In an increasingly noisy world, designing buildings to be pleasing to our ears as well as our eyes is becoming more important. After all, buildings that are better at keeping out external noise and don’t suffer nasty echos will be more pleasant to be in. A new project is aiming to help make this process a lot easier.
Sound Around You, an initiative by the University of Salford, aims to crowdsource information about sound levels around the world using a simple mobile app and some desktop analysis software. The project’s website allows you to explore and listen to all uploaded recordings via a Google Maps mashup.
The mobile software is J2ME based which means it will work with most phones that aren’t the iPhone, while the desktop software is Windows only. Apple fans will have to sit tight on this one for the time being but an iPhone version is planned.
In this video the man behind the project, Charlie Mydlarz, explains how it works and why it’s an important project.
Written on 26th February 2009
3 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Google Street View (part of Google Maps) can optionally now show you user contributed photos of various popular locations grabbed from Google owned Panoramio.
In Google’s words, the new feature
“allows you to explore on a level that our cameras can’t go…”
To view the photos, simply browse to a relatively popular location like Times Square, drag the little man icon on the left on to the map and click on the photos icon to the top right of the screen.
Written on 20th February 2009
16 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Bernie Bamford, a British aeronautical engineer, believes he may have the fabled lost city of Atlantis on the ocean floor.
Using Google Earth, the discovered grid has been found about 620 miles off west Africa in an area called the Madeira Abyssal Plane.
Atlantis Experts said that the unexplained grid is located at one of the possible sites of the legendary island, once described by ancient Greek philosopher Plato. According to Plato, the lost city sank beneath the ocean after the cities residents failed to conquer Athens around 9000 BC.
Dr Charles Orser, curator of historical archaeology at New York State University has said:
“The site is one of the most prominent places for the proposed location of Atlantis, as described by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato.”
Google however believe that the image is merely an artifact of the data collection process, not the city of Atlantis.
The underwater image can be found at co-ordinates: 31 15′15.53N 24 15′30.53W.
Written on 9th February 2009
3 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Google Australia have created a map to keep track of the awful bush fires burning through South East Australia in the aim of helping to coordinate traffic and assist the country’s emergency services.
The fires have already reached a death toll of over 108 people, the worst in the country’s history – with many reports that the fires are being set alight intentionally.
The flash map gives real time information about the fire locations and their status from the State of Victoria’s Country Fire Authority (CFA) website via RSS feed. The map also provides an address search functionality which should be a big help.
The number in each marker shows the number of fires at the location. A green marker means the area is called “safe” by the CFA. Yellow means “controlled”. Orange means “contained”. Red means “going”.
You can view the map large here or see it embedded below.
Written on 9th January 2009
2 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Google Maps has been used to help find a missing child. The nine-year-old girl, allegedly kidnapped by her grandmother, has been found using a mobile phone signal and Google Street View.
A police officer and fireman in Athol, Massachusetts began looking for the child following a complaint from her guardians. Her grandmother reportedly picked her up on Saturday and her guardians became worried her grandmother might be taking the child to her biological mother in Louisiana.
Athol police had the girl’s mobile phone number and requested the GPS coordinates of the phone during recent uses from the phone’s service provider.
Using Google Maps Street View, officials identified a building that looked like a motel. They put in a call to the Virginia State Police, who visited the motel and found the girl and her grandmother.
Sadly the story isn’t quite so straight forward. There are claims from the girl’s biological mother that the girls’ guardians have been neglectful and to be involved with drugs. If this is the case, maybe this isn’t such a pretty story after all…
Written on 26th November 2008
0 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Google have announced some changes to Google Maps today, particularly to enhance Street View.
In places where street view is available, you are able to just click the small yellow man (Google are calling him Pegman) to see the street view for the current location or you can simply drag the icon to the location on the map, a nice touch.
Google have also revamped the layout of Street View to give you the ability to view larger and wider buildings/objects.
Finally, Google have also added a feature allowing you to see both the Map and Street View a the same time (see right). With all the talk of job losses and troubled times, it’s great to see Google focus on what they do best, innovation.
For your interest, here’s a video apparently narrated by Pegman himself describing Google Maps latest update.
It must be a real pleasure when you’re a Google Maps developer and see some people taking your product to the next level. Like Jordi Ramot did. He’s a Spanish software engineer specializing in geospatial interoperability field and when he’s not behind his computer, he likes to be in the mountains hiking, back-country skiing or mountain biking. Since 2006, he has been developing Wikiloc, a Maps mash-up that allows users to upload GPS waypoints and trails so that other outdoor fans can use it on their trips.
It started as a hobby project, but has grown to a large community of thousands of outdoor enthusiasts sharing their best outdoor routes from anywhere around the world. Several voluntary translators have made the service available in twelve languages. Ramot told Spanish Web 2.0 blog that Wikiloc recently has become a full time project.
And it gets even better now that Google has announced the integration of Wikiloc in Google Earth. Users can now pick routes from the Wikiloc layer. So if you ever feel like skiing near La Monta in Switzerland, be sure to check this map:
Even when you’re not into the whole outdoor extreme sports thing, this post still is relevant to you. It shows that with enough passion, you can even let a hobby project become a successful company.
The controversial Dutch blog GeenStijl (translation: no style, wiki here) received an anonymous tip today saying Google censors certain parts of their Maps. We’re not talking about the regular “Google Blur” that hides military bases and government buildings, but a different – more evil so you want – kind of censorship. The thing is, the Mountain View-based company plants forests in Holland. Some Google employee has replicated a small part of forest to hide a certain object on the terrain of Castle Engelenburg near Eerbeek, Gelderland.
And there also is a second bush, left from the water, that also doesn’t exist. Livemaps, the mapping service by Microsoft, also shows a forest, but this one looks “better”.
According to GeenStijl, neighbors say there was “something weird” going on with European subsidies and nature areas. Anyhow, Google Maps secretly censors its satellite photos, that’s for sure.
Google announced a new feature in Google Maps, letting you view the walking directions. And as Andy Schwerin puts, it makes me want to stroll through the city a little bit as well: “You’ll notice shops, parks, and public art that you’ve been accustomed to zooming past, and come away feeling like you’ve really gotten the insider’s take on a neighborhood or city. Of course, don’t get too caught up in enjoying the sights! Please be careful, and be particularly attentive in high traffic areas.”
Simply type in the directions as you are used to and if the route is shorter then 10km, Google will offer a option to show Walking directions on the left of the screen. Don’t walk blind on the new feature’s directions yet, the beta service doesn’t know all the sidewalks yet, and is not intelligent enough to see a pedestrian bridge for crossing a busy street. Google doesn’t know all pedestrian pathways yet, and is collecting new data to find more effective ways to get to where you need to be.
Google seems to be the only mapping service that offers walking directions for now. Although we have seen Google Maps mashups for jogging purposes before, allowing to manually create, share and discuss jogging routes. I hope Google will implement a sportive function as well. For now, the feature will prove very useful on mobile devices for quick navigation purposes.
Written on 30th May 2009
5 COMMENTS 
In an increasingly noisy world, designing buildings to be pleasing to our ears as well as our eyes is becoming more important. After all, buildings that are better at keeping out external noise and don’t suffer nasty echos will be more pleasant to be in. A new project is aiming to help make this process a lot easier.
Written on 19th March 2009
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The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
