Tag archive: Google Street View

Announced during the Consumer Electronics Show this week, the new version of Mbrace developed by Mercedes-Benz will support several new Web applications including Facebook profiles, Google search and Street View, Morningstar Finance, Panoramio and popular review site Yelp. Many of the applications tie into the car's navigation system and update the car's route when redirecting to a nearby Facebook friend or a well-reviewed… Read More

Google has announced it is now enabling Wi-Fi hotspot operators to opt out of Google's broad location service. The mechanism is simple and yet also inelegant: to opt out, hotspot operators must change the names of their base stations to end in _nomap. So, a network named CafeWireless that didn't want to be used in Google's location services would have to change its name to CafeWireless_nomap. As Google drives around taking… Read More

Google Street View is a remarkable application for sure, but occasionally, when exploring some of the world’s great cities, you can almost taste the fumes from all the traffic clogging up the streets. Sometimes it would be nice to take a left turn into a park for a bit of peace and quiet, and to explore some of the city’s greener offerings. Well, now you can. In a post on its official blog on Tuesday, Google announced a big increase in the… Read More

According to a study out of the United Kingdom from Credit Sesame, approximately 78 percent of ex-burglars use Twitter, Foursquare and Facebook to identify properties with absent homeowners. This includes people that use location-enabled status updates or pictures to identify when they are at work or on an extended vacation. In addition, nearly three out of four ex-burglars use Google Street View to check out the quality of the home in addition… Read More

Kicked off in the pilot program during the first half of the year to start collecting photographs, Google has officially launched an interior version of Street View for buildings. The program sends a Google photographer to a business to take 360-degree photos and allow a potential customer to walk through the store. For instance, a user could navigate through a retail department store to find the exact location of the housewares department and… Read More

Google has recently announced plans to launch a new service called Business Photos. In a concept similar to Google Street View, Business Photo would allow consumers to view a 360 degree photo of a store they have, or may wish to visit. Interestingly, if the idea takes off, Business Photos could integrate well with Google Street View, enabling would-be shoppers to see exactly how a store looks like from the inside. And while it’s certainly an… Read More

While the Google Street car has been known to capture some crazy situations, this is the first time that the vehicle has snapped several photographs of a naked woman within the United States. Captured standing outside her house holding a water jug, the Miami-based woman catches the Google automobile turning the corner and continues to put her hand up to her mouth in shock in subsequent pictures. The vehicle captured at least three images of the… Read More

Fans do the coolest things sometimes. A dedicated group of Grand Theft Auto 4 lovers at GTA4.net spent two months putting together an interactive map for Rockstar Games' latest iteration of Liberty City, as seen in GTA4. If you're familiar with Google Maps and Google Street View, then you should feel right at home navigating the interactive map, as that's the model it uses. It's not quite as streamlined — for… Read More

In a partnership with the Sustainable Amazon Foundation, a team from Google has taken it upon themselves to map out the endangered South American rainforest as well as collect photo data of the communities of people that live there. To start, Google mounted the cameras on boats that travel the Rio Negro and Amazon rivers to create 360-degree panoramics of the waters and dense forest. On land, Google is using tricycles to navigate along dirt… Read More

Yesterday Google announced it would be pulling the plug on Google Labs. According to its blog, Google wants to spend more time developing and focusing on specific products rather than spreading itself too thin across Labs’ various experiments. This won’t mess with Google’s “20 Percent Time Program,” which allows the team to give 20-percent of their time to side projects of their choosing. But it does mean saying goodbye to the… Read More

Google has pulled the plug on Street View in Germany in spite of a recent court victory that declared the photo mapping project to be within the laws of the country. That means there won't be any new 360-degree photos added to Google's maps of Germany. However, the 20 German cities that have already been photographed will remain online and accessible. A Google spokesman told Search Engine Land that the company has shifted its… Read More

France's data privacy regulator has announced that it has fined Google $142,000 (€100,000) for unauthorized data collections carried about by the company's controversial Street View photo-mapping project. The Commission nationale de l'information et des libertes (CNIL) informed Google in May of 2010 that it would face penalties if it did not stop the data collections and hand over the information that had been collected. CNIL… Read More

Google has updated its Street View website to showcase some of the the program's more exotic imagery, detail exactly where Street View is available and even give insights behind the story of the mysterious “pegman.” On Street View's homepage, visitors are now greeted with a slideshow of some of the more high-profile destinations captured by the Street View team. Images include shots of England's Stonehenge, South… Read More

Google's photo-mapping project Street View has seen its fair share of backlash around the globe. In Israel, some government officials aren't concerned about privacy. Rather, they're worried that Street View images could be used in planning a terrorist attack. On Monday, Israel said that it was looking into ways to permit Google to photograph Israeli streets in a manner that would not expose the country to an increased risk of… Read More

South Korea is the latest in a long line of countries investigating Google for violating privacy laws, but it looks like it will be the first to actually take the company to court. Google is being accused of breaching user privacy by accessing e-mail and personal information over unsecured networks while it collected data for its Street View feature from October 2009 to May 2010. This summer, Korean national police investigated Google's… Read More