Google Maps is moving above and beyond with their new mobile offering for Street View. The application now includes a 360 degree pedestrian perspective. Google Map’s mobile version was introduced this week and is available for the Blackberry and other smart phones.

Speaking of Google Maps, Googlers (members of the Google Team) were invited to visit the University of Alaska at Fairbanks to make tools like Google Earth more accessible. The team will be conducting a series of workshops, conducting geography trivia contests and building maps (using Google Maps of course). Could Google be paving the way for mapping education?

Netezza, a global leader in data warehouse appliances and data warehousing, announced their spatial extension to its database. They will support spatial data types and operators (specifically vector data types: points, lines and areas). Netezza’s architecture is intended to work for mass queries and analysis, not operational geospatial applications.

GeoServer introduced their newest version of GeoServer and last release of the 1.6x branch, 1.6.5. The latest update features Dutch translations, and 65 bug fixes and other additional improvements.

Click2Map revealed a new feature for online crowded maps. The auto-cluster feature allows map makers to create a ‘unique marker’ for areas that are densely concentrated. The tool also enables you to laser-tune the display based on three parameters; clustering rate, minimum markers and maximum zoom.

Open Street Map is now available in Shapefile format thanks to some work from the team at geofabrik. With this addition, there is no longer any need to convert the osm.bz2 to Shapefiles as it is now supplied for users.

Popularity: 13% [?]

We are all set up here in cosmopolitan Burlingame for the fun of Where 2.0. Thus far we’ve sat in on Advanced GIS Hacks in Rails and are currently enjoying the GeoServer tutorial. There is a bit of a lull in the action, so I thought I would talk about something completely different.

Specifically, I got an email with a link saying Google was going to be launching “Friend Connect” at Where 2.0. Problem is I’ve not read anything on the blogs or else where that has talked about Friend Connect having a geospatial component.

It would be awesome if they’ve enabled something to embed your location into a social profile, but seems like that would be more ambitious than what has been outlined in the press releases and speculation. Google does have a talk tomorrow on the “State of the GeoWeb”, maybe we’ll find out there. Has anyone heard rumors one way or the other?

Popularity: 11% [?]

We’ve been doing work recently integrating GeoServer with GeoCommons to provide more hooks and capabilities for our platform. I was catching up reading the GeoServer blog and saw a new demo they had going to demonstrate their map annotations tools in development.

The map only has a base street map for NYC, but the annotation features and presentation is quite nice. You can add annotations and pictures to the map and all works very smoothly. The ability to create annotations and layer them on top of structured data like crime rates or toxic release points is very compelling. Then users can not only see where a statistical phenomenon is happening but also comment, including confirmation or criticism. For instance add a photo of dead fish in green bubbling ooze at a toxic release point.

We had some fun with the concept about a year ago after a trip to NYC mapping the location of bars and single women then testing out the hot spots. Less altruistic than the example above but again demonstrates the value of adding qualitative comments to quantitative data. For fun I added the heat map we made of the bars and singles to the GeoServer demo. If you go to the lower east side it is the yellow marker on 6th St.

Look forward to seeing if we can make use of the new GeoServer collaboration tools and props to them for all the good work.

Popularity: 15% [?]