by R. Colin Johnson, Contributor, Smarter Technology
Google maps are great for navigating to an address, but once you arrive, it’s up to you to find the office, meeting room or vendor inside. Now Micello takes over where conventional navigators leave off, mapping your route inside buildings, malls, convention centers and other points of interest.
by Juliet Ye, Reporter, China Journal, The Wall Street Journal
The Google April Fool’s Day joke has become something of a tradition at this time of the year, even in China.
Last year, Google posted a mock recruitment ad for a Google “human flesh search engine”….This year, the Internet giant announced the launch of a new service in China: the “Google Pigeon Bird’s Eye View.” Similar in concept to Google Street View, Google says the new service will be used to improve the image resolution on Google Earth and Google Maps, while also embracing China’s vibrant “shanzhai” culture.
Tragic events unfolded yesterday as a group of British skiers became separated from two of their party in the Swiss resort of Verbier. The rescue operation took on a global perspective when members of the party–a group of U.K. technology entrepreneurs–used the microblogging site Twitter in trying to locate the missing skiers.
MapQuest was once the unquestioned leader among online mapping services. And while others like Google Maps or Microsoft’s Live Search Maps offer a more modern interface and far more features than MapQuest, the latest data from Hitwise show that MapQuest still commands almost 40 percent of the market.
The terrorists who struck Mumbai last month stunned authorities not only with their use of sophisticated weaponry but also with their comfort with modern technology. The terrorists navigated across the Arabian Sea to Mumbai from Karachi, Pakistan, with the help of a global positioning system handset.
When they hear the telltale sirens of a fire truck bursting out of the station in Nanaimo, the locals don’t need to look out of the window or tune in to newscasts to find out where the action is. Instead, they can simply log on to Google Maps or Google Earth and track the firefighters in real time as they tear down the streets of this Vancouver Island port community. The Google-enabling of Nanaimo’s fire service, launched just weeks ago, is the latest venture in a British Columbia town that has been dubbed the capital of Google Earth.
by David Talbot, Chief Correspondent, Technology Review
… The days of patrol leaders operating half-blind on the deadly streets of Iraq are drawing to a close. After a two-year rush program by the Pentagon’s research arm, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, troops are now getting what might be described as Google Maps for the Iraq counterinsurgency. There is nothing cutting-edge about the underlying technology: software that runs on PCs and taps multiple distributed databases. But the trove of information the system delivers is of central importance in the daily lives of soldiers. The new technology–called the Tactical Ground Reporting System, or TIGR–is a map-centric application that junior officers (the young sergeants and lieutenants who command patrols) can study before going on patrol and add to upon returning.
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