Mapping

Weather service Weather Underground has a new trick up its sleeve: it can now show you the weather on a full-screen Google Map. The company is aptly calling it Fullscreenweather.com.

Fullscreenweather works just like Google Maps, meaning you can use your mouse wheel to zoom in and out, as well as use it to drag around the surface. It also includes quick toggles to change the terrain type, as well as what weather layer you're looking at--like temperature, precipitation, and cloud cover.

The company says it's been designed especially for touch-screen devices, including the Apple's upcoming … Read more

We've taken a first look at Google Buzz (video) from many angles--as a Gmail feature, as a privacy nightmare, and as a pain to disable. Now it's time to fire up the mobile phone to see how Google's new social networking service works on the go.

We give you a taste of Google Buzz for mobile in our First Look video, as tested (fittingly) on Google's Nexus One phone. But heed our warning--what you can access using Buzz from various outlets is a brain-bender, and depends on your smartphone.… Read more

OAKLAND, Calif.--Google on Friday introduced an interactive view of the San Francisco Bay Area's Bay Bridge to users of its Google Earth mapping software.

The new view (zipped file), which can be seen by all Google Earth users who have 3D buildings turned on, provides a sneak peak at a completed version of the bridge. This includes a live representation of ongoing construction of the self-anchored suspension span, the final piece that will cross the divide between Oakland and Yerba Buena Island, connecting the East Bay to downtown San Francisco.

Google and the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) … Read more

Do New York pigeons sound different from California pigeons? I'm not sure, but The Smalls Street Sounds could help me find out.

The new interactive online project aims to create a sort of sonic landscape of the U.S. by overlaying local sound snippets on Google Maps. Clicking through the 270-plus clips uploaded as of late Wednesday afternoon offers an imaginative audio tour from East to West and in between. It's a great way to relive the drama of a tropical Florida thunderstorm, amble through San Francisco's Chinatown, or visit that Radio Shack in Danbury, Conn., you've always wanted to check out.

Some sounds are decidedly location-specific (subway performers in New City, a Las Vegas casino, a student demonstration in Berkeley), while others could be heard anywhere (phones ringing, steam heaters sputtering, doors closing, zippers being zipped, plastic crinkling, computer keyboards tapping). You'll hear traffic, boots on pavement, trains, buses, wind, crying children, the sounds of running in snow--all captivating in their own way.

The Sound Map is a project of The Smalls, a curator of independent short films whose mission is to "champion the use of diverse and inspiring sounds in filmmaking and support talented artists who use sounds in a creative way to tell their stories and convey their own unique vision."

Next week, in fact, the Smalls Street Sounds will launch a competition challenging filmmakers to create short films (three minutes or less) based on sounds taken from the Sound Map. The theme of the contest will be announced on February 8.

In the meantime, anyone can contribute sounds (MP3 files only for now), with no limit on clip length, only file size. I'm just hoping no one uploads the voice of a San Francisco MUNI operator announcing yet another delay. I just don't think I could take hearing that one again.

… Read more

New iPhone app Assemble has one simple purpose, and manages to do it well. It lets you send out your location to a group of friends (or just contacts), along with a personalized message with any special instructions. In turn, they can use the app to navigate directly to you.

Instead of using SMS messages or e-mail, Assemble wisely makes use of Apple's push notification service. This is handy for your cheapskate friends who aren't on a messaging plan, but more importantly, clicking "view" on that message jumps them to a Google map of your location. … Read more

It's standard fare for Google to incubate a mobile app feature on one platform before rolling it out to the others. That's why an update on Tuesday to Android's Google Maps app will please Android users, who will see an uptick in productivity on the Maps, but will excite few other Google mobile-watchers on the whole.

We've seem both new features that Google is rolling out to Android phones in other guises. There's star syncing (we first heard about it in December), which stores the places you mark as favorites on your Google account, so … Read more

WINDSOR, U.K.--How opportune.

Just as I arrived as a transplant to England for a spell, Google added tours of 20 National Trust historic sites to Google Maps Street View.

I've long been a proponent of virtual tourism over the Internet, whether for planning an actual visit or just exploring other places virtually, so I'm happy about Google's partnership with the National Trust. The organization takes care of many historic sites in the United Kingdom, including assorted stately homes, the prehistoric stone circle at Avebury, and Lindisfarne Castle, where I was assaulted by territorial terns as a boy.

Google said 20 National Trust sites are now on Street View, and the National Trust said that more are coming, including a personal favorite, the Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland. The tours let virtual visitors click linearly through the sites--a plodding and limited way to explore compared with roaming freely around the actual sites, but still good enough to be useful. … Read more

Could virtual billboards one day show up in Google Street View?

A few months ago, Google gave a presentation to marketing and ad agency types in Europe as part of an event called "Above and Beyond 2009," an educational seminar/infomercial on how Google can help get their clients' messages out to the public. One of the presentations was on the exploding opportunities in mobile advertising, something with which Google is clearly obsessed these days.

In the presentation, Google tossed out the notion that ads may one day appear in Street View, the feature in Google Maps that … Read more

Navteq has begun collecting data to construct detailed 3D models and maps of the United States, the digital-mapping specialist said Wednesday.

The Nokia subsidiary has begun outfitting its data collection vehicles with a system called Navteq True. One big part is a lidar (light detection and ranging) system that uses lasers to construct 3D maps of the world out of a sea of data points. The company boasts that its True system uses 64 rotating lidar lasers, captures 1.5 million 3D data points per second from features as far as 150 meters away and works even when the data … Read more