mapping - News, Features, and Slideshows

News

• How a handful of USB sticks are revealing the secrets of the Great Barrier Reef

  Dr Robin Beaman compares the feeling of collecting his USB sticks from boats returning from the Great Barrier Reef to opening gifts on Christmas morning.

• Australian robotics team heads to abandoned Colorado gold mine for DARPA challenge

  ​A team of researchers from CSIRO’s Data61 and their robots are heading to an abandoned gold mine in the Colorado mountains this weekend, to take part in an exercise run by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

• What lies beneath: CSIRO robots rise to DARPA’s subterranean challenge

  Dark and disorientating, prone to rockfalls and flooding, and often filled with toxic gases: caves are not a safe place for humans. So why not send robots instead?

• Mapbox partners with Microsoft, Intel to provide self-driving car maps

  Mapping startup Mapbox has announced it is teaming up with Microsoft, Intel and Softbank's ARM Holdings chip unit to deepen its push into providing maps for self-driving cars.

• nearmap spies offshore opportunities for geospatial service

  nearmap, a Sydney-headquartered company that provides a Web-based aerial imagery service with built-in geospatial tools, is assessing opportunities for overseas expansion in North America and the Asia Pacific, according to managing director Simon Crowther.

• Tech behind Man of Steel's Metropolis coming to a developer near you

  Developers in the games industry and other industries will soon be able to integrate the technology responsible for creating the urban vistas of recent Superman movie <i>Man of Steel</i> into their own applications when Californian company Esri launches the new version of CityEngine next month.

• Birds-eye view drives cost savings at Western Power

  Government-owned WA electricity company Western Power has cut the cost of manually checking on swathes of its infrastructure by feeding up-to-date high-resolution aerial imagery into the company's GIS (geographic information system) setup.

• Studying North Korea via satellite

  Long-term remote sensing of North Korea using satellite images has helped overseas researchers build up a profile of the country including food production and military installations.

• Apple must reassess location strategy after 'Maps stumble': Gartner

  As location becomes a critical part of mobile OS success, Apple has found itself in unfamiliar territory playing catch up to Google, according to Gartner.

• Google offers gripping view of Japanese devastation via Street View

  The cataclysmic damage caused by the 9.0 earthquake and subsequent tsunami in Japan in March has been powerfully captured through 360-degree panoramic photography at Google Street View.

• Google Maps provides street view-look at store interiors

  Google Maps is moving you off the street and inside local businesses with a new feature called Business Photos that shows you 360-degree images of store interiors using Street View technology. Business Photos lets you peek inside select stores in 10 U.S. cities and surrounding areas including Austin, Baltimore, Boston, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York and Washington, D.C. The new feature is also available in Australia, France, Japan, New Zealand and the U.K.

• Why your business should be on Google Places

  Google has been very apologetic about the fact that open businesses are being incorrectly reported as closed on Google Places. It's incredibly easy to report business as closed on the service, and Google has promised on its blog to fix the problem. Let's back things up for a second and look at the Google Places service.

• CEDA wraps up WA state mapping project

  The WA Committee for the Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) has completed its project to map the state’s development, after wrapping up 12 forum sessions for its Inventing the Future project.

• Google quietly pulls flawed travel times from Maps

  Google has removed a service that predicted travel times with traffic from the browser-based version of Google Maps.

• Osama Bin Laden's hideout gets Google Maps treatment

  Google Maps fans have been in full satire mode writing reviews for what might be the site where American forces killed Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Shortly after President Obama spoke to the nation on Sunday, people scoured Google's satellite imagery and came up with what may very well be the hideout where the al-Qaeda leader was staying. The purported Bin Laden site on Google Maps looks like a large estate surrounded by large security walls, similar to the description of the compound showing up in news reports.