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Microsoft shows off Street Slide, trumps Google’s Street View

Microsoft Street SlideI don’t know about you, but I use Google’s Street View option in Google Maps all the time.  It is just one of those completely ‘wow’ products that is also totally practical.

Well guess who’s knocking on the ‘wow’ door of street level imaging? Microsoft. They just showed off their new Street Slide (hmm… nice similar name) at a technical conference and produced a video showing it off.

New Gmail Lab lets you see Maps of addresses embedded in e-mails

Gmail has long had an automatic link to a map to the right of the e-mail if it detected an address in the body. But now, there’s a new Gmail Lab called “Google Maps previews in mail” that will let you preview the map right in the body of the e-mail.

Preview Maps in Gmail

It takes a few seconds to load, but it seems quicker than either clicking that automatic link or copying & pasting the address into a separate Google Maps window.

Google Maps – now with Arterial Traffic info

For those of us commuters, especially the ones living in the suburbs of some big city, traffic can be a real nightmare. And of course, we’re all looking for alternative routes and usually when you drop off the freeway, you’re taking a gamble that the side streets will be better traffic-wise.

Help is here – Google (Traffic) Maps now features arterial traffic!

And while we’re at it, *you* can help to get this speed info right by getting Mobile Google Maps on your GPS-capable phone and turning on My Location so your phone sends Google up to date info about how fast you’re going. Nice.

i-gotU GPS travel & sports logger

The i-gotU GPS logger tracks your trip via GPS and records up to 65,000 waypoints in its 16MB memory. With its very small size, you can slip this into your pocket and head off on a hike, bike ride or road trip. Take pictures along the way and when you get back, plug both camera and i-gotU unit into your PC and the software will figure out where and when you took those photos.

The software is also configured to upload your travel blog to sites like @trip, Google Maps, Facebook and more. Take a look at the demo on @trip to get a good idea of what it can do for you without your having to figure out blogging software or GPS to map or photo to GPS.

There are 2 versions: a pure USB one and one that has Bluetooth so that you can pair it with your phone and use it as the GPS unit for your cell.

Buy now!

More info from the manufacturer
Price: $29.99
(Please note prices are subject to change and the listed price is correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of posting)

Broughton, UK residents say no to Google StreetView

The residents of Broughton, a village north of London, decided that they did not want Google’s StreetView team taking any photos of their homes, so they took matters into their own hands. They not only flagged down the Google StreetView driver, and angrily remonstrated with him, they called the police as well.

As much as I (we) all love StreetView, we can certainly appreciate the rights and wishes of the residents not to have their homes appear on a public website. Now if only Google could ammend their policy to include the ability of homeowners to not appear on StreetView in the first place. Right now, you can request to have your home removed from StreetView within a matter of hours.

How the Matrix Begins

Morpheus couldn’t tell Neo how the Matrix was first built, I think we’re seeing some interesting groundwork being laid for an ever-more realistic simulations of the earth coming out that will may one day give us the option of choosing to live in a virtual world instead of the real one. Which would make broadband access a vital public utility along with water, gas, and electricity.

First, Google Earth. If you haven’t downloaded it, stop reading right now and go get it. The fact that an interactive model of the entire earth, including detailed satellite imagery, 3D representations of buildings, hyperlinks to user-generated photo albums and a freakin’ flight simulator to fly around all of it is free, as in beer, is still mind-boggling. The thing to remember is that Google isn’t sitting still on Google Earth or it’s web-based companion, Google Maps. There’s a decent chance that since I’ve been writing this post, Google has added another cool feature to its mapping tools that will be the topic of another blog post.

Google Maps Street View

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