Mountain View, California - (The Hosting News) - June 11, 2007 - The Where 2.0 Conference in San Jose, California's Fairmont Hotel, hosted the release of Google's Street View and Mapplets, by Director Google Maps, John Hanke, Director of Google Earth and Maps, John Hanke.
Location systems, untapped geodata, unsung projects and hardware, including revenue generating innovations, high profile keynote conversations, ''high order bits'' demoing startups and applications. Other featured speakers included: Stephen Lawler of Microsoft Virtual Earth, Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media, Inc., Nathan Torkington of O'Reilly Media, Inc., and Mike Liebhold Institute for the Future.
Street View is a new feature of Google Maps that enables users to view and navigate within 360 degree street level imagery of various cities in the US. Street View provides users with a rich, immersive browsing experience directly in Google Maps, enabling greater understanding of a specific location or area. Street View imagery will initially be available for maps of the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Las Vegas, Denver and Miami, and will soon expand to other metropolitan areas. By clicking on the "Street View" button in Google Maps, users can navigate street level, panoramic imagery. With Street View users can virtually walk the streets of a city, check out a restaurant before arriving, and even zoom in on bus stops and street signs to make travel plans.
Google also announced the launch of Mapplets, a powerful new tool for developers and consumers alike. Mapplets enables third party developers to create mini applications that can be displayed on Google Maps, much like Google Gadgets are displayed on iGoogle. These Mapplets contain a variety of information, from housing listings to crime data, and tools like distance measurement. Users can select from a wide range of Google and third party Mapplets to display on the Map, essentially creating their own ''mashup of mashups'' directly on the Google Maps site, while still enjoying the built-in functionality of Google Maps, such as local search and driving directions. A number of our partners, including WeatherBug, Booking.com and Platial have already created Mapplets.
The 2006 Where 2.0 Conference hosted over 700 developers, innovators, cartographers, and entrepreneurs, in two days, co-chaired by Brady Forrest and Nat Torkington. The Conference's goal was to bring people, projects, and issues leading the charge into the location based technological frontier, to debate and discuss what's viable now, and what's lurking just below the radar. CTOs traded ideas with grassroots developers building mash-ups; while community activists networked with venture capitalists looking for the next investment opportunity.
With the largest index of websites available on the World Wide Web and the industry's most advanced search technology, Google Inc. delivers the fastest and easiest way to find relevant information on the Internet. Google's technological innovations have earned the company numerous industry awards and citations, including two Webby Awards; two WIRED magazine Readers Raves Awards; Best Internet Innovation and Technical Excellence Award from PC Magazine; Best Search Engine on the Internet from Yahoo! Internet Life; Top Ten Best Cybertech from TIME magazine; and Editor's Pick from CNET. A growing number of companies worldwide, including Yahoo! and its international properties, Sony Corporation and its global affiliates, AOL/Netscape, and Cisco Systems, rely on Google to power search on their websites. A privately held company based in Mountain View, Calif., Google's investors include Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers and Sequoia Capital.
To learn more about the Conference, please visit: http://conferences.oreillynet.com/where2007.
For more information about the new mapping feature, please visit: http://maps.google.com/preview.
For more information about Google, please visit: www.google.com.
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