Planet GeoSpatial

 GIS Stack Exchange is Open to All - New! A place where you can post a question and get fast answers. Wiki cross Digg approach. Using Tags and forum based content.Any 'geo' question What kind...

Map and GIS News finding blog. With so many Maps and GIS sites online now it is hard to find the good from the not so good. This blog tries to cut the cream and provide you with the newest, fastest, cleanest and most user friendly maps that are available online. News has location and it is mapped.

It appears that another Google Earth imagery update is underway -- thanks to GEB readers 'Eero' and 'cristi' for being the first to let us know about it.

As is often the case, you can use Google Maps to determine for sure whether or not a specific area is fresh. This new imagery isn't in Google Maps yet, so you can compare Earth vs. Maps to see what's new; the fresh imagery is already in Google Earth, but the old imagery is still in Google Maps. If you compare the two side-by-side and they're not identical, that means that you've found a freshly updated area in Google Earth!

[UPDATED -- 29-July, 9:41pm EST]

• Finland: Southern areas -- thanks 'Eero' and 'cristi'
• Nepal: -- thanks 'Steven'
• Netherlands: Various areas -- thanks 'Maarten'
• United States: San Jose and Sacramento, CA (thanks 'Steven'), Des Moines, IA (thanks 'cristi), Boston, MA (thanks 'Kevin') and Las Vegas, NV (thanks 'cristi')

If you find any other updated areas, please leave a comment and let us know!

We have recently added a really good new Idle Detail Report & Map.

Scrutinizing idle times and improving driver behavior as a result saves our customers a lot of money.  Knowing this we added this functionality to allow individual vehicles’ idle times to be examined more closely.  Improvements have also been made to the Idle Time Report (to include the ability to “drill down” from the summary to the detail for a particular vehicle/driver).

The Idle Detail Report can be run on an individual vehicle or a group of vehicles.  It will display individual idle events for each selected vehicle, along with the driver, address, and greenhouse gas emissions information for that event.  (The odometer values are also shown in the exportable spreadsheet version.)  Most of the columns are sortable – note the blue column headers shown below.

The Idle Time Report now allows more columns to be sorted too, including the % Idle column.  Clicking on individual vehicle labels will open an Idle Detail Report for the vehicle, with the same parameters that were previously selected.  Here is a sample detail report (note that one vehicle idled over 9 HOURS!):

After pressing the button for “Google Earth” all idle stops in the report are shown on a map (this one is 30 minutes or more):

Zooming down on another mapped idle stop shows the vehicle in a school parking lot:

This new report and associated mapping functionality will really help you understand who is idling your vehicles and costing you fuel and wear and tear, and let you instantly drill down to see where & in what context the vehicles are being left on when they’re not moving.

It is available for all customers & can be run for a month at a time.

It is extremely fast — running it for a full month for a customer with 279 vehicles only takes 2 seconds to finish.

Enjoy!

Thanks,

Rob.

A while back I blogged about Internet Explorer Accelerators that used Bing services for quickly highlighting text and performing subsequent searches (see, “Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 Includes Virtual Earth”). Well, Apple’s Safari browser has extensions that allow 3rd party services, such as Bing, to add on capabilities such as Bing Search, Bing Travel and arguably most important Bing Maps.

If you have Safari installed, go to the Safari Extensions page and download the Bing Highlights extension (from within Safari). Once you’ve installed the Bing Highlights extender for Safari, you can go to any web page within the Safari browser, highlight an address with your mouse or touchpad and you’ll see a pushpin icon in the extender. Clicking the pushpin will load a Bing Map right within Safari with links to view the address in Bing Maps or get directions to or from the respective location. Alternatively, click the magnifying glass and you’ll see some options for searching Bing. Select “Search for a map” and you will be magically transported over to Bing Maps with the location geocoded and centered at the respective match. So, now we’ve made it so easy to get maps even if you’re on Safari with a simple select and click.

Also, in case you were wondering, you can switch your default search in the Safari browser (upper right) to Bing too. Just click the down arrow in the search box and select Bing. Get your browser all Bing’d out! To learn more about the Bing Extension for Safari, read up on the Bing Search Blog.

 

 

 

Follow me @BingMaps, ^CP

Sony has developed a new cylindrical 360-degree “autostereoscopic” and volumetric display that they have debuted this week at the SIGGRAPH conference. The RayModeler 3D can show 360 degree images in all directions, with just one-degree separation. No special glasses are needed, and the display includes a gesture interface for interaction. The video below shows details, [...]

Stereoluchtfoto's van Amersfoort uit 1932In July 1932 a plane flew over the Dutch city of Amersfoort and took 160 stereoscopic aerial photographs. Wessel Spoelder has pieced together 32 of these photographs and created this Google Maps mashup.So if you have your 3D glasses hanging around after viewing Street View in 3D put them on and check out Amersfoort from above in 3D. If you know Amersfoort

IBM is opening a Smarter Infrastructure Lab at Carnegie Mellon University to develop sensors and systems to monitor the state of infrastructure. The intent is to monitor and analyze the state of buildings, roads, water lines and other urban infrastructure. The software and systems will be tuned to process, monitor and analyze the data from [...]

London to Istanbul by TrainOne of my life's ambitions is to take the train from London to Istanbul following the route taken by the Orient Express. Guardian journalist Benji Lanyado did just that and has created this video map of his journey.The map itself is just a simple My Map embedded on The Guardian website. The videos however are top-notch and definitely worth watching. They are even better

GEB reader 'fjk' has recently completed a bicycle trip across much of northern Poland, and he did a great job of tracking the journey and augmenting it with photos and other information.

A group of four of them completed to the trek to Swinoujscie, and they used a Garmin 60CSx to track their route.

To view the trip in Google Earth (as seen above), you can simply load this KMZ file. To see more of his adventures, check out his website.

It's great to see people sharing their journeys using Google Earth. If you missed it last month, a few GEB readers used the new "track" feature in 5.2 to show the progress of a 23km race that one of them participated in.

If you've created an interesting track in Google Earth recently, let us know about it and we may feature it in a future post.

Took a while, but this is the final installment of my epic 18-part series on free tools for making custom Garmin vector maps. I covered the free map compiler mkgmap in part 13, which converts OpenStreetMap data files (.osm) and Polish map files (.mp) to Garmin’s binary .img format. It’s command-line only, which can make [...] Related posts:

1. Free Tools For Custom Garmin Vector Maps XIII: OSM Tools A
2. Free Tools For Custom Garmin Vector Maps XI: TYP Tools A
3. Not So Free Tools For Custom Garmin Vector Maps XVII: Paid Apps