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In not-so-secret arms race news, the Federation of American Scientists details, with recent satellite imagery, the new Chinese secret naval base on Hainan Island. What's interesting is China's new capabilities, such as a demagnetization facility. What's not that much interesting is so many resources spent worldwide for military defense, but hopefully, it's harder and harder to hide such behavior to other governments. From the article: "The SSBN base on Hainan Island will probably be seen as a reaffirmation of China's ambitions to develop a sea-based deterrent. To what extent the Chinese navy will be capable of operating the SSBNs in a way that matters strategically is another question. China's first SSBN, the Xia, was no success and never sailed on a deterrent mission. As a consequence, the Chinese navy has virtually no tactical experience in operating SSBNs at sea. Yet the Jin-class and the demagnetization facility on Hainan Island show they're trying."

What happens when you mix two popular software such as World of Warcraft and Google Earth? You guessed right, a Google Earth MMO game is in beta (screenshots included). Visit this forum to learn more. This is part of the new crop of Google Earth-based games. From the initial announcement: "You pick a race (Warrior, Elf or Mage), then go around the world fighting enemies, earning experience points, increasing your level, buying weapons/spells/potions, etc. Some other features:
- Each major city is guarded by a different boss who must be defeated. Each city you defeat earns a crystal.
- You can team up with other players to take out difficult enemies.
- All gameplay (including battles, shops, messaging, etc) is done completely in Google Earth with no add-on software or web browser calls required.
- The battles are turn-based, similar to the Final Fantasy games, using our GEfootball engine.
- The shopping and messaging use Flash-based forms to handle the data, using code from our GEboards application.
- There are currently 9 cities, 14 different enemies (over 7,000 of them roaming the earth), 12 items, 8 spells and 6 weapons. All of those will likely be increased as we finish testing."

Recently, Engaget shared rumors of TomTom developing it's own GPS module for the iPhone, while the new Google 'My Location' feature now works with the iPhone. Forget TomTom and Google, here's a third-party GPS add-on for the iPhone and iPod Touch that will start shipping in February at the price of 89$US. The great news: the software used is open source, the bad news: it requires your iPhone/iPod Touch to be 'jailbroken' (maybe this will change with the upcoming SDK?). The description: "The iPhone locoGPS module allows jail broken iPhones to finally have GPS functionality. This module is in development and will be shipping in February. All software is open source and more applications are being written every day. The locoGPS module gives you the ability to explore all the benefits of GPS from a device that is small enough to put on a keychain." Of course, you can wonder if the iPhone really needs a GPS, use OpenStreetMap data instead of Google's, read KML/GeoRSS directly on the iPhone.

Google's official Lat Lon Blog announced the addition of shaded terrain to their free Google Maps site. In addition to adding the Terrain button, they've removed the Hybrid button, combining it the Satellite one. A single look at it is enough to convince anyone this is very welcomed even if Yahoo! Maps, Microsoft's Virtual Earth and Ask.com Maps offered something similar for quite some time. Also released this week, Google Maps searches are now providing a thumbnail of the related street view photo, and arguably a major new feature, the My Maps feature somehow becomes Our Maps, allowing to collaborate directly on someone else's My Maps, this has a lot of potential of getting big, and last, you can more easily share KML and KMZ files and GeoRSS feeds through My Maps. From the Our Maps announcement: "Just click the "Collaborate" link and enter the email addresses of the people you want to invite. They'll receive an email invitation with a link to the map. Once they open the map, they should be able to edit it, as long as they are signed into a Google Account that's associated with that email address. You can also open your map to the world so anyone can edit it by selecting the "Allow anyone to edit this map" checkbox." Competition is not sleeping, Microsoft had a recent major release of Virtual Earth in addition to 33.7 Terabytes of new worldwide imagery.

Microsoft unveiled their new version of Virtual Earth, and it's major. The Google Earth Blog actually reported this story yesterday. My apologies to the blog's author. Here's the official Virtual Earth blog entry. SharpGIS offers a few interesting screenshots. Ogle Earth also has his own interesting report. Amongst the juicy improvements, there is GeoRSS support, GPS GPX support, and even Google's KML format support (this format in being standardized by the Open Geospatial Consortium, which Microsoft just rejoined), there's Bird's eye view in 3D and even a SketchUp competitor in for 3D modelling. A longer more detailed list can be found here in the Virtual Earth Developer Forum.