Spotted: Google Street View Car!
Google Street View Car ©Richard Thomas
What a way to kick off my day! I was driving in Los Angeles this morning, when what to my wondering eyes should appear? That’s right: the Google maps Street View car! The Google map-wrapped Subaru with a red globe of cameras on the roof, was heading south on Fairfax, just south of Little Ethiopia.
Google Street View started back in 2007 as an experimental project in five U.S. cities. Today Street View has images across the globe on all seven continents.
According to Google’s map site, “the latest car has 15 lenses taking 360 degrees of photos. It also has motion sensors to track its position, a hard drive to store data, a small computer running the system, and lasers to capture 3D data to determine distances within the Street View imagery.”
Street View isn’t limited to the current Subaru: also included in the family are Street View Trolley, Street View Trike and Street View Snowmobile.
Happy Birthday Robert Bunsen!
Break out your chem lab goggles. We love a good Google Doodle and today’s is on fire! To celebrate Robert Bunsen‘s birthday Google Doodle has posted an interactive logo complete with his namesake Bunsen burner heating up several viles, test tubes and one of those amazing coffee pots standard in any Italian kitchen.
Bunsen also discovered the elements caesium and rubidium and developed the Bunsen cell battery.
More iPhone 4 Love
If it wasn’t obvious from a previous BuzzRocket post, iPhone 4 Challenge at TEDx, I love the iPhone 4, which has proved itself again today at a Writers Boot Camp Business Breakfast session, featuring Shira Lazar, an EMMY nominated TV and Web Personality who continues to bridge the gap between traditional and new media and be a prominent leader and voice for the digital age.
The moderator, Jeffrey Gordon, politely reminded the crowd to turn off their phones before the session started. Lazar quickly interrupted, saying, No! Leave them on. Tweet about this. I want you to tweet.” A girl after my own heart.
I quickly pulled up my Evernote app and started voice recording the Q&A, then popped over to Hootsuite to start tweeting realtime updates about the event. I was able to multitask and jump from app to app, updating, documenting all without a hitch.
I realize that many people, like my mother, use the iPhone to check email, take pictures, text and, yes, make the occasional phone call. But when you take advantage off all its capabilities, it truly is an invaluable tool that I’m very proud to have – even in LA, the land of dropped AT&T calls.
True story.
nail tech: What do you do?
gretchen schneider: Interactive marketing. (blank look on her face) Um, people hire me to run their Facebook, Twitter pages and to ghost write?
nail tech: Oh, so you’re a private investigator.
gretchen schneider: (pause) Yes.
Happy Birthday Harry Houdini!
In celebration of Harry Houdini’s 137th, Google has once again switched up its logo to honor the occasion. We have to admit, we’re a little disappointed. We were expecting a little more for Houdini, master illusionist. After all, Google Doodle did pull out all the stops – think interactive submarine – for Jules Verne just last month. Oh well. Happy birthday to a man who famously escaped from an underwater box in the East River in 1912.
Click here to see a complete gallery of recent Google Doodle logos.
Google Celebrates Women!
Today is marks the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day. In recognition of this historic day, Google is boasting a beautiful logo with a vintage look featuring accomplished women (one graduate, one physician, for example). Google doesn’t stop there. It has teamed up with Women for Women International to invite you to Join Women on the Bridge, an international campaign where tens of thousands of people will united on bridges across the globe to show their solidarity and support for women’s equality.
Don’t worry if you can’t be in physical attendance: Google invites you to participate virtually through Google Street Maps.
Happy Mardi Gras!
Laissez les bons temps rouler! We’ve spent much time on the bayou. And love all things NOLA. Especially these guys. But who doesn’t love themselves a little Rebirth?
Enjoy!
Friday Music: Lykke Li – I Follow Rivers
http://vimeo.com/tlobf/lykke-li-i-follow-rivers
We are loving the newly released Wounded Rhymes by Lykee Li. Here she is performing a stripped down version of “I Follow Rivers” at Victor Wynd’s Little Shop of Horrors.
iPhone 4 Challenge at TEDx
As I posted yesterday, I had the distinct honor of running the TEDxGoldstar blog throughout the day for the truly inspirational event. To make things (more) interesting, and to avoid lugging around a cumbersome laptop, flip cam, camera, etc., I challenged myself to run the entire blog off my iPhone 4. This made some question my intelligence, sanity … perhaps wonder if I had a gambling problem. Hey, this was TEDx: The perfect place to exhibit such an innovative tool like an iPhone.
I’m happy to report that my challenge was an absolute success. I was able to capture and edit HD video, take pictures, post real-time updates, add the TEDxGoldstar Interactive Host blogs and promote everything via twitter through my tiny, powerful little phone. I felt like I was living out an iPhone commercial’s dream.
The capabilities of the phone were nothing short of incredible, but I also have to attribute a lot of the success to the Tumblr iPhone app, which made uploading new posts a seamless process. Even uploading videos took but minutes from the phone (compared to 20-30 minutes from my computer). Tagging the posts was simple, as well.
My only complaint is that the keyboard on the Tumblr app doesn’t flip, so I was forced to type on a tiny vertical keyboard, which was fine at first, but by the eighth straight hour of blogging, I was ready to chuck my iPhone off the roof of the Downtown Independent, where TEDxGoldstar was held.
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