Juzer Burhani

Google Maps now has detailed map tiles for the major cities in China.





If you want to have a good look around the stadiums built for the Beijing Olympics 2008 you should visit EarthSwoop's Beijing Olympics collection of 3d buildings. EarthSwoop use the Google Earth Browser plug-in to show 3d buildings built for Google Earth.







I also received an e-mail today from noicon.biz to say that Google Maps in Japan has been updated to show the names of some houses and commercial locations. You can see this change in the screen-shot below where some buildings seem to have been tagged with little red dots.

The Chinese Google Rebang site – a listing of hot searches as well as a general info directory – provides a new research tool for prospective university students in China. The tool is called Gaokao Zhuanti, which can be roughly translated to “Special Subject: College Entrance Examinations.” I asked native speaker Aaron Liang from Canada to provide more background info about this, and he says:
<GaoKao) in June in order to go to college or university. After the exam, they get an answer sheet and start to evaluate their scores. Then they compare their scores with the requirement of each institution in the past and choose which one they want to go. Basically, better institutions require higher scores. This is brutal because first, the grads don’t know their true scores; second, the requirement of each institution remains unclear till they know how many students are applying and what their scores are.>>
Now, Aaron continues to explain, Google introduced this new service as part of Google Rebang to help “the grads to choose the institutions.” He says:
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The details page for a university when you click on it from the overview. Here, Tsinghua University and its academies are presented, with links including pointers to related Google China image, video, map, and partner searches (Google-partnered social site Tianya Laiba).