Google Maps officially launched in SA | TechCentral

Google Maps officially launched in SA | TechCentral: "

Google Maps officially launched in SA

Google has launched its map service in SA, providing detailed map information, driving and walking directions, transport data, and a range of other services.

Ahead of the 2010 soccer World Cup, the US Internet company has also provided a range of services specifically tailored for international tourists. These include a foreign-language version of the SA maps. The service allows tourists to plan their holidays.

“If you were using Maps two days ago, you will see a greatly different site today,” says Google SA country manager, Stephen Newton.

There are roughly 30 countries worldwide that have their own Google Maps Internet domain, or Web address. SA is the second country in Africa to receive the service, after Kenya.

The service allows businesses, including restaurants, to list their business information free of charge. And users can upload a wide range of information, including photos and live webcams.

Jaroslav Bengi, product manager for Google Maps in Europe and Africa, says a range of improvements have been introduced to the SA maps, which were previously unavailable.

SA now has its own landing page at maps.google.co.za — it no longer defaults to the US view — and searches are assumed to be local, not global.

Google has introduced a range of clever search tools that will help both tourists and local users. For example, a search for “restaurants near Nelson Mandela Square Sandton” will return a list of restaurants in the area. Or a search for “pizza Randburg” will list pizzerias in Randburg.

Users can then click on specific restaurants to get detailed information about the establishment, including user reviews, menus and even photographs.

Once a user has decided which restaurant to eat at, he can get driving or walking directions from their current location.

The new Google Maps service is also available on a range of mobile phones via Google’s mobile application.

Google has extended its “application programming interface” to the SA maps , allowing people to embed Google Maps on their websites. This service is likely to prove popular for real estate agents and other businesses that rely on map data.

Google’s highly anticipated Street View service, which provides a street-level view, will be launched in SA before the World Cup, Jaroslav says. Streets in five SA cities are being photographed using special cameras mounted to a fleet of Toyota Priuses. — Duncan McLeod, TechCentral

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Surf's up Wednesday: Google Wave update

Surf's up Wednesday: Google Wave update: "Starting Wednesday, September 30 we'll be sending out more than 100,000 invitations to preview Google Wave to:

• Developers who have been active in the developer preview we started back in June
• The first users who signed up and offered to give feedback on wave.google.com
• Select customers of Google Apps

We'll ask some of these early users to nominate people they know also to receive early invitations — Google Wave is a lot more useful if your friends, family and colleagues have it too. This, of course, will just be the beginning. If all goes well we will soon be inviting many more to try out Google Wave.

Some of you have asked what we mean by preview. This just means that Google Wave isn't quite ready for prime time. Not yet, anyway. Since first unveiling the project back in May, we've focused almost exclusively on scalability, stability, speed and usability. Yet, you will still experience the occasional downtime, a crash every now and then, part of the system being a bit sluggish and some of the user interface being, well, quirky.

There are also still key features of Google Wave that we have yet to fully implement. For example, you can't yet remove a participant from a wave or define groups of users, draft mode is still missing and you can't configure the permissions of users on a wave. We'll be rolling out these and other features as soon as they are ready — over the next few months.

Despite all this, we believe you will find that Google Wave has the potential for making you more productive when communicating and collaborating. Even when you're just having fun! We use it ourselves everyday for everything from planning pub crawls to sharing photos, managing release processes and debating features to writing design documents. In fact, we collaborated on this very blog post with several colleagues in Google Wave.

Speaking of ways you could potentially use Google Wave, we're intrigued by the many detailed ones people have taken the time to describe. To mention just a few: journalist Andy Ihnatko on producing his Chicago Sun-Times column, filmmaker Jonathan Poritsky on streamlining the movie-making process, scientist Cameron Neylon on academic papers and lab work, Alexander Dreiling and his SAP research team on collaborative business process modelling, and ZDNet's Dion Hincliffe on a host of enterprise use cases.

The Wave team's most fun day since May? We invited a group of students to come spend a day with us at Google's Sydney office. Among other things, we asked them to collaboratively write stories in Google Wave about an imaginary trip around the world. They had a ball! As did we...



Finally, a big shoutout to the thousands of developers who have patiently taken part in our ongoing developer preview. It has been great fun to see the cool extensions already built or being planned and incredibly instructive to get their help planning the future of our APIs. To get a taste for what some of these creative developers have been working on, and to learn more about the ways we hope to make it even easier for developers to build new extensions, check out this post on our developer blog.

Happy waving!

Posted by Lars Rasmussen, Engineering Manager & Stephanie Hannon, Group Product Manager

Coca Cola Can Concept

Coca Cola Can Concept: "

Dzmitry Samal designed a unique concept for beverage cans. The shape is much more geometric - featuring facets, instead of the familiar smooth round cylinder we're used to. The new can design utilizes a process called impact extrusion, a process where an aluminum slug (solid piece of metal) is pressed at a high velocity with extreme force into a die/mold by a punch.

The usual cylindrical can is made by a similar, but different process. The cans are generally produced through a mechanical cold forming process that starts with punching a flat blank from very stiff cold-rolled sheet. The flat blank is first formed into a cup about three inches in
diameter. This cup is then pushed through a different forming process
called 'ironing' which forms the can.

Conceptually, Dzmitry's concept could work, but it remains to be seen if it is comparable to the current standard can in price, quality and even feasibility for full-scale manufacture. What are your thoughts?

Design You Trust. World's Most Famous Social Inspiration.

Design You Trust. World's Most Famous Social Inspiration.: "

via http://designyoutrust.com/

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New Image Search Results for Feature Phones

New Image Search Results for Feature Phones: "Earlier this year, we launched new Image Search results for iPhone and Android-powered devices. Since then, we've rolled out the new format to iPhone and Android in 28 countries. Now, the new Image Search results pages are also available for most other phones in 38 languages.

The image results are tightly packed, making optimal use of the screen space on your phone and allowing you to scan eight to fourteen images on a single results page. Clicking an image leads to a details page, which not only shows a larger thumbnail, but also lets you either visit the web page hosting the image or view the image itself in full size. Moreover you can navigate the search results using 'next' and 'previous' links. These features are designed to make browsing and searching for images on your phone easier and faster.

How to use Image Search:
1. Go to google.com and click on “Images.”
2. Do a search query. The results page shows related images, clicking on an image loads the details page.

3. The image details page shows a larger thumbnail and links to the original website and image. You could also navigate to other results using 'Next Image' link.

Posted by Varun Sharma and Jignashu Parikh, Software Engineers, Google Mobile Team

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