Rome2Rio, a Vehicle-Agnostic Travel Site, Launches

A new travel site called Rome2Rio launches today, the brainchild of two ex-Microsoftemployees, Michael Cameron and Bernard Tschirren. The site’s main innovation? It’s vehicle agnostic, in a way–you tell it you want to go from A to B, and it’ll tell you what combination of car, plane, train, or ferry you need to take.

In that way, it’s more like the “how to get there” in a Lonely Planet guide, points out VentureBeat in its story on the site today. Rather than piece together information from here and there, Rome2Rio aims for the all-inclusive experience of simply reading a paragraph in a guidebook.

And it goes further than that, too–to be truly useful, any travel site needs to let you book flights. Rome2Rio does that, presenting Kayak airfares, which you can click through to purchase flights.

Cameron and Tschirren told VentureBeat that the site is probably most useful in Europe, where the train systems are complicated and have varied pricing. “Hours of travel time and hundred or even thousands of dollars” could be saved, goes the claim.

The site joins the trend of creating technology that would make classic movie plots based on missed connections and poor communication–such as Planes, Trains, and Automobiles–obsolete.

(from fast company)

Bicycling Directions, Trails Come to Google Maps

There’s nothing worse for a bicyclist than finding yourself a mile in to a two-mile stretch of shoulder-less, busy, highway-speed traffic with no alternative route. Before today, this was a common occurrence if you went to trusty Google Maps to get bicycling directions, but starting today, that has all changed.

Google has added bicycling directions, lanes and routes to Google Maps, meaning you no longer have to drive, walk or bus to get directions. And we can tell you, bicyclists are excited.

Before now, the only option to cyclists to get even remotely appropriate directions, was to use the walking option, but this would still ignore bike trails. Google has heard the pleas of cyclists and, from first look, we have to say that the feature is well implemented.

We gave it a test to see if it would put us on some of Austin’s more bike unfriendly streets, but it managed to chose some good alternative routes and stick to the bike trails when it could. The directions got a little wonky when we threw it a few curve balls, but we expect this to happen with any mapping service, especially one still in beta. But, as we’ve learned, you can’t just gomindlessly follow directions, lest you end up in a lake.

The new feature also includes a “Bicycling Layer”, which shows bike paths and bike-friendly streets with or without lanes. Three different lanes appear in the layer.

• Dark green indicates a dedicated bike-only trail;
• Light green indicates a dedicated bike lane along a road;
• Dashed green indicates roads that are designated as preferred for bicycling, but without dedicated lanes

According to Google, it has also taken steps to avoid uphill and long downhill routes, busy roads and even busy intersections. Google says that it even takes hills and other factors into account when calculating your trip time. “Assuming typical values for mass and for wind resistance, we compute the effort you’ll require and the speed you’ll achieve while going uphill,” Google says in its Lat Long Blog.

Google worked with the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy to bring more than 12,000 miles of biking trails to its map, along with bike lanes and recommended streets for 150 cities across the country. Google makes sure to point out that the feature is still in beta, so feel free to tell Google the next time you find yourself on a crowded, shoulder-less highway because of Google Maps.

And for those of you headed to fair Austin this week, make sure to take a look at the new feature, because it includes all of Austin’s numerous bike trails and bike lanes. If you’ve never been to Austin for SXSW before, bicycling is the way to get around town and now you’ll know how to get there.

(from readwriteweb)

GrottoCenter: a comunity database for cavers

GrottoCenter is wiki-like website for cavers. The site allows cavers to share their knowledge and favourite caving locations with other cavers. GrottoCenter includes a Google Map that shows the locations of the submitted caves and the site’s members.

Currently the map shows the location 0f over 12,000 caves and 361 grottoes. As well as displaying the location of caves the map includes geological overlays for America, Australasia, Europe and the Poles.

If you click on any of the plotted caves on the map you can get further details and links to any relevant websites about the selected cave.

Crowdmap

Crowdmap is designed and built by the people behind Ushahidi, a platform that was originally built to crowdsource crisis information. As the platform has evolved, so have its uses. Crowdmap allows you to set up your own deployment of Ushahidi without having to install it on your own web server, and it is free.

With Crowdmap you can collect information from cell phones, news and the web, aggregate that information into a single platform and visualize it on a map and timeline.

Nothing to Install

Your site is hosted on our servers, so you have no installation to worry about. Instead, just choose a name and start customizing your site.

Interactive Map

One of the most powerful ways to visualize information is via a map. Choose a location and start plotting reports, information and other data right away.

Dynamic Timeline

Track your reports on the map and over time. You can filter your data by time and then see when things happened and where, as it’s also tied to the map.

“Real Time” Data Tracking

The admin area of Crowdmap has analytical tools for you to make sense of your incoming data in real-time.

Google Street View Adds Local Business Listings

Last week, the newly renamed Google Places added a ton of features to help local businesses create a directory page right on Google. Today, Google’s Street View is joining the party by showing links to local business listings right in Street View. As you turn around in Street View, names of local businesses and other “Google Places” will show up overlayed on top of buildings. As you hover over those names, a small pop-up window shows some of the listing details such as business name, phone number, and ratings.

There have been links from business listings on Google Maps directly to Street View for almost a year, but now those business listings appear right within Street View itself. Google clearly wants to own local and is sprinkling these listings everywhere it can.

The next step I’m waiting for is to see Street view in a mobile augmented reality app, so that you can just point your phone camera at a building and see the businesses listed inside. That would be so Tonchidot of Google. Our augmented reality future awaits.

(from techcrunch)

NASA releases the most complete map of the earth

NASA and Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and industry (METI) released the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) Global Digital Elevation Model (GDEM) to the worldwide public on June 29, 2009.

It covers 99% of the earth’s surface and it is available for downloads.

The GDEM was created by processing and stereo-correlating the 1.3 million-scene ASTER archive of optical images, covering Earth’s land surface between 83 degrees North and 83 degrees South latitudes. The GDEM is produced with 30-meter (98-feet) postings, and is formatted as 23,000 one-by-one- degree tiles. The GDEM is available for download from NASA’s EOS data archive and Japan’s Ground Data System. In this colorized version, low elevations are purple, medium elevations are greens and yellows, and high elevations are orange, red and white.