Google Maps heads north...way north

Google Maps heads north...way north: Search for [cambridge bay] on Google Maps and you’ll fly to a tiny hamlet located deep in the Kitikmeot Region of Nunavut in Canada’s Arctic, surrounded by an intricate lacework of tundra, waterways and breaking ice. High above the Arctic circle, it’s a place reachable only by plane or boat. Zoom in on the map, and this isolated village of 1,500 people appears as only a handful of streets, with names like Omingmak (“musk ox”) Street and Tigiganiak (“fox”) Road.





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Cambridge Bay in Google Maps

There are 4,000 years’ worth of stories waiting to be told on this map. Today, we’re setting out on an ambitious mission to tell some of those stories and to build the most comprehensive map of the region to date. It is the furthest north the Google Maps Street View team has traveled in Canada, and our first visit to Nunavut. Using the tools of 21st century cartography, we’re empowering a community and putting Cambridge Bay on the proverbial map of tomorrow.

The hamlet of Cambridge Bay

We’re not doing it alone, but with the help of the community and residents like Chris Kalluk. We first met Chris, who works for the nonprofit Nunavut Tunngavik, last September at our Google Earth Outreach workshop in Vancouver, where he learned how to edit Google Maps data using Google Map Maker. Today Chris played host to a community Map Up event in Cambridge Bay, where village elders, local mapping experts and teenagers from the nearby high school gathered around a dozen Chromebooks and used Map Maker to add new roads, rivers and lakes to the Google Map of Cambridge Bay and Canada's North. But they didn’t stop there. Using both English and Inuktitut, one of Nunavut’s official languages, they added the hospital, daycare, a nine-hole golf course, a territorial park and, finally, the remnants of an ancient Dorset stone longhouse which pre-dates Inuit culture.

Catherine Moats, a member of the Google Map Maker Team, working with Chris Kalluk and others at the Community Map Up.

Now we’re pedaling the Street View trike around the gravel roads of the hamlet and using a tripod—the same used to capture business interiors—to collect imagery of these amazing places. We’ll train Chris and others in the community to use some of this equipment so they can travel to other communities in Nunavut and continue to build the most comprehensive and accurate map of Canada’s Arctic. As Chris put it to us, “This is a place with a vast amount of local knowledge and a rich history. By putting these tools in the hands of our people, we will tell Nunavut’s story to the world.”

The Street View Trike collecting imagery of Cambridge Bay.

So stay tuned, world. We look forward to sharing with you the spectacular beauty and rich culture of Canada’s Arctic—one of the most isolated places on the planet that will soon be, thanks to the people of Cambridge Bay, just a click away.



Posted by Karin Tuxen-Bettman, Google Earth Outreach team



(Cross-posted on the Lat Long Blog and new Google Canada Blog)

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Disruptive science service Mendeley passes 100m API calls

Disruptive science service Mendeley passes 100m API calls:
A couple of weeks ago we reported some fresh moves by Mendeley, the London-based science startup, to use some of its big data to provide an exciting new analytics product for researchers. Now the service says it’s ramping another aspect of its business — a science data API that is already hitting landmark numbers.
Co-founder and CEO Victor Henning told me that the company’s API, which offers other services access to its trove of millions of scientific documents, has just surpassed 100 million calls each month. A year after launching the service — which provides access to the information stored in around 65 million scientific papers, documents and files in Mendeley’s databases — the site has around 240 apps that employ it, and is now seeing growth rocket. And that growth, he said, comes through the increasing popularity of those apps, not through any new, specific effort on its own part.
Henning highlighted a few of the projects which are creating the bulk of that traffic, including some interesting examples of the benefit opening up some data can have on what is, traditionally, quite a closed market.
For example, Readermeter.org and Total Impact are both services that measure how much impact a particular scientific paper or author has by analyzing how much and how widely the work is read. Meanwhile productivity app Hojoki integrates with Mendeley, pulling updates in alongside other services to create a personalized newsfeed for you.
Perhaps most interesting of all is OpenSNP, a project that allows people to share their genomic data with each other. It’s using Mendeley to help users cross reference the data they are finding out about their own genetic makeup with the latest scientific research as a way of understanding what’s going on in their bodies. If that’s not mind-blowing, I don’t know what is.
Henning says this is all part of a move to opening up science.
Next up? Wary of Twitter’s recent API troubles, Henning says that Mendeley wants to enable as many third party apps as possible, and has no plans to force money out of them — instead focusing on paid accounts and secondary services like its institutional dashboard.
“In academia, everything revolves around journals — but everything is behind a paywall, only available to universities who pay expensive subscriptions, and without APIs or other ways to access the data,” he said. “People see the importance of this [Mendeley's API] for opening up science.”
“We want to keep growing the ecosystem, get apps talking to each other and get more integration with the Mendeley experience” he adds. “But we don’t intend to monetize the apps.”


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Facebook is collecting your data — 500 terabytes a day

Facebook is collecting your data — 500 terabytes a day:
With more than 950 million users, Facebook is collecting a lot of data. Every time you click a notification, visit a page, upload a photo, or check out a friend’s link, you’re generating data for the company to track. Multiply that by 950 million people, who spend on average more than 6.5 hours on the site every month, and you have a lot of information to deal with.

Here are some of the stats the company provided Wednesday to demonstrate just how big Facebook’s data really is:

• 2.5 billion content items shared per day (status updates + wall posts + photos + videos + comments)
• 2.7 billion Likes per day
• 300 million photos uploaded per day
• 100+ petabytes of disk space in one of FB’s largest Hadoop (HDFS) clusters
• 105 terabytes of data scanned via Hive, Facebook’s Hadoop query language, every 30 minutes
• 70,000 queries executed on these databases per day
• 500+terabytes of new data ingested into the databases every day

“If you aren’t taking advantage of big data, then you don’t have big data, you have just a pile of data,” said Jay Parikh, VP of infrastructure at Facebook on Wednesday. “Everything is interesting to us.”
Parikh said the company is constantly trying to figure out how to better analyze and make sense of the data, including doing extensive A/B testing on all potential updates to the site, and making sure it responds in real time to user input.
“We’re growing fast, but everyone else is growing faster,” he said.


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Sling Digital takes the Moneyball approach to Twitter advertising

Targeting an audience on Twitter when you have a lot of money is not so hard. Just buy a lot of the obvious keywords related to the audience you’re trying to engage and wait for the advertising results. But what if you don’t want to — or can’t — spend a lot of money?

That’s the hole that Sling Digital is trying to fill with a new product that is being framed as the Moneyball for Twitter ads. Moneyball, if you don’t recall, is the approach popularized by the low-budget Oakland Athletics, which bought players cheaply in order to obtain wins. Sling Digital’s Audience Intelligence tool works by monitoring Twitter users’ conversations and breaking down who they are interested in, what affiliations they have, and what sites they visit and share from. The goal is not to buy keywords but to use a lot of data to buy audiences cheaply.

From the information it gathers, Sling can figure out cost-effective keywords to buy that allow an advertiser to find the right audience but at a much lower price than buying a traditional keyword. For example, if a beer company wanted to target soccer fans, it could buy the words “soccer” or “football” for a promoted tweet, but that would be expensive. But if it uses Sling to listen to the millions of conversations a particular set of users is having, it can find out that buying a particular name of a footballer or a soccer club could have just the same effect, because that’s what people are chatting about on Twitter.
MTV has been testing out Sling Digital and found it could advertise to fans of Snooki at a much cheaper rate than usual. During a recent campaign, Sling looked at the tweets of Snooki’s fans and found the keywords and articles they were sharing and using, which categories they were engaging in, and which other celebrities influenced them. Choosing new keywords suggested by Sling, MTV was able to get its cost per engagement with its target audience down to $1.93, compared with $4.95 with its original keywords.

Sling is primarily focused on helping customers advertise on Twitter. But it can also help them buy display ads on other sites using the same model. So if an advertiser wants to reach a sports audience, it could pay a lot to hit ESPN.com. Or it could use Sling to buy cheaper ads on smaller sites that users are currently visiting and sharing articles from. The system works on a rolling basis, looking at the last two weeks of tweets and conversations, but it can be narrowed to look at a narrower time frame.

Saif Ajani, the founder of Visibli, the Toronto company behind Sling Digital, said services like bit.ly already show what links are being shared. And tools like Radian6 analyze and monitor social media conversations. But, he says, there’s still a need for a tool that pulls it all together and uses the collective data to help guide advertising decisions. 


Visibli, which was originally founded in 2009, has raised $365,000 from Extreme Venture Partners and angel investors including LocalResponse founder Nihal Mehta. The service reminds me a little of SocialFlow, a New York–based company that helps advertisers time their update and ads to hit users when they are most receptive to a message. LocalResponse also analyzes tweets and social updates to let advertisers act on real-time consumer intent. All of these companies spend a lot of time understanding users’ conversations to optimize engagement with them.

It takes a lot of work and smart algorithms to understand what people are saying and how it can be used to target ads and updates. But if done well, it can be a big opportunity as more advertisers look to tap social as a way to reach consumers.

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Twitter Founders Launch Medium, a New Site that Democratizes Online Publishing

Twitter Founders Launch Medium, a New Site that Democratizes Online Publishing:

Obvious Corp, the company that spawned Twitter, has unveiled a new project called Medium. It’s a site that attempts to revolutionize how online publishing is done.
Instead of content being centralized around individual people, it features photographs and text grouped into themed collections. Content within collections can be sorted by how “interesting” viewers rated it to be.

Here’s how Twitter co-founder Evan Williams describes the service:

Medium is designed to allow people to choose the level of contribution they prefer. We know that most people, most of the time, will simply read and view content, which is fine. If they choose, they can click to indicate whether they think something is good, giving feedback to the creator and increasing the likelihood others will see it.
Posting on Medium (not yet open to everyone) is elegant and easy, and you can do so without the burden of becoming a blogger or worrying about developing an audience. All posts are organized into “collections,” which are defined by a theme and a template.
[...] Collections give people context and structure to publish their own stories, photos, and ideas. By default, the highest-rated posts show up at the top, helping people get the most out of their time in this world of infinite information.

The service is currently read-only for the general public, and invite-only for people who wish to publish.
Contributing a photograph is as easy as uploading it to a collection and adding a brief caption.
Here’s a brief tour of various layers. The basic grouping for content is the collection based around a theme:

Inside the collection are photos or articles based on the theme:

Opening up one of the posts shows either a photograph in high-res glory or a neatly formatted article:

The idea is actually quite smart. It gives people a voice by allowing them to publish anything without having an established website or following.
Content is gauged by its own merit rather than how influential the creator is. Think of it as a Reddit for entire pages of content rather than simple links. That’s a pretty powerful idea.
Medium (via Laughing Squid)

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This is What You Get When You Stack Photos of a Meteor Shower

This is What You Get When You Stack Photos of a Meteor Shower:

Capturing a single shooting star can make for a brilliant photograph, but what does it look like if you composite multiple meteors into a single image? Fort Collins, Colorado-based nature photographer David Kingham decided to find out recently during the ongoing Perseid meteor shower. The amazing photo seen above is what resulted.

Here’s his description of how the image was created:

Last night I went out to Snowy Range in Wyoming in search of dark skies for the Perseid meteor shower. I wanted something special for the foreground and I knew the Snowies faced in the perfect direction to get this shot. I started shooting at 10pm and didn’t stop until 5 am, I had to change my battery every 2 hours which made for a long night. The moon rose around 1am to light up the mountain range.
This is a composite of 23 images, 22 for the meteors/stars and 1 taken at sunrise for the foreground which was lightly blended in. I also corrected the orientation of the meteors to account for the rotation of the earth (this took forever!)

The fact that the stars move in the night sky makes the compositing a bit tricky. To combine the images in Photoshop, he took a base photo and overlaid each shot he had that contained a meteor. For each layer, he lowered the opacity to 50%, matched up the stars with the base layer by rotating around Polaris, and then erased everything in the layer except the shooting star.
He says that the benefit of this technique is that the elements can be exposed in a way that maximizes quality. The base shot containing the stars can be shot at low ISO and longer exposure times, while the meteors can be shot using high ISO (maximizing the intensity of the meteor without having to worry about the rest of the sky being too noisy).
(via kottke.org)

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Image credit: Snowy Range Perseids Meteor Shower by David Kingham

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New Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Now on Flickr, Reportedly Doubles Team

New Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Now on Flickr, Reportedly Doubles Team:
Update: The account has mysteriously vanished from Flickr. This suggests that it was either fake, or something that wasn’t meant to be as big of a news story as it was.

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If you’re a fan of Flickr, then you’ll be happy to know that new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has apparently created an account on the photo sharing service. Granted, the page only features a single portrait of Mayer from her days as a Google exec, but it’s an important first step. Neither of Mayer’s two predecessors (Scott Thompson or Carol Bartz) bothered to join the service.

It doesn’t end there: according to Robert Scoble, Mayer has doubled the size of the Flickr team in just the past week. Apparently the Internet attempts to get Mayer’s attention is working, and Yahoo’s humorous response wasn’t simply a clever PR stunt.
Earlier this year, Yahoo was criticized for handing pink slips to “the highest level of Flickr’s customer support” — people who “loved the site the most”, so it’s awesome to see that the company is now hiring instead of firing, and devoting attention and resources to ensure that the service thrives.
Hopefully Mayer will start sharing some of her photographs as well!
(via Thomas Hawk)

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