Slashgeo

I saw on the lidar exchange mailing list the following announcement : "LiDARXCHANGE, the only worldwide resource exchange for LiDAR technology, is proud to announce the Free LiDAR Data Portal Program. The LiDAR Data Portal Program allows geospatial data providers the opportunity to offer for sale the entire data warehouse from lidardata.com to their customers through their own websites, and share in all revenue generated from their portal through a unique point of sale commission structure.  lidardata.com currently has over a million square kilometers of LiDAR data available for sale and is adding more areas every week.

 

Participants in the Data Portal Program will have access to the following features:

• Add their own geospatial data limits and create their own pricing structure for their data
• Share their data limits with lidardata.com to allow all program participants to offer that data for sale
• Customize their portal to include their own brandin
• Utilize convenient web advertising tools to direct traffic to their portal
• The tool is free for any registered LiDARXCHANGE user. Registration is also free, and only takes a few minutes
  

 

Update: 10/08 13:19 GMT by S : Updated the story's title to reflect the fact that the portal is free, but not the data. See comments below for discussion and alternatives.

Google Street View is now available in Canada and Czech Republic. The official announcement should be available this afternoon. Here's the two articles about the new StreetView availability, but they're in French: Google Street View à Montréal et Québec and Google Street View au Canada et en République tchèque. I'll update this story once we have official announcements or other geoblog coverage. Meanwhile, you'll find related stories below. Update: 10/07 16:32 GMT by S : Still no official announcement, but you'll now find English coverage on the Google Earth Blog (two links) and on The Map Room.

Jimmy Perron writes "NSim technology announces a new online demo of NSim Contour Beta. The new GIS web application provides powerful vector streaming, real-time spatial collaboration capabilities and accelerated 2D/3D display. The server streams multiple geographic data sources (shapefile, mapinfo, WMS, GeoTiff, Oracle Spatial, ...). The online demo uses free Canvec (Canadian vector) data to demonstrate streaming technology with an innovative spatio-temporal database. Try it now at http://www.nsimtech.com./"

Via email I got a link to this article named Augmented Google Earth Gets Real-Time People, Cars, Clouds, screenshot and video included. From the article: "Researchers from Georgia Tech have devised methods to take real-time, real-world information and layer it onto Google Earth, adding dynamic information to the previously sterile Googlescape. They use live video feeds (sometimes from many angles) to find the position and motion of various objects, which they then combine with behavioral simulations to produce real-time animations for Google Earth or Microsoft Virtual Earth."

Currently in discussion on slashdot : "Google is taking suggestions for where you'd like to see the new Street View Trike go. Your favorite park, hiking trail, zoo, school campus hangout or outdoor mall could be going online thanks to Google Street View's new 250 pound tricycle, complete with camera and GPS. According to the press release: 'The Street View trike began as a 20% project by Daniel Ratner, a Senior Mechanical Engineer on the Street View team. "I began thinking about building a bicycle-based Street View system after realizing how many interesting places around the world — ranging from historic landmarks to beautiful trails to shopping districts — aren't accessible by car," says Dan. "When I'm riding the trike, so many people come up to me and ask where it's off to next or how they can get imagery of their favorite spot, so I can't wait to see what our users come up with."'"

There is an article with video up on All Points Blog which has a UAV which can map a building, without requiring the use of a GPS. Here is the summary, be sure to check the article for the video : "Yes it comes from MIT -specifically, the Robust Robotics Group at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. The mini buzzing quadcopter carries an array of sensors and scanners (including a camera and laser rangefinder) allowing it to explore and map without GPS or IMUs. It's smarter than a Roomba and the aerial version of PenBay's floor-based mappers."