Google Earth has released a layer which contains thousands of panoramic views. These views are provided by 360cities.net. The newly added layer contains 360 degree panoramas from a number of photos taken from around the world. You can explore a number of attracting places in the 360 mode. In addition to Google Earth’s Panoramio and Wikipedia layers, 360cities.net will present a new way to browse the photos contributed by users. If you’re passionate about taking panoramic views then you can add them yourself as PhotoOverlays on Google Earth.

---
Related Articles at Startup Meme:

(I know we’ve covered Ocarina here before, but I’m a latecomer to it and I’m so blown away, I had to have a rant about it. Forgive the indulgence.)

It took me a few days to grok what’s so wonderful about Ocarina, the $0.99 app that’s been taking the App Store by storm in recent days.

It’s not just about playing music. It’s about sharing it. Globally.

I suspect I was like most newcomers to Ocarina, in that once I’d got it installed, I started trying to play it. The trickiest thing is making sure that you blow correctly into the microphone - blow gently, don’t whistle a tune, and make sure you hit the microphone square on. If your blowing misses, the music stops.

It took me longer to explore the other options Ocarina offers, but once I got into world view, I found myself grinning like an idiot.

For those of you who haven’t seen it yet, the world view shows Ocarina players all over the world as little glowing lights on a digital globe’s surface. The app takes you from player to player, their musical doodlings appearing as a stream of animated blue streaks and flying green circles, like something out of a 50s sci-fi movie. You hear what they’re playing.

So you can open up world view and leave it playing; have a thousand Ocarina players serenading you as you work, sleep, play, cook, chat. This is simply stunning work, and I challenge you to find anyone whose jaw doesn’t hit the floor in amazement when they first see it.

As you tour the globe’s Ocarina players, you can flag up the ones you like (some of them are very talented). Most webapps ask you to “fave” or “friend” the people you like, but inside Ocarina you get to tap a little heart-shaped icon. You don’t fave these people, you love them. Isn’t that fantastic?

The Ocarina forum is a treasure trove of great stuff. Want to learn how to play the Still Alive, the closing credits song from Portal? How about Breakfast in America? Or the Imperial March? My six-year-old is so going to go crazy about this.

I apologise if I sound a little carried away with excitement here - it’s because I’m very excited.

What makes me gush even more is that we’re still in the early days of the iPhone platform here. Yes, there is a lot of rubbish on the App Store and people everywhere (myself included) have had a good old moan about that. But buried amid the rubbish are some fabulous gems like this, things that inspire creativity and connectivity and a global perspective. And they’re available for just pennies.

The App Store has been with us for just over four months. What on earth will the collective genius of the iPhone developer community cook up for us in the next four months? The next four years?

Let’s say the iPhone platform is a theme park. Despite all we’ve seen in the last four months, we’ve not even arrived there yet. We’re still at home, looking at the brochure.

]]> Wed, 19 Nov 2008 17:02:35 +0000 thousand ocarina players ocarina players ocarina globes ocarina players inside ocarina options ocarina offers app app store world view Opinion: The Astonishing Accomplishment Of Ocarina http://www.softratty.com/article/987dd1455d01fa9db49a712870bd63c3 http://www.softratty.com/article/987dd1455d01fa9db49a712870bd63c3

NASA lately succeeded in conducting its first deep space communication in line with the Internet. Engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory used the Disruption Tolerant Network (DTN) to transfer space images between the lab and the spacecraft some 20 million miles from Earth. According to NASA the protocol had been designed in collaboration with Vint Cerf, vice president of Google. Manager of DTN Experiment Operations Center at the Lab, Leigh Torgerson stated:

In space today, an operations team must manually schedule each link and generate all the commands to specify which data to send, when to send it, and where to send it.

---
Related Articles at Startup Meme:

The trial turned EPOXI into one of 10 nodes in a test network (the other nine were on Earth), to verify the reliability and robustness of the new networking architecture.

This new networking system, an outgrowth of Cerf's Interplanetary Net project, can be layered on top of TCP/IP, the protocol that today's Internet uses. But although DTN is designed for a different environment than Earth, ultimately the technology may find its way back here, to improve communication back home.

How to network in space
JPL's Adrian Hooke, team lead and manager of space-networking architecture for NASA, explained the limitations of TCP/IP-based Internet to me. Although we tend to think of the Internet as routing around faults, he said, it is "not actually tolerant of disconnection between two machines." If you lose a link between relay stations (routers), he explained, "the routers start dumping packets on the floor after a few milliseconds."

Out in the solar system, where distance means that point-to-point communication time of a single bit can take minutes or hours, and where there is no system of interconnected routers, relay stations need to be smarter and more robust. Dropping packets doesn't work. "In space, it's very rare that you have an end-to-end path," Hooke said.

Disruption-Tolerant Networking devices don't just send off packets to the next device in the communications chain, as routers do. Instead, they hold on to packets until they expect that they will be received, and after they send them, they keep holding on to them until they receive an acknowledgment. Only once the packets are acknowledged do they release "custody" of the data to the next link in the communications chain.

It's a network. In space.

(Credit: NASA/JPL)

DTN networks need more smarts and storage than typical routers. They need to know which devices they can send to, and when, since planets and space vehicles don't stay put. And they need enough storage to hang on to packets that are coming in even when there may not be a receiver onto which they can offload them.

These concepts are not new. E-mail routers use store-and-forward architectures to transfer information, and mesh networks are opportunistic with their connections. But getting the DTN protocols certified for space operations requires a lengthy development cycle. Hooke told me that NASA hopes to have DTN ready to be built into spacecraft and ground-based radios in 2011, but that it will be four or five years after that before the technology will then make it into space. In 2015 or 2016, he said, "an interesting cluster of missions to the moon" will be launching, and he hopes to see DTN on them.

He also expects DTN to be part of the communications protocol for the Mars Sample Return mission, which is scheduled to launch in 2020 (but will probably be more like 2025). In that mission, a "full fleet of spacecraft" from several countries will all need to interoperate, and DTN should make the communications more reliable, and easier to build, than a patchwork of point-to-point radios. But first NASA and other space agencies need to know it works.

Meanwhile, back on Earth
DTN concepts are being applied to similarly flaky networks back home. Not surprisingly for a DARPA-funded project, the US military (the Marine Corps, to be specific) is experimenting with DTN for "stressed tactical military communications." On a battlefield, as in space, there's rarely an existing communications infrastructure a device can drop in to, so data radios need to be more tolerant of poor networks and opportunistically take advantage of communications links when they are available. Likewise, the Navy is looking at DTN to help submarines send and receive data in bursts when they surface or come close to a relay buoy.

DTN can integrate with existing TCP/IP networks, Hooke told me. "Bundle agents" can sit on the Internet and handle the store-and-forward protocols as well as the transfer of data from occasionally-connected devices to the main Internet.

And not all applications are military. A team in Sweden is using DTN to track reindeer movement (via geolocators tagged to animals), for example. Intel is looking at DTN to build out networks in developing countries with no communications grid. And in our own backyard, cellular equipment manufacturers are thinking about DTN for devices at the edges of expanding networks.

With the kind of battering the Google’s stock is receiving in Wall Street, the Search Giant has no choice but to stuff ads in as many places as they could find on God’s Earth. And they are doing just that, with Google Finance and Google Images being the latest two sites which now sport AdSense ads.

---
Related Articles at Startup Meme:

The update eveyone’s been waiting for is finally here! Google has release the update to Google Mobile App that includes voice search. On the iPhone, it uses the built in proximity sensor to begin recording when you hold the iPhone up to you ear. It will beep when the recording begins and when you stop talking or pull the iPhone away from your ear it stops. It then sends the recording to Google’s servers where it does the processing. Then it sends back search results, some which will launch the phone or maps applications. You can also tap the magnifying glass to the left of the search bar to change your search from iPhone & Web to Maps, Images, News, Shopping or Wikipedia. I haven’t tested the voice search in the car where there’s background noise but inside where it’s quite it’s working great.

At the bottom center of the app there is an Apps button. It takes you to a list of Google’s services, most formatted to the iPhone that open in Safari. There’s a long list that includes: Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Talk, Reader (my favorite), GOOG-411, News, Notebook, Photos, orkut, Translate, Maps, YouTube & Earth. You can even edit their order by tapping the edit button in the top right corner and dragging them around. … [visit site to read more]

Applications meeting Facebook’s standards will be marked with a verification badge, and more importantly, “users will see more information from verified applications as we increase their allocations for communication channels such as requests and notifications, and increase visibility of their stories in News Feed.” Those are of course the same viral channels that helped many applications grow rapidly when the platform first launched, but also caused users to feel the platform was spammy as opportunistic developers bombarded them with requests.

So what does it take to get your application verified? Facebook has published 10 “Guiding Principles,” with the central themes being that apps should be “Meaningful,” “Trustworthy,” and “Well-Designed.” It also takes $375 – the application fee that Facebook is charging to developers seeking to get their apps verified. Facebook will begin granting apps the benefits of Verified status early next year.

Essentially, coupled with the current fbFund finalists, Facebook is resurrecting the platform, which has been largely hidden to passive users (folks who ignore the apps completely) since the social network rolled out its redesign. It’s all been very methodical – first, bury the applications under a special tab on user profiles, then, dole out funding to the best app developers, and finally, offer everyone else a way to get their apps back in the game. Ultimately, it might get Facebook where they want to be – a platform offering several hundred high quality apps, as opposed to tens of thousands of useless ones.

---
Related Articles at Mashable | All That's New on the Web:

Facebook Announces Great Apps Program and FBFund Winners
Australia to Apply Film Ratings on All Commercial Web Content
Facebook’s New Sugar Mama: Virgin Mobile
AdBrite Serves Ads For Facebook Apps
Is Scrabulous Officially Dead?
Age Verification For Downloads Coming To The UK
Last.fm Releases Upgraded Facebook App

Google announced its new release of Google SketchUp 7, a software that enables you to build 3D models, such as a house, killer robots, furniture, tress, abstract art, and even models of Google Earth. The uses of SketchUp 7 are vast as architects and engineers you it in designing buildings and other structures. Woodworkers use it to plan their projects, and you can even decide where to place your furniture using this as well. Here are some of the features added into the new version:

• Making it even easier to get started – There’s a new class of "smart" objects called Dynamic Components, which are simpler to work with for new modelers. Take a look at the video above to understand more.
• Making it easier to share what you make and collaborate with other people – There’s a better link between SketchUp and the rest of the 3D world, made it possible to "sign" your models, and they’ve added Google Docs–style collaboration and sharing to their 3D Warehouse.
• Adding powerful features for experienced SketchUp Pro users – SketchUp is only half of the SketchUp Pro suite; the other half is all about sharing your work with your clients. LayOut 2 (which is now officially out of beta and rarin’ to go) lets you create multi-page documents and presentations. Models are linked to your Layout file so that changing the former automatically updates the latter.

---
Related Articles at Startup Meme:

Not only does the eclipse finder allow you to find solar and lunar eclipses on Earth, but you can seek eclipses on other planets as well.  I found out something really cool when checking out eclipses on Jupiter - because Jupiter is very large and has many moons, solar eclipses are very common.

There are even days when multiple solar eclipses take place on the same day on Jupiter.  I found an article about a triple lunar eclipse on Jupiter that Hubble captured back in 2004.  I used the eclipse finder to find the day it happened (March 28, 2004) and was able to simulate it.

WIth Celestia you can view celestial events that have taken place in the past or will take place in the future. Events can be viewed as they would have occurred in real-time, or time can be sped up. You can also run slower than real-time, but I don’t find that feature all that useful since most celestial events take place over several hours or years.

There are numerous add-ons and textures available at the Celestia Motherlode.  The add-ons provide additional celestial bodies and spacecraft not included by default.  The textures provide more detail for planet surfaces, stars, and star systems as well.

If you are viewing the earth, you can enter specific coordinates you want to visit and use the surface view (CTRL-G in windows) to see the night sky as you would from your backyard.

This is a great way to learn where the constellations are and which ones you can see during what time of the year. Celestia is like having a planeterium right on your desktop!

Which apps do you use for astronomy and space simulation?

Jorge Sierra is a geek that enjoys working with Linux and other free software and operating systems. He also enjoys programming as a hobby and has developed several iGoogle Gadgets. By day, he works as a Six Sigma black belt and by night he occasionally blogs as GeekLad.

Enjoyed the article? Please leave a comment and tell us what you think about it

New here? Get your cheat sheets and freebies at MakeUseOf Downloads. Enjoy!

Related posts

• xVideoServiceThief - Ultimate Download Manager for Online Videos (20)
• WordPress vs. Drupal - Content Management Systems (29)
• Utilizing Windows Search 4.0 (Part 1) (4)
• Ultimate Open Source Always Free Applications (3)
• Two Directories To Find Cool Adobe AIR Applications (4)

Not only does the eclipse finder allow you to find solar and lunar eclipses on Earth, but you can seek eclipses on other planets as well.  I found out something really cool when checking out eclipses on Jupiter - because Jupiter is very large and has many moons, solar eclipses are very common.

There are even days when multiple solar eclipses take place on the same day on Jupiter.  I found an article about a triple lunar eclipse on Jupiter that Hubble captured back in 2004.  I used the eclipse finder to find the day it happened (March 28, 2004) and was able to simulate it.

WIth Celestia you can view celestial events that have taken place in the past or will take place in the future. Events can be viewed as they would have occurred in real-time, or time can be sped up. You can also run slower than real-time, but I don’t find that feature all that useful since most celestial events take place over several hours or years.

There are numerous add-ons and textures available at the Celestia Motherlode.  The add-ons provide additional celestial bodies and spacecraft not included by default.  The textures provide more detail for planet surfaces, stars, and star systems as well.

If you are viewing the earth, you can enter specific coordinates you want to visit and use the surface view (CTRL-G in windows) to see the night sky as you would from your backyard.

This is a great way to learn where the constellations are and which ones you can see during what time of the year. Celestia is like having a planeterium right on your desktop!

Which apps do you use for astronomy and space simulation?

Jorge Sierra is a geek that enjoys working with Linux and other free software and operating systems. He also enjoys programming as a hobby and has developed several iGoogle Gadgets. By day, he works as a Six Sigma black belt and by night he occasionally blogs as GeekLad.

Enjoyed the article? Please leave a comment and tell us what you think about it

New here? Get your cheat sheets and freebies at MakeUseOf Downloads. Enjoy!

Related posts

• xVideoServiceThief - Ultimate Download Manager for Online Videos (20)
• WordPress vs. Drupal - Content Management Systems (30)
• Utilizing Windows Search 4.0 (Part 1) (4)
• Ultimate Open Source Always Free Applications (3)
• Two Directories To Find Cool Adobe AIR Applications (4)