Results tagged “googleearth”

• Google Earth Used By Netizens To Discuss Urban Planning [chinaSMACK] "For those of you who lived in or been to any major city in China, you must have at one point gotten stuck for hours during the morning commute or being lost within the maze of side streets and intersections. Things apparently don’t look that much better from the bird’s eye view, as curious Chinese netizens shockingly discovered (thanks to Google Earth) that even cities in Africa have seemingly better city planning and layouts than Chinese ones. The crux of the arguments boils down to whether it was truly poor city planning or because that most Chinese cities, like Rome, were not built in one day."
• The Akamai Of The East [Forbes] "In the first seven months of this year, 40 million users plugged into China's Internet for the first time, about 7 million more than the entire population of Canada. For China's Web sites and telecoms, that's a server-straining, broadband-bending rate of growth. For a privately held Beijing company known as ChinaCache and its investors, it's the kind of statistic that opens champagne corks. As the top content delivery network (CDN) in mainland China, ChinaCache holds a near monopoly on the lucrative business of selling Internet-based companies a fast track through the country's congested cyberspace."
• Taiwan film festival pressured to drop film about Chinese dissident [Monsters and Critics] "After Chinese protests, the organizer of the Kaohsiung Film Festival came under pressure Thursday to cancel a showing of a film about the life of a Chinese dissident. The Kaohsiung Film Archive announced earlier this month that it planned to show the Ten Conditions of Love, a documentary about exiled Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer, during its October 16-29 film festival in Taiwan's second-largest city."

• Deadly sex story puts 2 bloggers in court [Shanghai Daily] "The widow of the late Chinese film director Xie Jin has filed a libel lawsuit against twin-brother bloggers for claiming her husband died while having sex with a prostitute."
• Beijing teen hot-wires bus, causes chaos [AP] "A 13-year-old boy apparently hot-wired a public bus and took it on a joyride in downtown Beijing and crashed it into a dozen vehicles in a scene witnesses likened to a blockbuster movie, state media reported Monday."
• China plans to launch its own 'Google Earth' [China Economic Net]"Compared with Google Earth, the pictures provided by the State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping feature higher resolution and cover a wider range of national territory. As long as the place is not subject to significant security restrictions, online users can search wherever they want in the country."

Take a walk down Panyu (Fanyu) Lu from the Film Art Centre and you will soon pass by the SH508 restaurant. It occupies a slaughtered renovated colonial mansion adorned with a huge neon sign. Unknown to the proprietors, reviewers and most of the customers, this is actually the former family home of British writer J.G. Ballard.

Just as the rest of the world is getting swept away in a social networking frenzy, googling for keywords such as "Badoo", "Facebook", "Ebuddy", "Hi5" and even "Second Life", Chinese googlers it seems are a completely different species. In 2007, four out of the top ten keywords among Chinese googlers were wealth-related, searching for keywords such as "stock", "China Merchants Bank", "Industrial and Commercial Bank of China" and "China Construction Bank". Bank of China is conspicuously absent from the list!

This service, located at ditu.google.cn, has replaced Google Local, which was at bendi.google.cn. First off, there's a couple of big differences between this and Google Maps for the US. You can't use satellite or hybrid mode in the Chinese version. If you want a satellite you have to go back to using Google Earth or other such sites, and of course it's hard to find your way there because all you see are blotches of rooftops. Ditu.google.cn just has the regular graphics.

Google has been in the news recently after co-founder Sergey Brin said at the World Economic Forum in Davos said, speaking of Google's decision to comply with censorship regulations in China, that "on a business level, the decision to censor ... was a net negative."

Someone found the image on the right on Google Earth:

For detailed looks at the Shanghai metro system, try here and here. There also could be some kind of interesting Google Earth/Shanghai Metro mashup thing available, but Shanghaiist uses an Apple, so no Google Earth for us we were wrong (see comment) and just downloaded it.

For those of you who love Google Earth and have been craving some satellite imagery of the local scene, Google Local has recently uploaded some high-res images of the Puxi area of Shanghai. Use the scroll and zoom functions in the top left corner of the map to find your house or apartment, or perhaps to explore those areas of Shanghai that you just can't pry yourself off the couch to see during these cold winter months.