Tag: GOOGLEMAPS

Facebook released an update to its iPhone app yesterday, bringing event check-ins and enhanced map functionality. Rather than relying on Facebook Places, users can now check in at events and use Google Maps to visualize where their friends have checked in. And, perhaps best of all, the update allows you to unfriend people directly from your phone. No word yet on when these features will come to ...

As lame as it may be, we occasionally hop on the ol' Google Maps, and meander our ways down scenic city streets from our desks. Paris, New Orleans and Buenos Aires can all be ours, regardless of where we lay our laptops. Thanks to an update from Google, we can now wander off the streets of Rome and into the Colosseum. We'll get some work done next week. ...

Edmund Helmer used to spend a lot his time on IMDB, where he would look up the exact filming locations of his favorite movies. One day, though, he decided to cut out the middle man, and created his own custom Google Map, showing more geographical movie information than anyone could ever desire. Using Google's Fusion Tables data management tool, Helmer created a map showing the precise set ...

Tonight's First Four games in Dayton, Ohio, will tip off the 2011 NCAA men's basketball tournament. Until then, Google has a remedy for March Madness, offering 3-D virtual tours of the tourney's 14 host arenas. You can get a sneak peek, inside and out, at the places in which all the hoop heartbreak and joy will go down. In addition to the 3-D tours, Google has created a map that pinpoints the ...

The Chinese government imposes strict regulations on what images can and can't be displayed in overhead photos, making life difficult for services like Google Maps. But Baidu, China's Google equivalent, recently discovered that it could get around the government's restrictions by turning the entire Chinese landscape into one big illustration. The search engine's rendering makes China look a lot ...

It's Valentine's Day, and Google is celebrating the occasion with a special homepage doodle, and a new, 'Map Your Valentine' location-sharing service for lovers. The doodle is designed as a pretty obvious homage to Robert Indiana's famous 'LOVE' image, with a heart replacing the first "O" in a re-arranged Google logo, and the second one slanted to the right. Unlike recent homepage doodles, ...

Earlier this month, the latest version of Google Maps for Android got teased by Andy Rubin at D: Dive Into Mobile. Today, version 5.0 of the app has landed, and brought with it a host of fancy new features. The most immediately obvious will be the new 3-D view, which allows you to tilt, rotate and zoom the map. For some cities, like New York, when you're zoomed in close enough, the new Maps ...

Last night, Google launched Hotpot, a recommendation engine that is getting baked into Places, and comes loaded in the latest update to Google Maps for Android. Essentially Google's answer to Yelp, Hotpot connects you with friends so that you can share reviews and recommendations of businesses, such as bars and restaurants. The service takes a number of factors into consideration when making a ...

We've seen Google Maps misplace cities and mislead pedestrians, but we never thought the navigational service's occasional inaccuracies could spark an international conflict -- until now. It all began when Nicaraguan military commander Eden Pastora sent a group of troops into a region around San Juan Lake, near the border between Nicaragua and Costa Rica. Upon arriving, the soldiers promptly ...

As much as Google has shrunk our world for the better, we fear the all-seeing G might, in the same motion, strip it of the wonders it holds. Then, we see something like this game. Giving you a Street View image, a gridded world map and fifty guesses, it asks you to pinpoint the spot it was taken, and remember the uniqueness of every vista and street corner. ...

The Google search page is getting a small but significant tweak that makes identifying and changing your location much easier. Now your current (or at least assumed current) location is displayed on the left-hand navigation bar on the results page. You can easily update your whereabouts by clicking the "change location" link. Pretty simple, really, but quite handy. ...

We already know that kites outfitted with cameras can provide a DIY alternative to satellite imagery, as was evidenced in Grassroots Mapping's overhead shots of the oil-strangled Gulf Coast. Now, Frank Taylor, the author of the Google Earth Blog (not officially affiliated with the Menlo Park-based Net behemoth), has provided his favorite aerial imagery producer with some hi-res shots of his own, ...

Employees at Longleat Safari Park in Wiltshire, England, started noticing something strange recently. The giant, three-dimensional hedge maze that normally takes 90 minutes of hair-pulling panic to complete was becoming a breeze for many patrons, who were blowing through the attraction in a matter of minutes. Eventually the workers realized that many were ingeniously using their phones to cheat ...

For the third time, Google has managed to misplace the city of Sunrise, Florida, home to 90,000 U.S. citizens and the NHL's Florida Panthers. Despite Sunrise's being a reasonably sizable place with plenty of businesses, the world's most popular search engine can't seem to keep the city in its rightful place: on the east coast of Florida just outside of Fort Lauderdale. For one month this summer, ...

Want to know the average price of marijuana across the continent? PriceOfWeed crowdsources data from (obviously anonymous) users about their most recent sticky purchases, and handily displays the results on a Google map. Thanks to the 600 submissions in the week since its launch, we found out that weed is cheap in British Columbia and Oregon, and expensive in New York. Shocker? ...