I’ve just arrived in soggy Kuala Lumpur, tired and jet lagged after far too long in the purgatory that is Dubai airport. Tomorrow starts Global Knowledge Conference III, theme: Emerging People, Emerging Markets, Emerging Technologies. If I see any really cool new applications of GIS in the service of development, I will be sure to blog them. In the meantime, I am grateful to EarthNC for writing the rest of this post, so I can get some sleep:

EarthNC, Inc is pleased to announce the general availability of the EarthNC Google Earth Trip and Route Planner tool. The Trip and Route Planner provides a simple method to plan trips or routes using Google Earth and export them directly to Garmin USB GPS devices using the free Garmin Communicator plugin. For non-Garmin GPS devices, EarthNC provides a GPX file download option. With the release of the latest Garmin Communicator Plugin, the EarthNC Trip and Route Tool works on both Macintosh and Windows computers. [This is new!]

The EarthNC Trip and Route tool extends EarthNC’s novel ‘TakItWithMe’ Google Maps serviceto the 3D Google Earth platform. Trip planning and export is done with a few easy steps. To share trips, users can e-mail their trip folders to friends and family within Google Earth.

To help get users up and running quickly, EarthNC has produced a short video tutorial which demonstrates Google Earth trip and route creation, GPS export, and advanced tips:

The Trip and Route Tool is a free service of EarthNC.

(And if you’re still here, on a completely unrelated matter, also check out Google Maps API Blog’s Using the Chart API in KML for Quick Data Visualization.)