Google Chrome out of Beta

The official Google Blog announced yesterday that their browser, Google Chrome, is now officially out of beta!  I downloaded this version and must say that it is quit fast although I can't really recall how much faster it is as compared to the beta program version.  At any rate, less is more and this browser is definitely the "no frills" speedster I use every day!  Happy browsing everyone...

Google Chrome (Google's answer to the Web Browser)

Looks like Google is going to release their own web browser sometime today! Click here for their blog post... Google has also put together a "comic book" explanation of what Chrome is. If you have the time, go through the ~30 pages to learn more.

Google 411 Service

Google 411 is a free service (around since January 2007) that allows anyone, anywhere to call the 1-800 number for an instant connection to a specific business in the Google directory. What is really cool about this is that it will send you access to a Google Map if you choose the "Map it!" option so I assume it's using the exact same directory listings that they use for the entire Google Maps archive. This works out really well for those of us who claim to always know where we are going...I personally still get lost in the city that I have lived in for almost 18 years.

This is especially useful for those of us who still use an old-school cell phone with poor internet access...(1-800-466-4411)

Geotagged Photos in GeoPDF

Way back in 2006, Patrick and crew developed a really cool pilot project for automatically adding geotagged photographs to a GeoPDF. The idea was to have someone in the field drive around and take photographs of any target area with a Ricoh Digital Camera. These cameras have a built in GPS which allows for automatic geotagging. You are also able to take it to the next level by using the camera to record an audio clip. Pretty cool indeed!!! Here is the workflow:

1. Create a base map to work with. This can be anything from a high resolution image to a simple vector layer that is exported to GeoPDF.

2. Select the directory full of geotagged images. Note that future releases of this application will allow the user to ingest geotagged images from Google Maps and Flickr.

3. Select all the photos you would like to add then click the OK button. This will load all your photos in to the GeoPDF and maintain the spatial integrity of the data.

4. You will now see that each photo is adding to both the map space as well as a separate page in the table of contents. You can browse to each image by selecting it in the map or by clicking on it in the table of contents.

5. To hear the audio clip, select the speaker icon and to return to the map and select the camera icon. It's that easy!

To download this data set click here...