Trending Maps

Using the application it is possible to find all sorts of events that are happening around your location. Alternatively if you planning a vacation or visiting another town or city you can use Juntos! to search for events at your destination and refine the results shown by date.

Juntos! can also be used to share and promote your own events. If you share an event with Juntos! the event will appear on your Facebook events page and on the Juntos! application.

The maps start with Halloween directions for your early childhood and end with your adult years. Step 7 in the early childhood Halloween directions should prepare you for a lifetime of Halloween disappointments,

“7. Old Mr. McCafferty gives you sugar free candy. Wonder why old people even exist.”

Five years ago, Frank Taylor made a cool pumpkin overlay for Google Earth. It’s still a fun toy to play with, so we’re showing it off again. To make it work, simply download the KML here

For maximum benefit, turn off the atmosphere (“View -> Atmosphere”) and the “Borders & Labels” (found in the “Layers” on the left side of your Google Earth window).

The pumpkin was created using a simple image overlay that he wrapped around the globe, then added a 3D model for the stem. You can read details on how that’s done in this post of his from a few years ago.

If you want more, you can check out a bunch of Halloween goodness in the Google 3D Warehouse or maybe check out the “Pumpkin Man” in Google StreetView, found in the Disney Resort in Paris.

Happy Halloween!

If you want to get involved in this year’s fund-raising event then you can find out what is going on around you on the Movember Google Map. The map shows all the Movember events taking place around the world and the locations of the top fund-raisers.

This Google Map uses a combination of numbered map markers and a choropleth layer to show the number of inches of snow that has fallen across the region.

Why not dress as up as the Street View Pegman this Halloween, stick a video camera in your pocket, record people’s reactions to your scary costume and put the videos on a Google Map?

That’s what Mark and Brian have done. You can follow along with their Halloween antics on Google Street Boo.

Then came the Google Maps Typewriter, an application that lets you type in words and see them represented with, yes you guessed it, letters of the alphabet found on Google Maps.

Now we have the Google Earth Clock! Yes, it’s a digital clock assembled from satellite views of Earth. The Google Earth clock uses the Google Earth browser plug-in to show the current time. Just load up the page and watch as the clock loads different Google Earth views so that it always shows the current time.

Hat-tip: Street View Funny

The map shows the locations of UK holiday parks and can be searched by a number of categories. Users can refine the results shown on the map by the facilities provided by the park, company provider and even search for parks that are within selected distances of a beach.

Google has created a number of templates to help you carve your Halloween pumpkin with a Google Maps theme. The templates for your Google Maps themed pumpkin can be printed out from this PDF.

The templates include a Google Maps marker, a Street View Pegman, a Google Earth logo and a Sketchup logo.

If someone finds a lost pet that’s wearing a Town of Banff pet tag, they can visit the lost pet page and enter the tag number in the Town of Banff Pet Connect Google Map. If the pet is registered the user will see the pet’s name, description, general location of the pet’s home and the contact number of the owner.

The Pet Connect map also saves the town money by reducing calls to the Town and Bylaw services. It means less time is spent returning pets and of course it reunites lost pets with their grateful owners.

Last week, we showed you Google’s Crisis Response page for the flooding in Thailand. NASA’s Earth Observatory has now released some new imagery from the area and it’s quite striking.

You can view the imagery on the Earth Observatory site, or see it in Google Earth using this KML file

To learn more about how you can help, please visit Google’s crisis response page.

Back in 2008, Frank wrote about how Google.org was using Google Earth to visualize Geothermal Data in the United States.

Google has continued to increase the amount of data behind the map, making it a more and more powerful tool as times goes on.

If you’re unclear on what Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) are about, read this snipped from the Google.org EGS page: Enhanced Geothermal Systems, or EGS, attempts to do just that. EGS produces heat and electricity by harnessing the energy from hot rock deep below the earth’s surface, expanding the potential of traditional geothermal energy by orders of magnitude. EGS is a big challenge, but with the potential to power the world many times over, it demands our immediate attention. At Google we support efforts to advance EGS through R&D, investment, policy and information.

To see this data for yourself in Google Earth, simply load this KMZ file

When I first reviewed the game back in June I was particularly impressed with the game’s track creation and collision detection features. Thanks to Unit9.apps, the creators of the game (together with DDB Paris), we now have some clues as to how they put the game together.

In the MINImaps Case Study Unit9.apps have put together a step-by-step explanation of the game’s creation from brief through to finished game. For example, the collision detection was created using image analysis of Google Maps to calculate and visualise the boundaries of the roads.

To find the nearest drivers willing to share a car journey the user simply needs to enter their starting point and destination. The route is then displayed on Google Maps and markers show all the nearest car pooling offers for the journey.

The details of the car pool offers are also displayed in the map sidebar with a handy meter guide to how closely the owner’s journey matches the searched request.

Earlier this year we showed you the new Ovi Maps 3D, a rather nice 3D globe. It certainly wasn’t close to Google Earth in terms of features or depth, but it had some pretty cool 3D features in a few cities.

Not much has changed with it, aside from one big thing — they now have a WebGL version. Similar the Google Maps WebGL version that came out last week, you can now view the full Ovi Maps 3D experience in your browser without having to load a plugin. It only works in Chrome right now, but other browsers are being tested.

While it’s certainly not close to being as comprehensive as Google Earth, it has us even more excited for the future of WebGL. Google Maps brought us a few 3D buildings in its WebGL version last week (including nice touches like shadows), and now Ovi Maps 3D is showing us a WebGL map that feels a lot more like Google Earth.

Having over a billion downloads of Google Earth means that the Google Earth plug-in is already installed on hundreds of millions of computers. However, being able to access it from the browser _without having to use a plug-in at all_ would be awesome.

Google hasn’t said anything about porting Google Earth to WebGL, but I’m sure it’s something they’re at least considering. Part of that would likely include the ability to sync “My Places” to the cloud, something I’ve desired for a while. Imagine accessing Google Earth from any web browser and having your full list of Places available at your fingertips. The prospects are quite intriguing, so I’m excited to see what the future might hold!

You can read more about it on their blog, or go try it for yourself at maps.nokia.com/webgl.

The map is updated every five minutes to show the latest reported earthquake and you can use the time-line to explore earthquakes over the last seven days. It is also possible to refine the results shown on the map based on the different data sources.

Google Maps API applications that now load more than 25,000 basic maps or 2,500 maps that use the Styled Maps feature per day will now have to pay for the privilege.

Google announced in April that it would introduce usage limits for the free use of the Google Maps API. The usage limits that now apply to the Google Maps API are documented in the Google Maps API FAQ.

If your application exceeds the daily limit you can enrol for automated billing of excess map loads; or purchase a Maps API Premier license.

The Google Geo Developers Blog says that “for very popular sites (the) Maps API Premier (licence) is likely to be a more cost effective option.” Google also says that “non-profits and applications deemed in the public interest (as determined by Google at its discretion) are not subject to these usage limits.”

Google claims that it is necessary to introduce these charges to secure the “long term future” of the Google Maps API and to ensure that “Google can continue to offer the Maps API for free to the vast majority of developers for many years to come.”

For comparison the Bing Maps API has a limit of 125,000 sessions or 500,000 transactions in a 12 month period (for free usage). The OpenStreetMaps API continues to be free.

Google Maps is by far the most popular map provider on the Internet. A huge reason for the dominance of Google Maps is the ubiquity of Google Maps applications built upon the Maps API across the internet. I can’t help feeling that Google has just encouraged a lot of developers to start looking at other Maps API’s

The idea was so good I wondered how long it would be before someone created a lost pet map on a less localised basis. Well the wait is now over.

Lost Pet Atlas is a Google Map that allows anyone to report a lost or found cat or dog in the United States and Canada. As well as providing an overall map of north America Lost Pet Atlas has also created numerous more local maps for cities and towns throughout the U.S. and Canada.

Perfilderuta is a website that lets you plan bicycling routes and it also features a ‘helicopter view’ of your routes using the Google Earth plugin.

Creating cycling routes with Perfilderuta is very easy. You just need to right click on the map once to set your starting point and once to set the destination (you also have the option to use main or secondary roads in your route).

The map will then display your route on the Google Map and tell you the distance, the maximum and minimum altitude of the route and the total ascent and descent on your route. Users can then view an altitude chart of the route or view a tour of the route in Google Earth.

Perfilderuta includes a lot of other very handy options, such as adding localities to the route (this will tell you how far it is to different towns and locations along your route). You can also download the route to use with a GPS unit.

Elecciones 2011 examines the results, trends and the socio-demographic context of the 2011 elections in Argentina. The ‘Resumen General’ map shows the results for each presidential candidate in each electoral ward.

Other maps provide a choropleth view for the number of votes cast for each presidential candidate in each ward and allow you to examine the socio-demographic make up of each electoral ward.