New Mobile Google Maps Supports Public Transportion
The new version of
Google Maps for mobile is available to download to
your phone at http://www.google.com/gmm
from your phone's web browser.
Viewfinder: Aligning Photographs into the 3D World of Google Earth
Did that help? No??? OK, then watch their video (below) and you will get the idea immediately.
New Image Compositing, Panoramic Photography Features Coming From Adobe
Below, is a screen shot from a cool demonstration. Here, John took a series of macro photographed images with selective focus (meaning, there was an extremely shallow depth of field for each image). When all of the images were merged, a composited "in focus" image was produced. But seeing is believing (and easier to understand). So, go to about 19 minutes into the webinar to see this in action.
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Intelligent White Board
Seam Carvning Coming to Photoshop Plugin: Courtesy of OnOne Software
To get an idea of what seam carving is all about, read the blog post link above and/or check out this YouTube video below:
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Major Music Labels Move Away from DRM for all the Wrong Reasons: The Apple Implications
Sony BMG would become the last of the top four music labels to drop DRM, following Warner Music Group, which in late December said it would sell DRM-free songs through Amazon.com's digital music store. EMI and Vivendi's Universal Music Group announced their plans for DRM-free downloads earlier in 2007.
The irony behind this move by all the major labels to step away from DRM has very little to do with accommodating the needs of their customers, but a feeble attempt to supplement distribution channels. Apple is a primary reason behind the labels shift to DRM free, but the labels newfound interest has little to do with customer benefit or even a business ploy that will affect Apple's digital music leadership position. Let me explain... Read More...
The Machine is Us/ing Us
This is a very though provoking video. It's as much a brief lesson on Web 2.0 technologies -- among other things abstracting content from structure and repurposing content -- but it also is an interesting piece which gives you pause to the world we're creating with all of this information. Is copyright law relevant? Are we making too much information available? Not enough? What do you think?
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Power to the Knowledge Worker - All Hail Enterprise 2.0
"Corporate employees are beginning to use Web 2.0 tools such as blogs, podcasts, wikis, RSS, and social networking in their daily lives. The adoption, however, is uneven, with some employees willing to go to great lengths to use these tools, while others steadfastly refuse to adopt. On the surface it looks like technology marketers have their work cut out for them and will need to convince prospective customers that mass adoption is both possible and valuable. In reality, this situation presents more opportunity than threat, as smart tech marketers will appeal to employees, IT, and line-of-business sponsors each in turn. A well-crafted marketing plan will target each constituency and use its interests to drive value and revenues — regardless of the firm's initial Web 2.0 adoption level."
While I haven't shelled out the US$279.00 for the report, I must say, this concept absolutely has truth in my professional career. For the last five plus years, I have chosen many "non-sanctioned" hosted applications to assist me as well as my teams in driving our daily tasks, education and communication.
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Another Earthquake
After being unable to get back to sleep, I figured I'd go check out the quake's epicenter and magnitude. The USGS has great map data for all quakes, including the "mashup" above.
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Here Come Google Street View Maps of the OC
These Street View maps allow you to navigate down the street by clicking on the arrows in the photograph. What's more, you can pan around (left and right) within the image itself to gain a bit more immersive perspective on that particular location.
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Visualize Data
I find mindmaps to be a great way to represent ideas, thoughts, action items. Particularly when the end point of the effort isn't exactly understood. Meaning, you have a lot of data to capture and document, but you aren't absolutely certain the relative association for each datapoint. Without getting to hung up on structure, a mindmap provides a great way to get your thoughts down, then as time progresses, one will begin to see patterns, even a taxonomy.
Over the last few years, I have continued to be amazed by some very creative methods people have employed to visualize data. A couple of my favorites are captured here...
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Seam Carving Technology Eliminates Distortion in Stretched Images
Patrick Swieskowski has created a great Flash-based demo so you can see how this all works. Go check out Patrick's Seam Carving Flash demonstration.
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Backyard Home Theater Award Winner in smarthome.com Home Control Contest
To see how I “turbo charged” our backyard movie theater, check out the complete video on how it was done.
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New Google Maps Include 360 Panoramic Street View
Pretty darn cool. Now in select cities (San Francisco Bay area, New York, Las Vegas, Denver) you can get a “street view” within Google Maps. So I did a search for Moscone Center, clicked on the “street view” button in the window and a new map marker that looks like a person landed on the page. Move the marker to where you want it, and voila a 360 panoramic image of that location pops up.
As you see above, the photograph is pretty darn good. And just like the 360 degree panoramic photos I take, you can click down in the photo and pan left and right to look around in these Google Maps images. Finally, you can also click on the arrows to move up or down the street.
I Got Joost’d Today
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2007 Digital Outlook Report
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The Master Plan: Google Movie
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Is the Lost Island Found?
For all you Lost fans out there, I came across an interesting article this morning. If you type the mysterious numbers from Lost (4 8 15 16 23 42) into Google Maps, they correspond to the approximate latitude and longitude of an island in the middle of the Pacific. Hmmm, is that where they are?
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Cool Google Maps Greetings
By clicking on one of the letters, say the “k” in
Mike, you will quickly see that building is located
in Salt Lake City, Utah. (Click on the map
above to see it --- and where all the other
buildings -- are located).
Give it a try over at geogreeting.com
Interesting World Maps
Here are a bunch of interesting maps visually representing
different socio economic information. In the
case above, this is a map representing refined
petroleum imports.
Aperture 1.0 Users get a Apple Store Credit
OK, good form that Apple realized their user community was less than happy about the 1.0 release (check out the forums if you don't believe me) and took corrective measures. According to the Apple site:
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New Panoramic Image Stitcher on the Block
Kekus Digital
has introduced a prerelease of a new stitcher
called Calico Panorama. In addition
to single row panoramic images, Calico also
supports multi-row images. Cool. And the best
part? You don't need to be an uber propeller
head to figure it out. Just load your images and
let it do its thang.
As I am writing this, I am in the process of
stitching a 14 image single row panorama on my G3
Powerbook. So far so good. Calico does not support
fisheye images (go use PTMac for that) however, you
can still output 360x180 images if you want from
within Calico, your source images must be
rectilinear.
Way to go Kekus Digital!
EFF Open Letter to SunnComm (aka The Clowns That Created the Sony Rootkit)
President and Chief Executive Officer
MediaMax Technologies, Inc.
Mr. Clement:
As you know, we have already discovered one security concern arising from the MediaMax software, resulting in the patch issued on Tuesday and the revised patch issued yesterday.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) remains concerned that additional security flaws will be discovered in MediaMax software, in both version 5 and version 3. EFF isn't alone in this concern. Indeed, as Professor Ed Felten has noted, "Experience teaches that where there is one bug, there are probably others. That’s doubly true where the basic design of the product is risky. I’d be surprised if there aren’t more security bugs lurking in MediaMax." See http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=944.
While Sony BMG has taken some steps to address the security vulnerabilities in the MediaMax software, we are very concerned about consumers who purchase "MediaMax'd" CDs from labels other than Sony BMG, such as Cuban Link's "Chain Reaction" by Men of Business Records, Peter Cetera’s “You Just Gotta Love Christmas" by Viastar Records or MediaMax'd releases on KOCH Records. Many of these consumers have not been notified of this security issue, and indeed may be unaware that they even have a security vulnerability.
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Fly with Me: Podcast Recording of Cockpit Discussions of JetBlue Emergency Landing at LAX
Last week, a Jet Blue Air Bus made an emergency
landing at LAX after the pilot determined that
there was a problem with the front landing gear.
CNN covered the landing live. However, I think the
most interesting coverage is this podcast. Joe Deon is a pilot
"for a leading US carrier" and he brings a
recorder with him on his trips.
On the day of the emergency, he recorded the
conversation between the Jet Blue crew and folks on
the ground.
More Cool Google Map Mashups
Wow... so far this is the coolest thing I've seen
so far. Overlaying data on the maps. And in this
case, census and housing information. Type in a
street address, then see the 1, 3 and 5 mile radius
bands and the resulting data. Purty cool. Here is a link to the site to see
sensus data Google mapped.
Google Map Mashups
Google Maps are cool. And now
there are a lot of folks figuring out some cool
stuff to do with the Google Map APIs. Above, is a Google Map with an
overlay of where news events are taking place
around the world... the news events courtesy
of the BBC news feed.
Check out this "Google Map Mashups" blog to
see all the different kind of information and
map melding folks are putting together.
Bullseye! NASA Nails the Comet
According to NASA's site,
this image shows the initial ejecta that
resulted when NASA's Deep Impact probe collided
with comet Tempel 1 at 10:52 p.m. Pacific time,
July 3 (1:52 a.m. Eastern time, July 4) . It was
taken by the spacecraft's medium-resolution
camera 16 seconds after impact.
First Google Maps, Now Google Moon Maps (Sorta)
In honor of
the first moon landing that took place 36 years ago
today, Google with a little help from the folks at
NASA, have maps showing the landing spots
for the six Apollo lunar landings. Oh, and
be sure and zoom in, some geek humor will be
found 
Nikon Encrypts White Balance Values
Clowns. That was my first thought when I heard about this early this week [DP Review article, Adobe Forums post by Photoshop creator Thomas Knoll]. Why do I think Nikon are a bunch of clowns? Basically, by encrypting the white balance data, they are limiting the ability for third parties to read the data and manipulate it. So what? Well, if you're a photographer and use Adobe's Raw Camera plugin for Photoshop, you're kinda outta luck.
Instead, it seems Nikon wants you to buy there Nikon Capture app. It silly stuff like this that makes me really happy I decided to be a "Canon guy" a long time ago.
Here is an excerpt from Mr Knoll's post in the Adobe forum:
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Ding, Dong the (Sony Rootkit) Witch is Dead
Consumers can mail their CDs to the company, and they would receive a new unprotected CD in return.
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Sony's Stupidity Continues
Oh I wish I can up with that line, but I didn't. That's the best way to describe the beginning of a very bad new year for Sony. And the stupidity keeps getting worse. Now, according to Reuters, Sony has.... um... "liberated" some open source code in their DRM software without acknowledgement or attribution. Way to go Sony. How deep are you in your in your grave diggin' ?
(Source: Reuters via ZDNet News Did Sony 'rootkit' pluck from open source?) Read More...
Sony BMG Has Gone Way Overboard on DRM
Molly Wood at CNET has done a great job of summarizing all of this stupidity.
I know that a class action lawsuit has already been issued in California. I heard on Buzz Out Loud that the country of Italy has already started their own class action lawsuite too.
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Adobe Proposes Universal Digital Camera "Raw" Image Format
Adobe has published a specification for a new
universal file format for digital cameras. Dubbed
the Digital NeGative (DNG) format, Adobe's proposal
would not supersede the JPEG format used by almost
all digital cameras these days, but the native
formats such cameras offer users who want maximum,
image fidelity.
According to the Register UK
site, these raw formats hold the image as
taken, without the loss of data even mildest
JPEG conversion involves, or adjustments made by
the camera's video processing electronics. The
catch is that without compression, raw images
are very large, limiting the number of them the
camera can hold. Worse, different camera vendors
use different, proprietary raw formats.
Mars Rover Opportunity: 3D 360 Degree Panoramic of Mars
After seeing the images
Hans Nyberg stitched together of the moon
landings, I decided to go up to the NASA
website and see what else they had posted. As it
turns out, there is tons of stuff. What I thought
was particularly cool was this image above (click
on it to see a larger view) produced by a set of
cameras with a slight offset to create this
anaglyphic image. Get those 3D glasses out (you can buy
'em at that link--$2 with PayPal) and checkout
the Mars surface in 3D!