In what is probably the largest celebration for Google Transit since their initial launch, the team announced support for the New York today. I know from the stories Chris tells me just how difficult it was to get the largest transit agency in the country on board with their program.

The online world has taken notice and Chris was called out in a New York Times article. With the impending arrival of his son next Monday, Chris couldn’t travel to New York to partake in the celebration. Instead he posted the official announcement to the Google blog.

Thinking about the magnitude of today’s launch, I can’t help but think about how far we’ve come towards reaching our goal. It’s been nearly two years to the day since I posted about the expansion of the Google Transit trip planner (we added five more cities to our initial single-city launch in Portland, Oregon). And in that post I included some statistics about how many people lived in a city covered by our product. At the time, our coverage was 6 U.S. cities. Now we cover more than 170 cities and countries across the globe, including about 70 cities in North America and 81 in China, plus cities in Europe and Australia and national coverage of Japan, Switzerland and Austria. And the number of people served annually by agencies was at about 6 million. Now it’s hard to count precisely, but the number is at least at several hundred million (wow!).

Posted by Chris Harrelson, Tech Lead & Creator of Google Transit

In New York, Google and the MTA announced the partnership via a splashy event in Grand Central Station.

You can watch some video coverage by local NYC news.

Dear Yahoo!, can I please have one of your kick ass bikes? kthxbai.

As part of a new viral advertising campaign called “Start Wearing Purple“, Yahoo! has created some GPS-enabled bikes. The project is called “Purple Pedals“. In about 7 weeks a team hacked together a bike that would take a picture every minute, geocode it, upload that photo to Flickr and then plot it on a map. A diverse team in NYC partnered together for the project.

They did a great job of documenting the process and the behind-the-scenes videos are really engaging. I think that the production quality and the narrative are what really brings the videos together.

From what I could catch watching the video, here’s the components:

1. Elektra Townie 8 cruiser bike
2. Nokia N95 mobile phone for camera & GPS
3. Custom python scripts loaded onto the device
4. External battery pack for phone
5. 3 solar panels to charge the battery
6. A/C power cord to charge battery (backup)
7. Accelerometer to detect when the bike’s in motion
8. Secure, waterproof enclosures for all hardware
9. Flickr for recieving, hosting and mapping photos

Oh, and check out this awesome beagle! He’s hanging around the industrial designer’s studio. Make me wish it was easier to bring Rusty into the office.

Wicked funny comic from XKCD.

Ryan Carver takes some damn fine pix.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

No TLD,
originally uploaded by Dan Harrelson.

Microsoft handed out these cards to UX Week attendees today. They dropped the .com from the officelabs domain in the URL printed on front.

Whether this was a mistake or not doesn’t matter…. it made me wonder if we can start doing this in tech-focused materials and just assume the .com suffix. This is already done for the http:// prefix.