Juzer Burhani

Zemanta is a plugin for Firefox and Internet explorer that integrates with Gmail and Yahoo mail and other Blogging Services to add inline images. for example this image down here is added through zemanta.
In blogger it also suggests tags.. cool huh.

Today I'm happy to announce that we've just finished pushing out an imagery update for all you Google Earth fans out there. As usual, I'll drop a few hints at where these updates might be, and tomorrow I'll post the complete list of updates.



1) Founded in 1608, this former British possession has a decidedly French flair.



2) Once the seat of great political power, this red fortress is now a major tourist attraction.



3) Now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, this city was lost to the world for 1700 years.

Dutch artist Henk Hofstra has done a couple of interesting large outdoor "urban art" projects. The first is a "Blue Road". He painted 1000 meters of road in bright blue in Drachten, The Netherlands - on top was the phrase "Water is Life" written in eight-metre-high letters. The road was painted (using 4000 liters of paint) in April of 2007, and Hofstra hoped it would show up in Google Earth - but, the imagery for Drachten in GE is still dated 2005 currently (no new aerial or satellite photo has been acquired by Google for the area). I did notice the artist had some aerial photos taken of the road. I've placed one of the photos in a Photo Overlay for Google Earth - load this file and double click on the placemark to be flown into the Photo Overlay where you can see how closely the photo of the Blue Road matches the road in Google Earth. Try the transparency slider to check the underlying imagery.
More recently, in May of 2008, Henk Hofstra has done another outdoor art project called "Art-Eggcident". In this case he has created 100 foot wide fried eggs in a large square in Leeuwarden, The Netherlands. Some of the eggs even have 3D yolks kids can crawl on (see more photos). Amazingly, the city is allowing the art project to stay in place for the next 6 months. We can hope a proper orthographic aerial photo (straight down), or a satellite photo will capture this cool looking art project so it can be seen in the Google Earth images. But, in the meantime, I have again taken one of the aerial photos and made a Photo Overlay so you can see a photo of the Art Eggcident in its actual location in Google Earth.
This is just a reminder that if you do some large outdoor project you want to be visible in Google Earth. You can always take your own aerial photo and place it with the Photo Overlay or Image Overlay tools in Google Earth. That way it is still "immortalized".

I've started getting reports of new imagery available in Google Earth today! The update is occurring as I write this because not everyone is seeing the new images yet, but it will probably be fully deployed within a few hours. Here are a few places I've confirmed (I will update this list as people tell me about other places - leave comments below please):
[UPDATED 1130, 1143, 1150, 1410, 2220 EDT]

• Catalonia/Spain - My story about 3D Roses is a popular story right now, and that's where people first started reporting the new imagery. The entire Catalonia area has new imagery mostly dated September 2006 by the Institut Cartográfic de Catalunya. Also, Murcia, Zaragoza, Toledo, Granada, Cuenca and Cáceres (see comment below). Also, Valencia. Also: Lleida, Tarragona, Barcelona
• Portugal - Looks like areas in Portugal have new imagery.
• Czech Republic - entire country has Spot Image (medium resolution 2.5 meter)
• Slovakia - entire country with Spot Image
• Hungary - entire country with Spot Image
• Croatia - Notheastern part
• Australia - All of western Australia has Spot Image as well! Also, some new low resolution imagery for the Great Barrier Reef area off North Eastern Australia (see dark colored imagery). Adelaide, Brisbane, Tasmania
• USA - Looks like all of New Mexico has high resolution now. Credits to NMR GIS dated July 2005.
• Mexico - Central Mexico has Spot Image imagery
• Italy - Rome, Naples
• Venezuela - Maracaibo (Thanks Gerardo!)
• Germany - center of Munich
• Canada - Quebec, Southern Ottawa
• California - Areas around San Francisco, San Diego, Benicia, Solano County, Monterey, Palo Alto, Los Angeles (unconfirmed)
• England - Bristol, Worcester, Evesham
• Cote d'lvoire - Bouaké

You can confirm whether the imagery is new by clicking on the "View in Google Maps" icon in GE - the imagery in Google Maps isn't showing the new data yet. If you find new areas not in my list above, please leave a comment and I'll update the list.

Google already frequently shows text-based AdSense ads with a slideshow feature... two arrows where you can click through to more ads if you like. Now Bilal Hameed spotted an image ad with a slideshow feature, as shown above. I wonder... is this new, or is it perhaps one of those gadget ads?

I am so Happy to hear that Yesterday Panoramio added photos up to ID 10760000 to Google Earth, that means around 750,000 new photos improving the experience in Google Earth. That also means that out of my 2 previously mentioned Panoramas, First one (id: 10410584) is now viewable in Google Earth. The next update will be around August 10th and will include photos reviewed before July 27th which may include my second one too.

Windows/Mac/Linux: Firefox extension Xoopit turns Gmail into a robust, searchable media management tool for every piece of media that comes through your inbox. By indexing every attachment as well as every link to photos and videos from sites like Flickr, Picasa, and YouTube, Xoopit allows you to easily search for and find any picture or video and view it from directly inside Gmail. Imagine this: You're looking for a YouTube video that you were sent a link to recently, but you really don't know where to begin your search. With Xoopit installed, you can just click the Videos tab and you'll see this:

Finding that video becomes a lot easier at this point, but you can narrow down the search even further by sorting the results, filtering by sender, or searching for the words associated with the video (even if all the original email contained was a link).

Today, Xoopit has also integrated their media search with Gmail's search box so you can get media results when you search Gmail the regular way (see their demo video for more). Once you're viewing a video or picture in Gmail using Xoopit, you can even post it to Facebook or to your blog directly from Gmail (WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, and LiveJournal are all supported).

Overall, Xoopit sounds (and is) pretty great, but there is a catch, and it's kind of a big one: You need to be willing to turn over your Gmail password to Xoopit to allow them into your inbox to index all of your email. It would be excellent to see this sort of functionality incorporated directly into Gmail so you don't need to trust a third-party with your inbox. However, if you give it a try and are unhappy with Xoopit, you can email Xoopit support and have your account deleted.

Xoopit is free, works wherever Firefox does. They're currently in a private beta, but they've promised access to Lifehacker readers who follow the signup link below. As soon as you sign up, Xoopit will start indexing your media. You should start seeing indexed content in a few minutes, and all of the media in your inbox should be indexed in under 24 hours. If you give it a try, let's hear how you like it in the comments.

Microsoft has come out with Deep Zoom, a method that uses the Silverlight 2 plugin for navigating around large online images. Deep Zoom uses the same technique as that used in online maps and virtual globes — showing a hierarchy of ever-more detailed imagery tiles as you zoom in. Hard Rock Café has an early example of the technology in action.

And to prove the point about the similarity with maps, Deep Earth uses Microsoft’s own map tiles to create a Deep Zoom version of Virtual Earth. What’s the difference between the two? Virtual Earth doesn’t really zoom smoothly but does wrap around, Deep Zoom zooms but doesn’t wrap around (at least not in the examples given).

The London-based Center for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) has had a similar tool for a while, except that this is a Java application that uses the Google Maps API: The Google Maps Image Cutter. It’s main advantage over Deep Zoom is that this application lets you make your own instances of zoomable gigapixel images. (I haven’t yet seen a tool that lets you create and publish your own Silverlight-powered gigapixel imagery.) [Update: There is a tool for creating Deep Zoom images, see comments.] The main disadvantage is that it doesn’t zoom smoothly — instead, you have to step between discrete zoom levels. And once you’ve zoomed smoothly, there isn’t really any going back.

It makes a lot of sense to publish gigapixel images to the web with a technology that only downloads the bits you’re actually zooming in on. (Zoomify is another example.) But what about 360-degree panorama images? These wrap around, just like an imagery dataset for a virtual globe. Here too, CASA has come to the rescue, with PhotoOverlay Creator, which produces KML that lets you explore a 360-degree panorama in Google Earth. This java app also uses a pyramidal hierarchy of tiles.

There are several ways of publishing panorama images on the web using Flash, such as Flash Panorama Player and Lucid. But such tools have lacked support for the piecemeal loading of high-resolution panoramas. One solution has been to become a member of and upload your panoramas to a site like Gigapan which uses server-side processing to deliver up the imagery piecemeal. But for DIY types, there is now also a relatively new Flash-based panorama publisher on the market that does provide multi-resolution tiling: KRPano. Expect to see a lot more development in this space.

So now we have scalable online viewers for both Euclidian and elliptic large imagery datasets. But where is the viewer for hyperbolic imagery? :-)

To celebrate Street View's one year birthday, I am very happy to announce we are bringing Street View to 37 (you heard me - 37!) new areas and we have expanded coverage in 15 of our existing areas. All in all, this effectively doubles our coverage. The new cities include:

• MA: Springfield
• NY: Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse
• NJ: Newark
• VA: Virginia Beach
• NC: Charlotte, Winston-Salem
• SC: Columbia, Greenville
• GA: Atlanta
• FL: Boca Raton, Cape Coral, Ft. Lauderdale, Jacksonville, Sarasota, West Palm Beach
• AL: Huntsville
• MS: Jackson
• TN: Knoxville
• KY: Lexington, Louisville
• OH: Cincinnati, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo
• MI: Ann Arbor
• MO: St. Louis
• KS: Topeka
• NE: Lincoln
• OK: Oklahoma City, Tulsa
• NV: Reno
• CA: Bakersfield, Fresno, Sacramento, Stockton

Now you can stroll under the iconic Reno Arch:


Along with showing you some great metropolitan areas, I'm especially excited that we're also bringing you 10 new parks and recreational areas:

• Everglades National Park (Florida)
  
• Florida Keys
• Grand Teton National Park (Wyoming)
  
• Yellowstone National Park (Wyoming/Montana)
  
• Rocky Mountain National Park (Colorado)
  
• Joshua Tree National Park (California)
  
• Death Valley National Park (California)
• Lassen Volcanic National Park (California)
  
• Sequoia National Park (California)
• Lake Tahoe (California/Nevada)
  

Now you can see the boiling springs in Yellowstone National Park from a very safe distance:
And last but not least, Street View coverage has expanded in 15 of our current areas: Boise, Boston, Kansas City, Miami, Nashville, New York City, Orlando, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, Richmond, San Diego, San Francisco, Tampa, and Tucson.

We've also been spending the past year working very hard to improve Street View image quality. In this push, we removed some of our oldest images, so say goodbye to odd coloring and funky geometric artifacts. The new images have better color and more consistent lighting.

Let's revisit San Francisco City Hall:
And the skyscrapers of Chicago:


Now you can look up in all our images. But what goes up must come down, so with this release you can also look down as well. The roof of our car and the 'black hole' really aren't all that interesting -- now when you pan down the car is magically gone and you can see straight to the ground in most of our images!

And finally, in the spirit of getting better with age, the face blurring technology we began testing in Manhattan has been deployed for all of our imagery. Remember that all these new Street View images are simultaneously available in Google Earth and through Google Maps API.

In celebration of Street View's first year of public availability, Google has made a major update to the Street View imagery. Unfortunately, none of the imagery is outside the US yet (despite the many sightings of Street View cars taking imagery in Europe). But, this update not only includes the many new cities in over a dozen states, but also updated and expanded coverage in many of the cities which already had Street View imagery. In particular, Google says more of the imagery now has more spherical panoramas (so you can look up and down in addition to 360 degree panoramas). And, they've worked on improving resolution and picture quality. Also, all the imagery has been processed with their new face-blurring technology to address some privacy concerns. Not only that, but the entire update is also available in the Google Earth Street View layer. Just to whet your appetite, here's one of the new cities:

View Larger Map

Read the full details on the new and expanded coverage over at Google's LatLong Blog. And, to see interesting sights found in Street View, or to share interesting things you find in the new imagery, try out Google Earth Hack's new Street View sightings database.

P.S. My apologies for the small number of posts the last few days. Had a bit of family crisis when my nephew Jason was involved in a traffic accident. Thankfully, he is miraculously all right now, and should completely mend in a few weeks. The other good news is that I got to do some flying in a Cessna between several states during the last few days.

To go with the new “version 2″ 3D data for Miami, Microsoft has updated Vienna and Seattle. In addition to that, they’ve added a ton of new imagery.

I normally like to list all of the updated areas, but it’s simply too much. You can view it all on this page.

The total amount of new imagery is reported to be around 69.2TB, which is amazing! However, I don’t know how that number is computed. Is that raw imagery? Compressed? Anyone know how that figure is derived?

In any case, it looks to be another awesome update.

These are my first two panoramic images i have created recently. Both are hosted at Google Panoramio.
The first one is shot from the terrace of Al Jamea tus Saifiyah - Arabic Academy.
This panorama is also posted on Gigapan images.


The second one is shot from the terrace of Khaimat ar Riyazat building.


comments are welcome.
Related Posts :
Google Panoramio Features Look Around
Surat skyline from Al Jamea tus Saifiyah

Windows Live Writer, your favorite blog editing software, just got better.

You can now crop pictures and screenshot images right inside Windows Live Writer without requiring external software. There’s a new tilt feature that lets you rotate pictures by a custom angle.

The new version also adds some new visual effects for your photos including Reflection and Rounded Corners. They are simple things but definitely help in making your blog entries more appealing.

With the new Windows Live Writer, you can also upload videos directly to MSN soapbox though we would like to see support for YouTube as well.

Available at Writer Zone. It’s a technical preview but pretty stable. I also find this release a bit faster than the previous version.

Last week, during the Google I/O conference, it appears Google managed to make another imagery update for Google Earth - and apparently already in Maps as well. So far Google has not officially announced the update. Maybe they were trying to turn it into a June update? However, GEB readers are way too savvy for that. Thanks to several tips from readers here, I have a list of sites which do indeed appear to have received new imagery last week (I'm still waiting for confirmation from Google):

• Europe - Austria was the first place I heard got new imagery. There was even a news piece about this new 25 cm aerial imagery. Thanks to Martin for the tip. Several other eastern european countries appear to have updates including Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Serbia, and Montenegro.

• Central America - Mexico - many areas around the country, but particularly the outskirts of Mexico City; Guatemala, Belize, Nicaragua, Panama, and Honduras - all got some new strips of Digital Globe imagery. Also, a lot of new coverage for Dominican Republic.

• South America - Some new coverage for Peru, Brazil; also, Trinidad and Tobago. A bit north, Grenada got some new strips as well.

• Africa - Nigeria got a lot of new coverage; nearby countries may also have some new coverage as well. Abidjan for example got a bunch of new images. Kampala in Uganda got some.

• India - It appears a lot of new imagery was added for India.

• Myanmar - Not surprisingly, some new imagery showed up for this storm-damaged country.

• Thailand - Lots of new imagery for Thailand.

• Philippines - I have seen many reports about the new imagery in the Philippines.

Thanks to all the many folks who sent me tips on the imagery over the last week. My apologies for not listing everyone's name, it's been a busy day of posts and catching up with E-mails! If you've heard of other areas, leave a comment here.

Fantastic news from India:

Taking the global geo-mapping service Google-Earth head on, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) plans to launch its own satellite imaging system on its website within six months.

Of course, whoever wrote this press release doesn’t know that Google is not in the business of making its own imagery, but rather accumulates satellite and aerial imagery from all comers. But let’s not nitpick:

'We are going to launch our own satellite images on the web within six months from now. Our images are quite good and even better than Google,' ISRO chairman G. Madhavan Nair dislosed here Thursday.

He said certain locations with security risks have been prohibited by the law from being imaged.

[...] Nair said the Remote Sensing Satellites (RSS) provide imagery of the earth in a variety of spectral bands and with a resolution better than one metre.

This is good news for us, because you can never get enough high resolution imagery of the planet. Imagery of India itself will be censored, but with luck India will soon be offering competitive imagery for sale of other areas that are currently serviced by just a few US, French and Russian vendors. India’s iGovernment site adds:

“The space organisation is ready to offer its capacities on a commercial basis and ring in its cash registers, after meeting the domestic requirement that calls for four to five launches a year,” [Nair] said.

Wouldn’t it be great to finally get sub-meter resolution imagery of Israel, Gaza, the West Bank and Golan in Google Earth, courtesy of India? Those areas are currently not available at resolutions higher than 2.5m per pixel, in part due to outdated legislation that should be abolished.

It’s ironic, though, that this additional source of global satellite imagery is coming about as a result of wanting to offer a censored alternative to Google’s imagery dataset and borders for India.

PhotoSynth is a new concept introduced by Microsoft, which in reality change the way one think and feels about photos. This new software takes large number of images, and look for similarities in these photographs, to create a complete 3 Dimensional look. This technology allows you to

• Walk or fly through a scene to see photos from any angle
• Seamlessly zoom in or out of a photo whether it’s megapixels or gigapixels in size
• See where pictures were taken in relation to one another
• Find similar photos to the one you’re currently viewing
• Send a collection - or a particular view of one - to a friend

Microsoft actually achieves by symbolizing each and every structure by series of dots, and then these are matched with other images, so that they can be compiled together to give that look. Photosynth can also identify the depth at which picture is taken, because each and every camera has different aperture and zoom. You can walk into 3D as well, and the best part being you can zoom into it infinitely.
This can completely change the way the 3D world is today. You must at least once try it out. To view the PhotoSynth in action, you need to install the software from here.

Related Posts:
Surat skyline from Al Jamea tus Saifiyah

I've always thought that an image search engine should accept as an input images and list identical or similar images from the web. This is useful if you have an image, but you don't remember what it depicts or if you want to find a higher-quality version of an image.

TinEye tries to do that and the best part is that it mostly succeeds. The new image search engine, powered by Idée's technology and currently in private beta, has an index of 487 million images (Google's index is at least 12 times bigger) and manages to find identical versions of an image or alterations. According to the FAQ, "TinEye frequently returns image results with colour adjustments, added or removed text, crops, and slight rotations. TinEye can also detect images that are part of a collage or have been blended with another image."

And the FAQ doesn't lie: I uploaded a screenshot of Flickr's homepage that included a Flickr image in the top-left corner. TinEye returned 6 results: 5 of them were different versions of the featured image (including the original image hosted by Flickr) and another result showed Flickr's homepage with a different featured image.


Then I uploaded an image from my computer that shows fingers in a book scanned by Google and TinEye pointed to me to a TechCrunch article that included that image:


TinEye doesn't do a good job at ranking images, as it orders the images "by relevance i.e. how well the result image matches your query image". It can't figure out the most-likely original source of an image, so TinEye's algorithms could be combined with a traditional image search engine like Google's in order to determine the authority of each image. TinEye also doesn't recognizes faces or objects in an image, so it just looks for similar images.

How does it work then? "TinEye uses sophisticated pattern recognition algorithms to find your image on the web without the use of metadata or watermarks. TinEye instantly analyzes your query image to create a compact digital signature or 'fingerprint' for it. TinEye searches for your image on the web by comparing its fingerprint to the fingerprint of every single other image in the TinEye search index."

The search engine is in private beta, but you can request invite or watch this screencast:

Popout

Have you ever required a software that would color correct your images, and make your images look more natural, and beautiful? Well, if you have, then there is an online tool that does it for you, and it does it very neatly.

Improve Your Images is an online tool, that just asks you to upload your images, and rest is done by the tool itself. The results you get are stunning. You might feel sometimes that, there might be something missing in the photograph, and it not coming that lively, But this free online tool does it, and I don’t know how, No information has been given on the site as to how it works.
All in all, it is not a Photoshop replacement, but results are very much satisfying, Do give it a try

Have you ever required a software that would color correct your images, and make your images look more natural, and beautiful? Well, if you have, then there is an online tool that does it for you, and it does it very neatly.

Improve Your Images is an online tool, that just asks you to upload your images, and rest is done by the tool itself. The results you get are stunning. You might feel sometimes that, there might be something missing in the photograph, and it not coming that lively, But this free online tool does it, and I don’t know how, No information has been given on the site as to how it works.
All in all, it is not a Photoshop replacement, but results are very much satisfying, Do give it a try

via GOS

At the recent "Search Factory Tour" event (slides, YouTube video), Google announced that its image search engine has received a lot of attention from users lately and it intends to dramatically improve it. People no longer use Google Image Search only to find celebrity pictures or pretty images, they started to use it to compare products, to choose vacations or visualize unfamiliar situations.


To cope with the increasing number of images from the web and to provide better answers for the new use cases, Google promised that will start to add features that use complex image analysis.


One of the new features will allow you to find similar images, given a selected image. Since it's difficult to describe pictures using words, you will be able find a a group of images that illustrate the same situation.

After adding face detection as a restriction for image search, Google prepares to expand it and actually recognize faces. This will improve the quality of results for searches that include person names. Google doesn't intend to limit image recognition to people faces: finding objects in pictures is a difficult task, but it's a reliable way to filter irrelevant pictures.

Image search engines don't use the information from EXIF tags, that could offer a lot of interesting contextual details about location, date, image quality. Google will start to add information about geolocation from digital images.


The most controversial new feature tested by Google is the addition of display ads next to image results for commercial queries. Google's previous experiments with text ads weren't very successful, so adapting the ad format to the content could be a better idea. It depends on their usefulness and their prominence: the second mock-up displayed above puts too much emphasis on the image ads. For now, Ask.com Image Search is the only important search engine for images that displays ads, but they're text-only.

If we take into account that, in addition to all these enhancements, Google developed an improved algorithm for ranking images (VisualRank), we can expect an entirely new image search engine from Google in the near future.