Google Geo Developer Day
Google is hosting its Google Geo Developer Day for major Google Earth API developers, local search gurus, and to announce a new version of Google Earth. Greg Sterling, Frank Taylor and Mike Pegg are at the event and covering the presentations and announcements.
From Greg Sterling :
According to Google: 30K developers using the Maps API and 100 million downloads of Earth. Also, Maps and Earth, formerly separate, are being integrated — “different browsers on the same database for different use cases.”
Google is also providing tools to make mapping more accessible to ordinary people and permit more user-generated content in Earth and on Maps. And make ready for the merger of multi-player gaming and mapping (at some point).
Mike Pegg of Google Maps Mania :
Google’s top brass Eric Schmidt (CEO), Larry Page and Sergey Brin (co-founders) just provided open remarks followed by John Hanke and Michael Jones of the Google Earth teams. Eric, Larry and Sergey outlined the importance of Google Maps in the overall Google Search strategy. Cameras are all over the room, so this address and thoughts should be available on Google Video soon.. I’ll be sure to point you to it later. Google Maps product announcements to come soon!
And Frank Taylor of Google Earth Blog:
Too many features to discuss here, but here is one big hightlight from the SketchUp guys:
The 3D models for Google Earth will take on much greater realism now thanks to new support of textures. This means you can put color photos, patterns, even paintings onto the surface of polygons for 3D models. Models of buildings, people, landscapes, etc. will take on much greater realism without the necessity of complex 3D data which would otherwise take up a great deal of memory. This unleashes the full power of the free Google SketchUp modeling program.
