3D trees in Google Earth

Google Earth is about to get something of a makeover thanks to more than 80 million 3D trees populating the product.

"Trees are part of the world we live in and if you fly over San Francisco with the trees turned on versus turned off it presents a different sense of what the city looks like," said Google Earth's vice president of product, the aptly-named Mr Birch.

He added that planting more than 80 million trees presented some technical challenges: working out where to put them; ensuring they were of the right type for the area and making them distinct enough to determine one species from another.

To start, six major cities have been populated with more than 60 different species: Athens, Berlin, Chicago, New York City, San Francisco and Tokyo are now home to models of dozens of species from the Japanese Maple and the East African Cordia to the cacao tree and the flowering dogwood.

         Google Earth also gets a bit political as Mr Birch explained that they have started to model forest lands and areas of the world under threat such as the Amazon and Kenya and some of the work being done to restore the environment there.

The search giant worked with groups like the Green Belt Movement in Africa, the Amazon Conservation Team in Brazil and Conabio in Mexico.

"We want to tell a broader story of the trees and deforestation and climate change to draw attention to the things happening to our planet," he said.

"This brings home just how special trees are and how they need to be protected," added Raleigh Seamster from Google Earth's outreach team.

"Modelling these areas of deforestation will draw more attention to what is going on there."

Street View also gets woven more tightly into the offer. Yes, that same product that has been slightly tarnished of late with issues of collecting snippets of data it shouldn't haveas the cars drove by people's homes to snap photos of neighbourhoods.

"Our goal is to really create this mirror world where people can travel to distant lands and learn about the planet and different areas. One of the problems is that the experience doesn't connect you all the way to the ground," said Mr Birch.

"It does a great job flying over mountains and cityscapes and your old childhood neighbourhood. But we all live on the ground and walk about the street and that is how we experience the Earth and this tighter integration with Street View gives us a great opportunity to complete the connection between the street level and this flying around."

The final change is an effort to make it easier to find out what historical images are available for a given area.

The upgrade was included in the previous release; this version invites users to fly to an area where historical imagery is available and see the date of the oldest images on a status bar at the bottom of the screen from London during the Blitz to Port-au-Prince inHaiti before and after the devastating earthquake of January 2010.

Multiple Gmail accounts just got a lot easier to manage

   

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• E-mail delegation will allow you to easily manage multiple Gmail accounts
• Originally feature was useful for granting others access to your primary Gmail account
• When you send e-mails from secondary account, primary address will also appear

RELATED TOPICS

• Google Gmail
• Email Software

Google's announced yet another awesome Gmail feature today. Called e-mail delegation, the feature will allow you to easily manage multiple Gmail accounts without signing in and out of Gmail and switching accounts manually.

Originally, e-mail delegation was useful for granting others access to your primary Gmail account -- personal assistants, for example.

With today's changes, this basic feature is going to be more useful for any Gmail user with multiple accounts of his or her own.

When you sign into your primary Gmail account, you can choose to grant access to another account. Just navigate to your Gmail settings by clicking the link in the top right corner of Gmail's web interface.

Under the Accounts tab, there's now a new section entitled, "Grant access to your account." Here, you can add any other Gmail accounts you control to your primary Gmail account.

When you add an account, you'll have to accept access from a verification e-mail sent to the to-be-added account. Once the account is successfully added, you can simply toggle between your Gmail accounts without logging in and out.

Also, when you send a new e-mail message while signed into a secondary account, your primary address will also appear in the e-mail details.

Online WikiLeaks game is a hit

       

A computer-game parody of the much-talked-about WikiLeaks saga has made a splash online.

In the online game, players assume the role of WikiLeaks founder and outsized personality Julian Assange hiding behind President Obama's desk in the Oval Office.

Using their mouse, players must manipulate the Assange character to smuggle secret documents from Obama's laptop onto a USB drive as the president dozes off. Those who fail are treated to a juicy presidential sound bite and a mock story planted in the newspaper.

More than a million people have visited the website for "WikiLeaks: The Game" since it was posted five days ago, developer Sebastiaan Moeys, 21, told ABC News.

"Just like governmental attempts to quash WikiLeaks, the game is harder than it looks," wrote Alexia Tsotsis on the tech-news blog TechCrunch. "I've played it five times and I still haven't won."

Game developers have been quick in recent years to capitalize on the popularity of prominent news events.

Satirical animated games have spoofed Tiger Woods' extramarital scandal, the Hudson River plane landing, the Chilean mine rescueand the rescue of a ship captain from Somali pirates.

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