Thursday, 6 July 2006
Tour de France goes 3D with Google Earth
I don't know about you, but with the action and excitement heating up in the Tour de France, it's hard to keep track of exactly where everybody is riding. When you're trying to understand the Herculean effort that these cyclists go through in stages like L'Alpe d'Huez, or which streets in Paris the final stage will pass through, 2D maps just aren't as compelling.
But now you can make sense of it all by flying around the route yourself. A new KML file available on the official Tour de France website lets you see the entire course overlaid on satellite imagery for Google Earth.
This special Google Earth tour is available in French, German, and Spanish as well as English. Pick your language on the Le Tour site, and once you've done that, look for the "Tour on Google Earth" link in the lefthand navigation under Route. Then you can see the starts, the finishes, even information on each of the cities along the way. Just move the KML file into your "My Places" folder on Google Earth, and follow along day by day. (Did you know that Huy has the unique privilege of hosting stages for the Tour de France, the Giro and the Tour of Belgium this year? We didn't either.)
Be sure to try out the tilt feature to see the truly daunting magnitude of all of those climbs where riders are battling it out in this year's wide-open race. "Beyond Category" climbs? No thanks -- we'll stick to the flats and leave those verticals to the pros!
Wednesday, 5 July 2006
Armchair travel with Google Pack
Even though I've lived in one city my entire life, I've always loved to travel and experience all the languages and cultures around the world. So it's been exciting to be a member of the team responsible for making Google Pack available internationally.
I'm happy to tell you that starting today Google Pack is available in Australia,
Austria, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, and the U.K. It includes a batch of useful software like Picasa (for organizing your vacation photos), and Firefox (for safer web browsing). And it comes with Google Updater, which keeps all the Pack programs current so you don't have to. Maybe with all the time you save, you can do some travelling of your own.
Saturday, 1 July 2006
We get letters (4)
Our inbox is filled with stories from people who tell us how they use Google, and occasionally we feature these stories here. If you have a noteworthy tale, write to us.
In the world of marketing, there's always keen interest in knowing what the "target customer" does with the company's products. What are these people really like? How do they use our products?
Well, now we know about one in detail. Meet Alex, age 12. She just completed 6th grade in the Seattle area. And she wrote this essay for her class. If we made Alex up, you wouldn't believe us, so take a moment to read her report yourself.
Her dad Bill wrote to say that Alex "just totally loves doing research on the web and playing with making web sites. She did a cyber camp a couple of years ago, but most of what she knows comes from her mom" (who at the time led development of an online commerce business).
What's more, Bill goes on to say, Alex "has just discovered geocaching" and he adds "I started teaching her python as a first programming language this winter, but she got bored until I could figure out how to do some visual stuff that was more engaging than console read/writes :-)." He also notes that she "just discovered usability studies, and has been seen "flipping through one of her mom's several books on web design, engaging the reader, and ecommerce. Her dream job when she grows up is to be a technical program manager or web designer."
To us, the ideal Google user sounds a bit like Alex - resourceful, keen to try new things, and clearly, someone who appreciates ease of use. So we're really pleased that a number of our services meet her needs.
By the way - she got 106/100 for her essay (extra points for writing technique). Nice work, Alex! And a happy holiday weekend to our American readers. We'll see you next week.