2011 NCAA Championship on Google Maps

Google College Basketball Tournament Map

Google has created a Google Map of the 14 arenas used for the 2011 NCAA Basketball Championship. The map includes all the schools involved, the schedules and the venues.

Also included is a distance tool so you can measure how far each school has to travel. There is even an option to switch on the Google Earth browser and view all 14 arenas in 3D.

If that isn't enough for you the map also contains a little game that lets you shoot some hoops yourself.



Via: Official Google Blog

New Satellite Images of Japan

Both The New York Times and ABC News have published before and after satellite imagery of the destruction caused by the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. Both visualisations use new imagery captured by the GeoEye satellite.

Google are working to provide this data directly to response organizations on the ground to aid their efforts.


From ABC News


From the NYT


You can donate to the Japanese Red Cross Society here. You can also donate to the Japanese Red Cross with Google Checkout at the Google Crisis Responsewebsite. 

Google Map Showing 100 Years of Cinema

100 Years of Set Locations

Do you ever wonder what films have been shot in your neighborhood? Well, with BoxOfficeQuant's new Google Map you can find all the movies that have been shot on location near your home.

The map displays the top 2,000 films from 1910-2010 according to IMDB. The location of sets used in each film was also obtained from IMDB. In total the map shows 9,736 locations from the 2,000 films.

The map uses Google Fusion Tables. It is a shame that BoxOfficeQuant didn't add the heat map option provided by Fusion Tables as it would be quite interesting to view the world's hot-spots for movie sets.

BoxOfficeQuant were even kind enough to respond to my wish to view a heat map of the locations used in the films.

Google Map of the World's Richest

Forbes Board
The Mapize team has created a nice visualisation of the Forbes Rich List.



As you can see the visualisation includes a fully interactive Google Map showing the location of the world's billionaires. You can filter the map to show the richest and the 'poorest' billionaires.