Slashgeo

The Map Room and All Points Blog links to a Wired article on TeleAtlas and NAVTEQ data collection strategies. From the article: "Next, GDT acquired detailed aerial photography of major cities. "We could look at a street and see which way cars were parked, even tire rubber going into intersections, and deduce 85 percent of the turn restrictions and one-way attributes," Cooke says. Some state transportation departments offered video footage of their streets to GDT, and Cooke's employees would fast-forward through hours of tape, noting every road sign. Impressed by how much faster and cheaper maps could be updated with this approach, Tele Atlas, a Belgium-based company, bought GDT for $100 million in 2004." On this previous story, we learned Tele Atlas wants to benefit from customer feedback to improve maps.

Slashdot discuss the Google announcement of their new Street View and Mapplets feature. Their summary: "Today at the O'Reilly Where 2.0 Conference Google unveiled two new map features. An O'Reilly blogger describes Street View, which uses 360-degree street-level video from Immersive Media to enable neighborhood walk-throughs in (for now) a few selected areas. The other new feature is Mapplets, which let you embed Google Maps mashups in any Web page. Much more coverage is linked from TechMeme." The GEB covers the launch. Of course, you can read about it from the Official Google Lat Long Blog. See related stories below.

tprinty writes "Looks like Google is getting their street view fleet in order big time. A tipster to Gizmodo took some screenshots of a dozen Chevy Cobalts ready to hit the streets. Smile! Your on Google Maps!" From the Gizmodo article (with screenshot): "It was an entire fleet of at least 30 brand-new Chevy Cobalt cars parked behind the building, most without license plates yet. As you can see in the pictures above, each had a metal device attached to its top, which looks suspiciously like a vertical extension for mounting Google's Streetview 360° camera."

ixcer writes "A joint press release announces that TomTom, the world’s largest navigation solution provider, will acquire Tele Atlas, the biggest data provider for navigation systems, including Google, Yahoo!, AOL and Nokia. The announcement starts this way... "TomTom N.V. (“TomTom”) and Tele Atlas N.V. (“Tele Atlas” or the “Company”), jointly announce that the expectation is justified that an agreement can be reached in connection with a public offer by TomTom for all outstanding shares of Tele Atlas at an offer price of € 21.25 in cash, (the “Offer Price”) per ordinary share (the “Offer”).

The Supervisory Board and the Management Board of Tele Atlas (the “Boards”), after having duly considered the strategic, financial and social aspects of the proposed transaction, support the intended Offer and conclude that the Offer is in the best interests of the shareholders and all other stakeholders of Tele Atlas. The Boards of Tele Atlas will, when the Offer is made by TomTom, recommend acceptance of the Offer by the shareholders of Tele Atlas."" Update: 07/23 17:41 GMT by S : All Points Blogs provides more links such as the Reuters article.

Tele Atlas has announced the availability of Tele Atlas Connect, a "Global Solution for Digital Map and Location-based Applications", that expands their digital map coverage to over 200 countries and territories. This extended coverage allows for seamless mapping and routing across national boundaries and a standard database format ensures its utility with current and future geographic applications. GISuser.com has the full news release here.

CNET News and google-latlong blog reports "Google has added four more cities to its Maps street view: San Diego, Los Angeles, Houston and Orlando, Fla. San Diego is getting the same high-resolution imagery treatment that Google gives San Francisco; I'm not sure why." Update: 08/08 20:39 GMT by S : In addition, the Geowanking list discussed examples of Google's Street View hacks.