Explore the Amazon with Google Street View

by Kraig Becker on

Yesterday, in honor of World Forest Day, Google rolled out a new addition to their popular Street View application. The Internet search giant updated the service with imagery and data from the Amazon River, giving would-be explorers the opportunity to travel along that famous waterway without ever leaving the comfort of their own home.

According to the official Google Blog members of the Street View team from both the U.S. and Brazil traveled to the Amazon Basin back in August in order to collect the thousands of images necessary for its inclusion into the system. That team worked closely with the Amazonas Sustainable Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to environmental conservation in the Amazon and the improvement of the quality of life for those living there. All told, they collected more than 50,000 still images, which were digitally stitched together to create the 360-degree panoramic views that are the hallmark of Street View.

The Amazon River is truly one of the great natural wonders of our planet. It stretches for more than 6400 kilometers (4000 miles) in length and at its widest points it can be as much as 48 kilometers (30 miles) in width. It is so massive in scope that it is estimated that approximately 1/6 of the world’s fresh water is contained in this one river alone making it the lifeblood of the Amazon Rainforest that surrounds it. That dense forest is home to thousands of species of plants and animals, many of which are found nowhere else on Earth.

I had the unique opportunity to visit the Amazon a few years back and found it to be a spectacular destination. The dense forests, diverse wildlife and miles of water are amazing to behold. Most travelers will never have the opportunity to visit the place for themselves, however, which makes the river’s inclusion in Street View all the better.


Browse historic photos of San Francisco with Old S.F.

by Jeremy Kressmann on

A photographer could spend weeks wandering around San Francisco – between the city’s dramatic natural setting, bright murals and colorful rows of Victorian homes, there’s a lot to see (and shoot).

As Gadling blogger Jessica pointed out recently, it’s also a city rich with history. In fact, photographers have been documenting this City by the Bay ever since the very first days the camera was invented. Now a website called Old S.F. lets you blend these two pursuits, displaying the city’s pleasing photography and rich history via an interactive map.

The story behind Old S.F. begins when resident Dan Vanderkam was looking at historic photos at the San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection and came upon an image of his block that was identified with the wrong cross streets. The inaccuracy inspired him to start a searchable database, layered onto a Google Map of San Francisco to help others find them more easily. The rest, as they like to say, is history.

To start using Old S.F., just pull the sliders along the top to adjust the date the photos were taken (starting at 1850 and ending at 2000) and then click on one of the red dots to see images from that location. It’s a fascinating journey through some of San Francisco’s most famous (as well as its most intimate) landmarks – witness the chaos and destruction that followed the 1906 earthquake, or watch the elegant Golden Gate Bridge as its construction slowly creeps across the Bay. It’s your own personal time machine to San Francisco – and you’re holding the controls.

[Photo courtesy of army.arch]

My kid is more up-to-date on geography than Google Maps

by Sean McLachlan on

“Where’s South Sudan?” my five-year-old asked me.

Being my kid, he’s big into maps. He has a map of Africa with all the flags on it hanging above his bed. Using it, he’s been able to trace dad’s adventures in Ethiopia and Somaliland. It’s been marked up a bit since I got it for him more than a year ago. I had to draw the boundary of the unrecognized state of Somaliland on it, and we had to add a flag after Libya suddenly got a second one.

He’s been hearing me talk about wanting to visit South Sudan, the world’s newest country after splitting from Sudan in July. In order to draw the new border, we looked it up on Google Maps. It wasn’t there. Google, which analyzes everyone’s search terms and takes photos of where everybody lives, hadn’t yet decided South Sudan was worthy of notice. We had to go to this map on Wikipedia to find out the information.

After an online campaign, Google Maps has finally changed their map to reflect reality, the BBC reports. Yahoo!, Microsoft and National Geographic have yet to follow suit.

I guess this a good lesson to my son that no source of information is 100% reliable, especially if that source is on the Internet.

Google’s Hotel Finder to help you find the perfect hotel

by Melanie Renzulli on

On Friday, Google introduced Hotel Finder, which promises to help users find the perfect hotel. Hotel Finder utilizes Google Maps as well as a Google Reader-type interface to display hotels according to photo, class, user rating, rate, and “compared to typical,” a useful metric that displays a percentage of how much more or less the rate is off the typical price from the past year.

Google calls Hotel Finder an “experimental” product, a disclaimer that excuses this tool from being perfect. For example, one feature of Hotel Finder is the “shortlist,” which allows users to bookmark hotels they find interesting. Unfortunately, the shortlist only works for the current search and can not be saved for future hotel searches. (I’d love for the shortlist to become more like Foursquare‘s “To Do” list, thereby allowing you to save your shortlist in your Google profile.)

While Google has yet to venture into the business of booking your travel, look for that to change given Google’s acquisition of ITA in July. In the meantime, should you wish to book a hotel via Hotel Finder, click on the blue “Book” button and you are given options to make your reservations via third-party sites like Travelocity and Expedia or on the hotel’s own website. Click on “book” and you’ll see the base price of the hotel as well as the price after taxes and fees for each third-party site.

Although it is a fun tool, Google’s Hotel Finder is not quite ready to be the web’s go-to site for hotel bookings. In fact, Hotel Finder is currently only available for U.S. hotel searches. But I look forward to seeing how Google will integrate Hotel Finder into its current suite of products, particularly as it rolls out ITA-integrated travel product and as Google + grows in popularity and usefulness.

Ubiquisys Attocell could enable roaming-free international cellphone calls

by Dana Murph on

Femtocells aren’t new. For the past few years, they have trickled out onto Verizon Wireless, AT&T and Sprint using various names, and while they’re perfect for those who have subpar cellphone coverage in their own home, they aren’t great for avid travelers dealing with international roaming. If you’re unfamiliar with the technology, it works as such: a femtocell is a miniature cell tower, of sorts, which connects to your home broadband Internet connection. This basically creates a cell tower in your home, and it routes your calls out through the Internet instead of via the nearest “real” tower.

Unfortunately, all of the US carriers have locked their femtocells to work only in America, and even when you change locations domestically, most require you to update your address in your online profile before it can work elsewhere. There’s a GPS beacon attached to all of them, which works as the ball-and-chain for travelers. The ultimate femtocell would be the one that you could take anywhere, and plug into any Internet connection, in order to have five bars of local cell service anywhere in the world. It would all but eliminate roaming fees while you were chatting in your overseas office or hotel room. But wouldn’t it be even nicer if you could take that idea, and make it mobile? That’s exactly what Ubiquisys is doing with its newest product, the Attocell. Read on for more details.This USB dongle is considered a “personal femtocell,” cramming the technology that’s usually found in a router-sized box into a single USB adapter. The setup couldn’t be simpler: plug the Attocell into a laptop that has an Internet connection (for example, this would work through a laptop out in a French coffee shop with Wi-Fi freely available), and then use the connection it creates to make a phone call via the web. It’s sort of like Skype, except you’re using your actual phone number, which is far more convenient.

The company hasn’t coughed up pricing or availability details yet, but should do so next month with a formal unveiling at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. We’re told that a number of carrier talks are already in progress, but we have to worry about what fees (if any) will be tacked on. The ultimate goal would be to buy this adapter and then use it without limits for free, but it’s unclear if the carriers involved would let that fly. If they charge too much, it will end up simpler to just make a call while roaming, but we’re crossing our fingers that it won’t go down like that. This could very well be the answer to a lot of prayers from those who travel overseas routinely and have to swallow massive roaming bills each time they return.

[Via Engadget]