sharing of spreadsheet information. You couldn't do that with MS office easily, since excel documents need a copy of excel installed in any computer they will be viewed.
2 - Allow simple computation without excel. In the past, just to do some quick calculations I need to open MS excel. Now, I can just do it easily by clicking on a link to Google Spreadsheets.
It is not much, but I think it is enough to keep people interested in the product and make it grow. Google knows how to improve products incrementally, as it has done with Gmail, and Google Maps. I think Google Spreadsheets will follow a similar pattern. Maybe we are seeing an excel killer just in its infancy...
Google maps has become a great success for the advanced features it provides: automatic scrolling, high definition images, and well devised controls. But up to now, many of these features were available only for a few countries, including USA.
This week, Google started providing maps for Western Europe, in an effort to improve the coverage of the service. According to the announcement in the official Google blog:
We're excited to announce that we have just launched beta versions of Google Maps for France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. These sites include the full suite of interactive street maps, driving directions, and integrated local business search. This has been a global effort with Google teams in Paris, Hamburg, Milan, Madrid, New York, Mountain View, Kirkland, Sydney, London, Dublin, and Zurich working together for much of the past year to build a truly "local" product.Link
Google is expanding again the amount of content available from their website. This time, they are adding financial information to its list of offers, with the finance.google.com.
Along the lines of yahoo, the objective of the finance website is to provide information, news stories, quotes, and general data related to finances, stocks, the financial market in general.
One of the nice features of google finance is the new plots of stock quotes. Along the lines of Google maps, the online stock quotes can be moved, stretched, zoomed using a nice web 2.0 interface. This makes it much easier to check the values of stock quotes ranging from a few hour time to multiple year, with just a click of the mouse.
it appears that Google is using their approach for web sites to this financial service: clean pages, lots of useful information, and great automation with web 2.0 features. It is still early to say, but it seems that google finance will draw a large crowd that needs good financial information really fast.
Technorati Tags: Announcements, Google, Web 2.0
If you think that printing the itinerary of your new travel is the best way of using Google maps for driving, think again. Volkswagen is partnering with Google to provide a new navigation system for their cars that allows drivers to see the exact path they need to follow. They use the same engine of Google earth to provide detailed instructions for drivers.
The new system is still just a prototype, and pictures can be seen
here. But it looks exciting, and I am looking forward to see this as an accessory in my new Volkswagen!
Link
The winter Olympics just started, and for a few days the whole world will be seeing the marvelous sports events occurring in Torino. Even if you couldn't buy a ticket to visit Torino, you can still have a virtual tour to the city.
Thanks to Google imagery software, including Google earth and Google maps, you can see images of the city with incredible quality. You can almost touch the mountains where the winter games will be played.
To see the new images provided by Google you can either use the Google earth software, or just point your browser to Google local and use the controls to turn around. A map of the area is also provided.
The world is really getting smaller, and many of these is thanks to the technology that allows us to see things that we could never visit. Google maps and Google earth provide some of this technology for free. So, let us use it!
Link
Technorati Tags: Announcement, Google, Tips
Google maps is also a great way of learning Geography. If you go to this web site, you can get a quick look at the waterfalls in any state in US.
Certainly, with google maps you can learn much other fun facts about geography, without having to travel (or read) too much.
Link
Technorati Tags: Google, networking
Google maps is now available for your celullar phone. This is one of the new goodies comming from Google labs.
If you need detailed information of how to go from one location to another, or where to find a good restaurant, you don't need a full-featured computer anymore. Google maps can be acessed from most commercial cell phones. The software is java based, and runs on any java-enabled mobile phone.
To access the service, you just need to download a java program to your cell phone, using the link from the google web page. Once installed, you can access the google web site using a data connection (notice that depending on your plan this may be more expensive than a normal call).
In case you cannot load a java program to your phone, you can always access the address http://mobile.google.com/local, which is the mobile version of the google local web site. As a last resort, send a text message with your query to GOOGL (46645). They promisse to send you back an answer!...
Google has become in the last few years a leader not only in web search, but also in the area of online tools. They have quickly developed web tools that are now widely used, such as gmail, blogger, and google maps, to name a few.
What is missing in the offer of google is a good way of keeping personal information organized. Competing companies such as yahoo have implemented calendar and reminder systems for years.
According to Paul Kedrosky, sources from google said that this gap is close to be filled. A new calendar system is on its way, and could be released as early as tomorrow. The new feature would complement the already successful tools google developed for online organization, with its award winning gmail.
A new offer from google in this area would be very good news. Online calendar systems are not new, and everybody from microsoft to yahoo, and even older email systems such as lotus notes have one such feature. In my view, however, none of these are really simple to use, and google may bring a fresh view on the old concept. Using ajax technologies would be very beneficial for this kind of application.
Another advantage is to be able to get all data necessary to work online in the same website. Nowadays, if a user wants to maintain an online calendar, it has to rely on other websites, even when its main email system is gmail-based. It would be very good to have everything under the same account.
Finally, it would be possible to avoid duplication of data. Although gmail stores lists of emails in an efficient way, data still has to be imported and exported from/to other programs in order to have it available. A calendar system from google would allow us to use this data to make appointments and other scheduled events.
