The Google LatLong team just announced that Google Maps is getting 3D previews of travel directions. The interface now displays a "play" button that switches to a Google Earth view that flies along the route automatically. Playback can be paused and resumed at any point, and dragging the map allows exploration of the surrounding area.
It's all existing Google technology, putting a browser view of Google Earth inside the Maps window, but it's a new integration. It's not the most useful feature, but it is a new and immersive way to plan a trip.
Yesterday we took a look at the history of Facebook mobile and how the company has taken a browser-based approach since almost the beginning of its mobile Web development. Keep that in mind with the announcements that Facebook is reportedly ready to make next week concerning its HTML5-based Web apps platform, the so-called Project Spartan.
Facebook's developer conference was enlightening, if you read between the lines. Facebook's CTO Bret Taylor said there, "would be no central repository" of Facebook mobile Web apps. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said multiple times during the f8 keynote that all of Facebook's newest features, including the Timeline, would work on the mobile Web. We know that game developers are working hard on HTML5 for Facebook. How is this all going to come together?
Google's Chrome Web browser could become the second most popular browser on the market before the end of the year, according to data from StatCounter, a Web analytics company. The three-year-old browser would knock Firefox from the second place slot behind Internet Explorer.
The coup would be quite an achievement for Chrome, which was just released in 2008 and has been growing rapidly ever since. By comparison, Firefox was first launched in 2004 and took much longer to attract significant market share.
Last weekend, Foursquare held its second hackathon, a worldwide, weekend-long affair in which hundreds of developers tinkered away and built new location-based apps and tools on top of Foursquare's API. There were about 100 hacks submitted for consideration and today Foursquare announced the winners.
Taking the top prize is a handy little Web app called Plan My Next Trip, which uses your Foursquare history to recommend things to do when you visit other cities.
Flickr just announced its first native Android app for shooting and sharing photos. It offers quick filters, topic and location tagging, access to comments and groups, and full-screen browsing and slideshows. It has a full list of sharing options as well as privacy controls.
There's also a new feature for all Flickr users called Photo Session, which lets members browse photo slideshows in sync together over the Web. Users can chat and doodle on photos during a Photo Session. It supports all major desktop browsers, iPhone and iPad.
Google and Nielsen measured the impact of advertising across multiple screens, and the findings were stark. Advertisers will be happy to learn that advertising across devices appears to significantly increase brand retention by eyeballs... I mean, people.
The study tested a 15-second car ad on different subject groups. Some saw no ads, others saw them on various combinations of TV, PCs, smartphones and tablets. Those who saw the ad on TV alone recalled the brand of car correctly 50% of the time. The people who saw it across all devices got it right 74% of the time.
Wikipedia today introduced a program called QRPedia, a QR code creation service that lets users snap a picture of a QR code and be automatically directed to a linked mobile Wikipedia entry in whatever written language their phone uses. If there's no article in their language for the designated topic, the program directs them to the most relevant related article that is available in that language. If you don't have a QR reader on your phone, I use the Google iPhone app, myself.
I dare you to find a cooler example of QR codes in action than QRPedia. Originally built at England's Derby Museum and Gallery (by the museum's Wikipedian in Residence!) the service is now available to anyone online. Multiple museums around the world have already put it to use, posting QR codes on the wall next to items on display. That's what the Internet is for, people, for taking the reality we're standing in front of and exploding it with a world of additional information available on demand.
Alongside its Kindle Fire tablet device and new line of Kindle e-readers, Amazon introduced another new product today: Amazon Silk, a mobile Web browser that rethinks the way browsers have traditionally worked.
Silk essentially splits the architecture of the Web browser in half, relying on both the computing power of the hardware and on the remote servers that comprise Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). It relies on the cloud to call up certain elements of a page, acting sort of like a content delivery network built right into the browser. The company claims that this unique approach will offer a much faster browser experience to end users.
Amazon just announced the Kindle Fire. It's a Wi-Fi only, 7-inch tablet with a full-color, backlit, 1024x600 IPS touchscreen (video). It has a dual-core processor, and it weighs 14.6 ounces. It looks like a BlackBerry PlayBook. The resemblance is not an accident; as Ryan Block at gdgt reported on Monday, the same original design manufacturer (ODM) - Quanta Computer of Taiwan - made both, and Amazon's Kindle team used the PlayBook's hardware as a template.
But the similarities end there. The software is a custom fork of Android that has Amazon's own feel, and it puts Amazon's vast catalogues of digital content at users' fingertips. In addition to the Kindle reader app, it offers Amazon's Cloud Player for music, and Instant Video Player for TV and movies. It comes with a 30-day free trial of Amazon Prime, and it ships with Amazon's own Android Appstore, rather than Google's. With Android as the starting point, Amazon has built its own tablet experience on top of it. At $199, the Fire is now the top of the Kindle line. It ships November 15.
Slideshare made an announcement this morning that is sure to thrill open Web standards advocates and iOS gadget lovers alike. The document and presentation-sharing site has done away with Flash completely and now uses HTML5 for its file embeds.
Not only will millions of SlideShare uploads embedded across the Web now render effortlessly on iPhones and iPads, but the company also launched a new mobile site that renders nicely on smartphones and tablets as well. The upgrade should also make the site and its embeds load faster, since they don't rely on clunky Flash plugins and content to render.
