Mapping

PARIS--There's been a lot of discussion of late about how Apple's iPhone remains the most profitable smartphone around, despite fierce competition from Android.

That's relevant for companies like HTC and Samsung that sell Android phones. But Google has a different agenda with its freely available operating system: driving usage of its own services.

That was the business interest that Google's Marissa Mayer discussed today at the LeWeb conference here. As the vice president in charge of products with a local component, she has a high interest in what happens on mobile phones.

"Google Maps for … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Interviewed at the Web 2.0 Summit, Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley talked about how the location check-in app is becoming more passive.

"One of the big hurdles we have is that you have to think about using it," he said of Foursquare. "If we can lower that barrier, we can juice the experience."

That's why the company recently launched the Radar feature, which, once you turn it on, collects info about where you are, the direction you're going, and so on. It'll tell you if people you like are nearby, and "… Read more

All that work to build 3D graphics into the Web just bore fruit on one of the Internet's most useful and widely used sites: Google Maps.

Google has enabled a "MapsGL" option to show 3D buildings on the site through the use of WebGL, a 3D graphics technology for the Web that four of the five top browsers have embraced.

The move marks another step in the convergence of the browser-based Google Maps and the more immersive Google Earth software that stemmed from Google's 2004 acquisition of Keyhole. Google Earth lets people fly around, overlays imagery … Read more

Recently, I took a road trip from San Francisco to Los Angeles to drive the 2012 Toyota Camry Hybrid. When I told friends that I'd driven over 5 hours one-way just spend even more time driving when I got there, the question I got most often was, "Wouldn't it have been cheaper to just fly?"

Had I known about the Cost2Drive Web service and iOS app at the time, I'd have been better equipped to answer that query.

After entering a starting address, ending address, and a make, model, and year of a vehicle, Cost2Drive … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--At the TechCrunch Disrupt conference today, the first product announcement came from Gowalla CEO Josh Williams. The new version of Gowalla will be bringing city guides to the service, leveraging the company's large database of places and updates from users.

The new version will launch shortly with more than 60 city guides using, of course, user content. But the service has new editorial partners, including Disney, National Geographic, and several universities.

With Gowalla, you can now create "stories" around events. Anyone you tag in a location and time becomes a full authoring partner of the post, and the presentation of these stories is quite good.

The question is: by focusing on the traveler instead of the resident, does Gowalla give up the nice deal-based transactional business that Foursquare and Facebook can run with? Perhaps, but the travel business is in many ways a much sweeter place to be. The advertising money is national more than regional, bigger, and more stable. You can still use Gowalla to check in at locations, so this is a bigger--and smarter--change than it may appear at first.

TechCrunch has the preview post … Read more

New Zealander and former decathlete Sean Gourley says it's only a matter of time before his company Quid will know more than the United States government. "How much is information worth?" he asked rhetorically during at a recent lunch meeting with CNET, as he showed off Quid's software that uses data, math, and visualizations to help clients make billion-dollar decisions.

Based on today's news from the company, the answer to Gourley's question is "a lot." Quid announced it has secured $10 million in series C funding from some heavyweights in the Silicon … Read more

Google Maps has received a new experimental Labs add-on today that may simplify your life in areas with little to no Wi-Fi or data.

The "Download map area" add-on in the new Google Maps 5.7 for Android will store a map for a specific area you're trying to visit. You'll have to plan in advance with this tool, and downloading a map will take some time and storage space, but it beats lugging around a guide book, or worrying about getting enough signal in a trouble spot.

If you've got an Android phone running … Read more

Trying to find a specific location using Bing Streetside View is potentially a bit easier now, thanks to a few new tweaks from Microsoft.

Using your mouse to drag across the screen, you can now pan up and down different streets to track down specific sites and locations. As you virtually stroll along each street, Bing quickly updates the street-level photo view, showing you a seamless perspective of your tour of the neighborhood. You can drag your mouse left or right to travel along your current street. Making a right or left at an intersection is just a matter of … Read more

Google may have launched its first daily deal offering in Portland, Ore., yesterday, but Groupon is fighting back one city at a time, with a spin on the model it popularized.

Groupon Now, which rolled out in San Francisco and New York yesterday and launched in Chicago two weeks ago, follows the formula of Groupon's original online daily deal but shrinks the timeline. Instead of having 24 hours to purchase a perk and months to use it, you'll now have hours to both buy the deal and cash it in.

The premise is simple. After entering your location … Read more