Mapping

BlackBerry-carrying cyclists seeking direction for their two-wheelers are now privy to the same directions database introduced three weeks ago for Android smartphones.

In addition to requesting biking directions, you can also activate the Bicycling layer in maps to check out cycler-centric trails.

As with the Android version, the cycler-friendly Google Maps for BlackBerry 4.2 update only applies to handsets in the U.S.

In addition to devising safe bike routes, the map app update also refreshes the search results list, adding images and place ratings, in addition to some welcome quick-link buttons that you can tap to get directions … Read more

How did Google's Wi-Fi spying debacle get to this point?

As Google prepares to defend itself against allegations of Wi-Fi spying, it has said very little about exactly what kind of personal data it gathered as part of its Street View project. Last week, Google also declined to provide executives willing to speak on the record about how one of the most monumental oversights in its history occurred: the inadvertent gathering of "payload" data by Wi-Fi sniffers mapping hotspots while recording street scenes for Google Street View.

But Google finally did confirm a few additional details about … Read more

Google has yet to turn over data collected as part of its Street View program to German authorities, and could be prepared to hold out for some time.

The New York Times and Financial Times reported that Google missed a Wednesday deadline to turn over the data it collected from unsecured Wi-Fi networks by its Street View cars, a practice which Google has said was done inadvertently but has raised the hackles of critics and privacy advocates. Google did provide German authorities with a written explanation of how the incident occurred, according to the AP, but it's declining to … Read more

If you're the kind of person who likes to trace your own footprints, you may be interested in the new experimental feature that Google introduced Wednesday for mobile phones.

When you opt into the Latitude location feature on Google Maps and enable Location History, you'll find a brand-new beta dashboard view that doesn't just report your meanderings in a linear, chronological way, but will attempt to group your visits by trends, like trips away from home. The addition of map thumbnails helps keep data visual, liberating your history from traditional text-based constraints.

Privacy has been a key concern of late, … Read more

Dear Google,

I try not to write too many of these open letters because, well, they're a gimmicky way to hook readers on a Monday after a long week of news. But your relative silence since last Friday's revelation that you collected personal data from unsecured Wi-Fi hot spots all over the globe shows you are underestimating the slow burn this incident has sparked among your user base, otherwise known as basically everybody on the Internet.

This isn't like Facebook exposing the pictures from your 5-year college reunion, the one where you learned that no, you can … Read more

Google has released the source code for an an Android phone GPS program called My Tracks, which lets people record where they've been, log journeys in Google Docs, and post their trip maps online.

"You can expect My Tracks to become better than ever with the contributions we hope it will receive from other developers, and also that many applications which work side-by-side with My Tracks will be written," Google engineer Rodrigo Damazio said in an e-mail list posting Friday. "For instance, one could easily build an application for tracking fitness activities, geocaching, aviation, and so … Read more

The fallout from Google's Wi-Fi data collection gaffe continues, with the U.K. government ordering it to destroy personal data collected through the Street View project.

The Information Commission's Office in the U.K. issued the order Tuesday, according to the Guardian, following Google's disclosure Friday that it had inadvertently collected personal data from Wi-Fi hot spots as part of its Street View mapping project. Google has said that it collected random packets of Internet traffic sent over unsecured hot spots as part of its bid to use Wi-Fi hot-spot triangulation for geolocation services, which several companies … Read more

We've been using Google's voice-guided driving directions on an Android phone since October, but we didn't have too many equivalent apps to compare it with until Microsoft released its own voice navigation service for Bing last week for Windows phones.

We took Bing on a few test drives against Google's map navigation, all in the San Francisco Bay Area. Both apps will likely eventually get you where you want to go, but both exhibited overly creative directions and produced their own frustrating errors.

What we liked We immediately noticed Bing's less tinny-sounding directions bot. Sure, "she" still sounds robotic, but less so than Google's navigatrix. We also appreciated how the Bing app "bings" before sounding off the next direction. The chime was a natural and unintrusive interruption to signal that voice guidance is imminent. It would have been nice if Bing also chimed to indicate that it's time to make a left or right turn, as Magellan's GPS units do, but that's a more minor quibble.

What we didn't like Bing was the more navigationally flawed app in our tests compared with Google's navigation. Google's maps also have more features and options; for example, a street-level and bird's eye perspective of the map.

Within our first two test runs, Bing thrice dispensed misdirections that didn't correlate to the real world, including directing us to circle around a neighborhood even when we were on the same street as the destination address. There were also more trivial directional errors that turned up in subsequent testing. … Read more

Any urbanite knows that directions aren't created equally. Pedestrians can usually go wherever their feet can take them, but road traffic has to contend with hated one-way streets. Don't even get us started on cyclists. Luckily for bike riders toting Android phones in their messenger bags, a few days after Google added directions specifically for cyclists, the Maps team rolled biking guidance into the Android app.

Now cyclists who download the updated Google Maps 4.2 application from the Android Market can find optimal routes for their two-wheelers--both in the directions module and as a map layer that … Read more