Browse stores virtually in 360 degree images with Google interior maps. Google has been mapping our world for quite some time now, giving us online access to the geography of the Wonders of the World, and even uninhabitable places.
Google Maps War With Apple Is Over - Google Won. Wifarer's bold quest to out-map Google indoors. Google to unveil 3D Maps ahead of Apple's WWDC. Zagat ratings added to Maps and Google+ Apple to ditch Google Maps in iOS 6, replace with in-house 3D Maps app: report. Goodbye, Google Maps.
Hello, super-duper-awesome Maps app, which according to Mark Gurman of 9to5Mac will make its debut in iOS 6. The new Maps app will be entirely Apple-built, and provide users with a “much cleaner, faster, and more reliable” user experience, writes Gurman. The introduction of Maps is, of course, not yet verified by Apple.
(Nothing is verified by Apple pre-launch.) Instead, it comes via the tech world’s omnipresent “trusted sources.” Foursquare is a Threat to Yelp. Foursquare has just announced that business hours for venues are now available, signaling an interesting expansion that eats into Yelp’s own territory.
We already saw how Foursquare can be used to discover food nearby, so now that both menus and hours are available, the company’s intentions are becoming clearer. Move over Foursquare, SXSW’s next big location app is Highlight. There’s a new trend set to emerge at this year’s SXSW know as “ambient social networking.”
At the helm of this burgeoning trend is the budding two-person startup, Highlight, headed by founder and CEO, Paul Davison. While in the past, Foursquare and Gowalla were the location-based apps that made headlines, the latest innovation a is new breed that sits on your phone and runs silently behind the scenes. Rather than the check-ins feature that even Foursquare founder, Dennis Crowley, has admitted was losing steam, ambient social networking applications will only notify users with a pop-up notification when another user of the same application approaches your immediate vicinity.
The purpose of an application like Highlight is simply to connect users with similar interests. Users within the same vicinity can view a snippet of each other’s profile, which includes their “Blurb,” the number of mutual friends and interest in common, and a map showing their location. Draw Pictures On Google Maps With Its New Drawing Library. Google Maps developers just launched a drawing library for the Google Maps API, so that developers who build on Google Maps can add simple tools for users to draw markers, lines and shapes on to maps.
Shapes can also be made editable, even once they've been placed on the map. Applications can use drawings for selecting regions of the map to search or highlight, as well as for annotations. This simple interface offers a surprising range of features for developers building applications upon Google Maps. There's a working demo embedded on the Google Geo Developers Blog. Try it out; it's easy to use, but it's surprisingly flexible. For Your iOS Enjoyment: Portland Art Museum's Place-Based App. How many times have you found yourself in possession of a whole lot of digital content that should be tied to a very specific physical place, maybe even a particular spot in a room, but with no easy way to tie together the two dimensions of online ephemera and real-world location?
Maybe that doesn't happen to you very much yet, but if you worked at a museum - it would happen all the time. And wouldn't you like to imagine yourself working at a museum? I suspect you would. The good people at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon found themselves in just such a situation and have leveraged an interesting new mobile publishing platform in order to capture some of the value of place-based digital content in order to share it with their patrons.
This morning the museum launched its big Summer exhibit, a retrospective of historic automobiles. The new Portland Art Museum iPhone app is built on top of a platform called Meridian, by a company called Spotlight Mobile. World-food-crisis. US Trails China In Almost Every Mobile Usage Trend. Mobile device usage has spread across the globe.
In terms of mobile penetration, the United States is actually on the lower end of the worldwide spectrum, with only 77% cellular device ownership. That seems counterintuitive to the way the U.S. views itself as the heart of mobile acceptance and innovation. It is China and other Asia-Pacific countries that really lead in mobile adoption. Research firm Forrester released a study last week showing global mobile usage trends. In almost every mobile usage aspect, metropolitan China and other Pacific Rim countries lead the way. Forrester's research shows that the mobile Internet is starting to become the prime point of entry to the Internet for many people around the world. In metropolitan China, 46% of people access the mobile Internet, 57% listen to music, 36% play games on their mobile devices and about 33% access social networks. Fly Along Your Google Maps Route in 3D. The Google LatLong team just announced that Google Maps is getting 3D previews of travel directions.
The interface now displays a "play" button that switches to a Google Earth view that flies along the route automatically. Playback can be paused and resumed at any point, and dragging the map allows exploration of the surrounding area. Internet in developing countries: Hailing the Google bus.