The 2012 Google Model Your Town Competition
Following the success of last year’s Google Model Your Town competition, we're launching a new challenge for 2012. Model Your Town is about geo-modeling – making photo-textured models of real-life buildings that appear in Google Earth. The competition is a chance to celebrate your town by adding it to the 3D map and to win $25,000 for a local school or district. Visit the Google Lat Long Blog for more information on the contest and submit your entry before the deadline!

Connecting mapping enthusiasts
Recently, we hosted several members of the Google Earth Community, educators, bloggers and Help Forum Top Contributors in Rome, Italy for a user summit, providing an opportunity for passionate Google Earth users to meet in person and discuss ideas. Creating an environment in which people from all around the world can share their knowledge and experiences on a map is essential and we'd love for you to learn more about this community of cartographers.

Take a walk in the park with Street View
Over the past year, the Street View team, equipped with the Street View trike, traveled to twenty-two different countries to photograph some of the world’s most beautiful and unique parks. Recently, we launched these new panoramas and you can now explore a couple hundred new special collections in Google Earth and Google Maps. A visit to our gallery will reveal some of our favorite examples. Taking a walk along the High Line, which sits 30 feet in the air over the bustling streets of New York City, or catching glimpses of Buckingham Palace from St. James's Park is now easier than ever!

Tours and mapping tools for veterans
In many countries, November is the month where members of the military, past and present, are remembered. In honor of Veterans Day in the US, Google launched the Google Veterans and Families initiative. As part of this program, we are introducing new tools that enable veterans to tell their military story, including a new Tour Builder powered by Google Earth. To showcase how Google Earth can be used to create a 3D virtual tour of service history, we created several demo tours to preview. Sign up to be notified when the Tour Builder is available more broadly.

Recap: Google Geo User Summit in Barcelona
Barcelona's distinctive mix of tradition and innovation proved the ideal host to the Google Geo User Summit. From October 12th-14th, team members from Google Map Maker, Google SketchUp, Building Maker and Panoramio came together with users to brainstorm potential new product features and set strategies for improving the overall Geo community. To learn more, visit the event website or or read the summit recap on the Google Lat Long Blog.

New and Updated Imagery
This month, our imagery team added hundreds of new images to Google Earth and Google Maps, including high-resolution aerial updates for the US and high-resolution satellite updates for Angola, China, Greenland, Libya, Spain and more. Explore updated imagery from Seattle, WA or fly around Silicon Valley itself as part of an update to the San Francisco Bay area by opening this KML file directly in Google Earth. Don't forget you can use the View > Historical Imagery feature to scroll through past imagery through a time slider.