Yesterday, as promised, I did a random drawing from people who gave me their business cards during the Where 2.0 conference. The lucky winner got a free 3DConnexion SpaceNavigator for Notebooks. And the winner was...

Alberto Andrés Lucas, of the cool Google Maps social network site ipoki. I was especially glad to give this one away as ipoki came a long way for this conference - all the way from Spain. I had met them previously last year during Where 2.0 when those famous guys from Panoramio announced they had been bought by Google (see photo of one celebration).

This was the last day of Where 2.0. A diverse collection of talks representing innovative startup-technology, innovative applications of free and open source apps for disasters and humanitarian purposes, long-established geospatial data providers, academics, and top tech companies like Yahoo and Google were all in the mix. In other words, another day at Where 2.0. Schedule.

Ok, so here is another summary of those talks with a Google Earth perspective:

I will be writing some more summaries from Where 2.0 2008 tomorrow. But, I just wanted to share one bit of Google Earth news from today's sessions. Lior Ron, Product Manager of Google Maps, made several Google Maps announcements in his talk today (more details tomorrow). One thing he announced, is a plan to release a Google News layer for both Google Earth and Google Maps (in the new "More..." layer option for Google Maps). Google News aggregates news from thousands of news sources all over the world.

Google joined up with the New York Times and released just over a month ago the first built-in live updating layer of news from the NY Times in Google Earth. Now they have apparently determined some ways to get geospatial information for a wide range of news sources and will release this new layer - according to Lior Ron - in about a week. It will be interesting to see how they highlight each news agency's content and attribution in this new layer. I assume you'll have to link back to their web page to read the full stories.

More Where 2.0 news tomorrow. You can read more Where 2.0 news for Google Earth: Day 1 summary, Google John Hanke Keynote, and Day 2 summary.

Yesterday was the first full day of sessions at Where 2.0 2008. Of course, I already blogged the Google keynote by Director of Google Geo John Hanke (I've added a video of his presentation to the post). Also, note there are other videos of some of the presentations at Where available at where.blip.tv. I'm not going to have time to write summaries of all the talks from yesterday right now. So, here are a few notable summaries which I found most interesting from a Google Earth perspective.

• Microsoft Virtual Earth - The other important keynote of the day, from a GE perspective, was from the Microsoft Virtual Earth team (for a good summary of the entire talk, see Chris Spagnuolo's post). Microsoft's Vincent Tao, formerly the founder of GeoTango, gave an enthusiastic presentation - and revealed not only current progress, but some interesting glimpses at future technology they are working on. I found it interesting that Vincent claimed "VE is the largest mapping project ever in the industry". Given the amount of money have spent, and the huge volume of data they have generated (3D city models, Bird's Eye Views, as well as high resolution ortho photos and street maps) - they are certainly generating a lot of bytes of imagery. But, don't forget Google has StreetView imagery, ortho imagery, street maps, and 3D city models as well. And, Google has many layers of information not found in Virtual Earth (borders, places of interest, Gigapan photos, Panaramio, etc., etc.). Google started the process of "crowd sourced" mapping data which has generated vast amounts of data as well. So, I think it is presumptuous to say Microsoft's project is bigger. Vincent also demonstrated the impressive Virtual Earth upgrade from last month with a particular emphasis on the new "version 2" 3D cities. Currently there are only four new cities, but I heard from other Microsoft people they plan to add several new v2 cities a month soon. As I've said before, the new 3D trees they've added look awesome, and the upgraded model textures definitely enhance the look of their cities. Probably the most interesting new demonstration by Vincent was a new upcoming capability they are working on: automatically placed photo overlays. The demo appeared to offer the same 3D placement of photos as Google Earth's new PhotoOverlay (first introduced last fall). But, the big difference is that Vincent claimed they could automatically place the photo. I suspect this is using the same underlying photogrammetry technology used to generate their 3D models. This could be a huge development since putting photos in Google Earth's PhotoOverlay manually is a real pain. Now, if only Microsoft will do it in such a way that the photos can be output through KML using the PhotoOverlay parameter - that would be cool! Vincent also briefly demoed a "StreetView" technology they are working on - it was showing "video" of the street views. Another last minute demo Vincent gave was showing the ability to add sunlight time animations in Virtual Earth 3D in some future update. Microsoft is definitely pushing hard to earn the "best" title in virtual world technology. And, they certainly do have some of the best data (BEV, their ortho photos, the size of their 3D city models, and the new 3D trees in their v2 city models). I certainly hope Google is working hard to add new and better models and features or they may lose their lead.
• Poly9 - Poly9 are the creators of FreeEarth - a free browser-based 3D virtual globe which was one of the first to support KML. They have added a number of features to Free Earth - including some not even in Google Earth (like sound). More recently they have announced a new commercial product to help emergency responders called "GeoAlert" (see press release). They claim the system can help save lives. They've teamed with another company which can automatically call people when an emergency (like a chemical fire) requires evacuations.
• Fortius One - Sean Gorman - Sean has a good grasp of the development of the GeoWeb. He gave a good summary of progress in that arena and described efforts by his company with their GeoCommons (announced at Where last year) which lets people upload data and get back interesting visualization maps. He said they ran into a bottleneck with their design oncce they reached 1.6 billion uploaded features. They formally announced a new application for GeoCommons called Finder! whose mission is to allow you to "Upload, Organize, and Share your GeoData".
• Pict Earth and DIYDrones - Pict Earth's David Riallant and Jeff Johnson gave a great overview of their aerial photography technologies using primarily unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and some regular general aviation aircraft. (I've written about Pict Earth several times because they have used Google Earth as a platform for visualizing their data). The significance of what they are doing is the real-time geo-location and mapping of the photos, and the experiments they have made with using off-the-shelf technlologies like smart phones to acquire the photos, provide GPS location, and communicate with the ground. They have also worked with Chris Anderson who has been developing technologies to create auto-pilot capabilities to turn basic remote controlled aircrafts into UAVs. Chris gave a very engaging talk also describing the evoloution of their technologies (and some great stories about succeses and failures). Their goal is to create open source software and very low cost solutions that anyone can add to create their own UAVs. See his web site DIYDrones.com.

I'll try to update this post with other observations from Day 2 later. But, I need to go prepare for today's sessions. I also want to mention a few things I observed in the booths and at the Where Fair.

More Where 2.0 news: Day 1 summary, Google John Hanke Keynote

[UPDATED 14-May 1510 ET - official details on the imagery updated added below.]

Google has released new imagery today for Google Earth. As usual, they are not revealing the locations yet - instead we get some hints of locations in the form of some riddles. I've been busy with attending the Where 2.0 conference, and haven't had time yet to check out the imagery myself.

Here's the answers to some of the riddles (thanks to help from some comments below): 1) Los Angeles, 2) Coronado Island near San Diego, 3) Houston, Tx, 4) Lisbon, Portugal, 5) Madrid, Spain; 6) Milan, Italy, 7) Melbourne, Australia, 8) Miami, Florida, 9) Isle of Man

Thanks to GEB readers for find a lot of the new imagery, but here are the official details from Google's LatLong blog:

New high resolution:

Significant amount of new satellite imagery in Ecuador, Peru, Senegal, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, India, Iran, Bangladesh, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, and The Philippines. Additionally, new 2.5m imagery for part of Western Australia

Updated Imagery:
Americas:
- USA: LA, San Diego, Houston, Miami, Chicago and Milwaukee area suburbs, New York City area suburbs, much of coastal New Jersey, and Harney County (Oregon).

Europe, Middle East & Africa:

- England: Isle of Man, Suffolk

- Spain: Madrid
- Portugal: Lisbon, Guimaraes, Porto, Sevilla, Coimbra, Costa del Sol, Costa Blanca
- Italy: Milan
- France: Toulon, Montbeliard
- The Netherlands: Assen

Asia & Oceania:

- Armenia: Yerevan
- Australia: Melbourne, Darwin

Updated Terrain:
- Westport, Ireland
- Hawaii
- Puerto Rico

Thanks to Google Earth's StreetView layer, I noticed some of the new StreetView images released today have some night-time views of Times Square. See it here in Google Maps:

In Google Earth (v4.3 only), if you turn on the StreetView layer and zoom down to near street level, you'll see miniature spheres showing the images in place of the icons. That's how I quickly noticed the different set of images. See more about StreetView in the video demonstration of Google Earth 4.3 here (the last half of the video shows it).

The Times Square area is a particularly good area to check out the new face blurring technique Google is using to help reduce privacy concerns about StreetView imagery. They have face detection software to help with the blurring process.

[UPDATED 1730PT: Added the video of the talk below.]

At Where 2.0 today John Hanke, the Director of the Google Geo team, had a couple of announcements. He started out by giving a report on the state of the GeoWeb as he sees it. According to Google's statistics geospatial data grew by 300% since last year's Where 2.0. He also described the progress in their geosearching which started with Google Earth and has progressed into Google Maps with more features. He said he had one announcement related to that: Google is now releasing a GeoSearch API. An AJAX API that allows you to tap into Google's geodata search indices. It will be interesting to see if you can get more results than the standard Maps/Earth interfaces and then output the results in KML. I'll link to details on their web site after they formally make this announcement.

The other interesting thing that happened during John's talk was his strategy to get more GIS data into the Where 2.0 type applications world. John went and spoke to Jack Dangermond, CEO of ESRI, to see if he could convince him to work on ways to better enable access to GIS data. He invited Jack up to the stage and Jack quite enthusiastically described his shared vision with Google to get GIS data more accessible. Apparently ESRI will be intorducing new features in the applications to facilitate KML output of GIS data. Jack said the new features will start rolling out in about 4 weeks. The implication was that it would be possible to create mashups between GIS databases and neogeography databases and tools. They discussed a bit the issues that might crop up between crowdsourced data vs. professional GIS data, but that in the long run it could be for the best. Emergency situations like the California fires was given as an example where both data types proved useful.

Here's a video of the presentation:

More Where 2.0 2008 coverage: Day 2 summary

• New StreeView Stuff - Google pre-announced new StreetView data for New York City. The data reportedly has higher resolution data. However, so far I'm not seeing the new StreetView imagery. But, those of you concerned about seeing your face appear there - don't worry - Google has used face-detection software that "blurs" the faces in the imagery. The data is also reportedly more recent. I did notice a new "More" drop-down option that lets you turn on Panoramio or Wikipedia placemarks though.
• WorldWide Telescope - Microsoft has surprised many of us by releasing a beta of their widely anticipated WorldWide Telescope application. Stefan Geens at OgleEarth calls it "stunning", and further says: "this is easily the most impressive thing I've seen Microsoft do in a long time...". I haven't had a chance to try installing it, but hopefully will before the week is out. I'll draw comparisons with Google Earth's Sky mode. Mickey says it has some bugs, but is definitely worth checking out. The New York Times has an interesting article describing both WWT and Google Earth Sky and compares them from a philosophical approach.
• Dishpointer.com - Stefan at OgleEarth also has a great review of an interesting new web site called Dishpointer. This site will calculate the angle for TV satellite antennas. More importantly, it will let you see it in Google Earth so you can turn on 3D buildings and see if you might be obscured by buildings.
• Yahoo WOE - Rev Dan Catt announced a new Yahoo capability to offer "Where on Earth IDs". Here's the Yahoo announcement. Dan focuses on the Flickr aspects of using these new ids. Ed Parsons from Google also comments positively on the Yahoo effort.
• GPSAnimator.com - Got an E-mail from some folks who have developed an application called StarTRAX which lets you visualize your GPS tracks in Google Earth. I haven't had a chance to try it out, but it sounds a lot like GPSVisualizer.

Left my house near Raleigh, NC at 4 AM to fly out to California. I was a bit weary after nearly 11 hours of travel when I arrived at the Where 2.0 registration desk. But, I did manage to show up just in time for lunch! Brady Forrest of O'Reilley, Program Chair for Where 2.0, joined me for lunch and brought me up to date on events thus far. He said the morning tutorials were well attended and seemed to be quite popular (see schedule for Monday). Also, nearly half the people who registered for the conference were in attendance for the first day events. Also, overall attendance looked to be higher than last year. Several announcements are lined up for the week as well from both big and new players in the geospatial community. Looks like lots of good stuff for this year's event!

The afternoon tutorials included another four tutorials. Naturally, I chose to attend the one by Google entitled: "Searching the Geoweb: Exposing Your Geo Data to Search Engines" by Lior Ron and Mano Marks. Their session focused on how to get your geospatial data to be recognized by search engines (or at least Google). Google has already been scanning web sites for links to GeoRSS, KML, or KMZ files as well as the Google Earth Community and other known locations. They gave tips on how to improve the chances things will be indexed. A significant point is that you shouldn't make a single large file with tens of thousands of placemarks. Better to break down the content into different files. The one piece of real news in this session is that Google is now supporting a new sitemap file format for geospatial content. This means you can very specifically tell the search engines to look for a KML, KMZ, or GeoRSS file which will then be almost immediately scanned into the geosearch index. The last half of the session was dedicated to discussing how to create good KML content using various tools as well as directly coding KML. Google said there will be more of these tutorials during the Google I/O developer conference later this month.

Keep reading for some details on Ignite/Launchpad.

Over 100 new historical maps have been added to the Rumsey layer in Google Earth from David Rumsey's map collection of over 17,000 maps he has available online. The maps range from complete global maps to historical maps for cities around the world. Turn on the layer under "Gallery->Rumsey Historical Maps". You see placemarks for each map along with the date of the map and a thumbnail of what it looks like. Click on the thumbnail to load the map as an overlay in Google Earth. The maps are very fascinating to look at, and compare to the underlying "real" world. Select the layer and grab the transparency slider above to make comparisons, or turn on the "Borders" layer and adjust your zoom level to see how the borders match up to modern day political boundaries and coastlines. via Google Lat Long

Seero is a new service which offers geo-spatially aware video content in either Google Maps or Google Earth. You can even watch the position of a video broadcast change during the playback of the content, or you can do your own broadcasts. See my previous post on this.

The Seero team will be offering live video content from the O'Reilly Where 2.0 conference starting today. They now have a new service allowing you to embed a video with the geospatial context on web sites, so I'm including an embed of the Where 2.0 content here (Note: until they start broadcast the content you'll see here will be other content available from Seero - See below for a Google Earth link to watch the video from within Google Earth):

Or, you can watch the broadcast through a placemark in Google Earth through this link . I'll be attending Where 2.0 myself this week, make sure you look me up in person if you're going. Or, watch Seero, you might see me right here on video at some point.

It's been a while since I highlighted 3D models for viewing in Google Earth on a Friday. The Google 3D Warehouse has continued to evolve over the last two years. They now have an excellent way of sharing cool 3D models called "Collections". Anyone can set up a collection and point to various 3D models already in the warehouse. And, you can rate and comment on the ones you like.

Today I'd like to point out an excellent collection of 3D structures, put together by someone called 'scarpimp', which are UNESCO Cultural Heritage sites. Places like the Taj Majal or the Himeji Castle and 50 other UNESCO sites are already in the collection. Many of these buildings are already built in to the 3D Buildings layer of Google Earth. Some, like the Himeji Caslte seen in the screenshot are not well optimized, so they aren't in the 3D Buildings layer. You can find the locations of these UNESCO sites more quickly by just viewing the 3D Warehouse collection. Hopefully this collection will inspire 3D modelers to create more of the other 500 or so UNESCO sites.

I've been updating my original post with a list of visualizations on the Myanmar disaster for Google Earth showing Cyclone Nargis's path, weather data, and the resulting flooding from satellite photos. Google and other organizations have released all kinds of data in the aftermath of the storm to help people realize the extent of the disaster.

Google has a link for places to send support to Myanmar in their time of need.

• NBA Destination - The National Basketball Association and ESPN have commissioned a Google Earth visualization showing all kinds of NBA and basketball content including 3D models of stadiums, placemarks with trivia and history, and a few little basketball "easter eggs" (Tip: try looking to the east of Mt. Hood, Oregon after loading the KML). You can go to their fancy flash-based web site NBAEarth.com which includes a video introduction, or you can go straight to the KML file . Thanks to Anandaroop Roy, the author of the KML content, for telling me. This is a well done KML file with lots of interesting content.

• EarthNC 2.0 - EarthNC has celebrated their one year anniversary by releasing version 2.0 of their online and Plus versions of EarthNC electronic charts and other marine data for Google Earth. If you're a boater (particularly in US waters) you should definitely check out this fantastic resource of marine data. EarthNC has some of the best KML, and most thorough, content available for Google Earth. And, their rates are very reasonable, especially compared to other data providers in the marine industry.

• Google Geo Education - Google has released a new web site to help educators find their geospatial related educational tools and content I'm a little disappointed they don't highlight more examples of Google Earth content. But, they do have some interesting classroom ideas, and on that page they link to a post I did last September with more relevant links for educators.

Next week, I will be attending the O'Reilly Where 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. If you're planning to go, and you regularly read this blog, please make sure to look for me and let me know you're a GEB reader. I'm planning to give away one free SpaceNavigator for Notebooks on Wednesday May 14th to a random pick from GEB readers who give me their business card while at Where 2.0 (like GEB did last year).

Also, if you want to attend Where 2.0, but the cost is causing you to hesitate, GEB is giving away two free passes to Where 2.0. Leave a comment to this post if you're interested (the comments won't be posted). Ardent Google Earth fans are more likely to get the passes, but tell me why you want to attend Where 2.0 in your comment and include your e-mail address. I'll select the winners by Thursday (May 8th) afternoon.

[UPDATE May 8th: I've selected the two winners of the free passes. There's a chance some of you may still get a free pass from O'Reilly because I suggested the runners up to them. Hope to see you there at Where!]