Never seen this one before but I think it’s brilliant and wanted to share it with my readers!

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Google StreetView Explained (Japanese version)

Spain is now the second country in Europe to have StreetView available, in 4 cities, Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and Seville. This was the announcement made yesterday on the Google LatLong blog. The first country to have StreetView available was France, soon after the Tour de France took place.
So now you will be able to view the city I live in, Barcelona, by using the StreetView option. The LatLong blogs shows some examples of the architecture in this city, including the famous Sagrada Familia and the Casa Milà.
The imagery available in StreetView was quite recently taken, this seems to correspond with when I blogged about StreetView visiting Barcelona at the beginning of August.
As reports were made of seeing StreetView vehicles in other countries in Europe including Germany and the Netherlands I suspect these will be available soon.

Local Barcelona tip: This is the coffee shop (cafe mono) around the corner where we usually go. They serve good Italian coffee!

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Spain second country to have Google StreetView

Good to hear that the Google LatLong blog just reported that France is the first country in Europe to be launching Google Streetview, right after they already featured this service during this summer’s ‘Tour de France’.

Now some major cities have been added to StreetView in France and Google is looking forward to add more European cities and countries in the (perhaps near?) future. Hopefully these features will also be available in the Mobile Maps version of StreetView in the near future.
I’ve already reported seeing streetview in Barcelona, Berlin and Amsterdam and looking forward seeing the feature introduced here as well!

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

StreetView kicks off in France – Rest of Europe Soon?

It seems that Europe is getting ready for the Street View feature in Google Maps. In the past couple of months there were reports of Google Street View cars visiting various cities in Europe, for example, here in Madrid and Barcelona, Berlin, Amsterdam/Rotterdam. And just this afternoon a colleague shot this picture outside our office while drinking a coffee.

Google Streetview Car Barcelona on Gran Vía

Well after reading this, wedding proposal 2.0 in streetview, I am wondering if businesses are ready for the Google Van visiting your streets. Did you spend some bucks on new outdoor print already? Maybe now is the right time to refurbish your neon’s a bit.

I think it will be nice to see your business in Streetview alongside the placemark you added to Google Maps using the Local Business Center or KML files.

Update: I noticed this post on Chris Silver Smith his blog naturalsearch about text recognition in StreetView and how it could improve Google Maps. It’s a recommended read.

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Are you ready for Street View?