Slashgeo

[just realized this is partly a duplicated story, but it offers different links] Remember last week Microsoft announced Streetside, a feature similar to Google's StreetView? Today Google announced something similar to Bing Bird's Eye View: tilted perspectives imagery in Google Maps: "Starting today, developers will have access through the Google Maps API to high-resolution overhead imagery that is presented in a new aerial perspective. This is currently available in 2 spots in California: San Jose and San Diego. This new perspective gives users the ability to tilt their view of the world. In addition to seeing hotel rooftops like in our current "satellite" view, users can now see both the rooftop and sides of the hotel at an angle. In fact, users can rotate around all the sides of a hotel to get 4 different views from back to front. While the imagery is great to look at, we wanted to make sure it was also a useful tool for users. Consequently, we decided to stitch thousands of images together so that users can smoothly pan across the map in perspective." Developers can access tilted aerial imagery using the Google Maps API v2 (and v3 probably soon). Two other official entries focuses on finding what's nearby in Android and the launch of 'Favorite Places on Google' service using 'QR code' and a camera-equiped smartphone: "This launch is part of our overall effort — online and offline — to provide you with the best local business results whenever you're trying to figure out where to go [...]" The Google Earth Blog also shares his predictions for Google Earth in 2010, the themes: imagery freshness, map and imagery correlation, cloud power, 3D buildings and StreetView. There's also Italy's Milan now in 3D. Ogle Earth also shares an entry comparing the latest major Bings Maps upgrade with Google Earth.