As Google Maps is ever expanding, taking you inside hotels and local small businesses, now you can tour around the vineyards of Cape Town, South Africa, and explore and practice your best novice-level sommelier performance as you virtually tour the vineyards of the 30 wineries that are now included within Street View. Later, look forward to Street View to include Botswana cities and tourist landmarks.

Julie Taylor, head of communications and public affairs for Google in Sub-Saharan Africa, told a local news agency, “We are delighted to be updating Street View with more Cape winelands imagery and look forward to bringing our cutting-edge Street View technology to Botswana.”

As with all of the Google Street View features Google has been rolling out, these Maps locations offer a fully 360-degree surveillance of the entire countryside. Go have a look at the breath-taking views of Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden in Cape Town. And kudos to the Google Street team for having a mind for good timing and grabbing these photos on a particularly beautiful day.

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At least now you don’t have to embarrass yourself in front of actual vino aficionados and can tour the vineyards from the humble privacy of your own office.

It sounds a bit far-fetched, but through the use of Google’s Maps technology, you can now create a virtual tour for your customers that will basically create a Street View experience for people look. In a post on their LatLong blog yesterday, Google announced that they were making their Business Photos pilot program available to all small businesses who want to participate. To get a glimpse of what it can make your business look like, check out the example provided by Google of Spice Market, a business located in New York City:

As you see, it’s literally the 360-degree virtual experience you get when you apply Street View to any Google Maps.

Getting your small business the Street View treatment isn’t really all that hard, either. Google has created a website called Trusted Photographers that are basically proxy photographers small business owners can contract to come take photos of their business on behalf of Google. The photographer will then upload the photos to Google, who will then render the 360-degree panoramic interior of your business on Google.com, Google Maps, and on your Google Places listing. Google provided a testimonial video from a small business in Austin, Texas, that took advantage of Business Photos:

As of right now, Google has proxy photographers in 14 U.S. cities and photographers located in the U.K., France, Australia, and New Zealand. Additionally, Google encourages business owners to make suggestions of cities that would benefit from having Google’s Trusted Photographers.

My wife was curious about just how good a bargain she had landed. The stamp in the bag boasted “Made In Italy”.

I figured it would only take 4 seconds of Google and we’d know. But, I was quickly flummoxed. I searched the name of the manufacturer.

No luck with “di rito” in the U.S. So, I expanded to Florence Italy. I quickly determined that ‘di rito” does not have its own web presence. Odd, for this kind of workmanship.

I ended up finding the name on the sites of a few distributors. But, they were in Italian. So, Google Translate came in handy. Among other things, I learned that a “pelletteria” was Italian for “leather goods”. And, I finally got an address:

VIA FAENZA, 50/52 – 50123 Florence (FI) – Tuscany

On to Google Maps.

Well, we were right in Tuscany. By this point I was more excited about where than bag was from than how much it might be worth. I grabbed the little Street View guy and dragged him to the map.

Unfortunately, the street I was aiming for had not been photographed. But adjoining streets had. And, I was soon looking right down Via Faenza.

The street, no wider than alleys in the U.S., was under construction at the time the Street View van went by. But, you can see down far enough to see what business is like. This is where my bag was born!

I decided to swing around and see what the area was like.

To people in Italy, this might not be a big deal. For me it was thrilling.

I have used Google Street View twice to look at houses and neighborhoods when moving. We’ve checked out schools, workplaces, found area businesses, all without being within 500 miles of the place.

Last week, I was reading Stephen King’s book “11/22/63″ (go read this book, not spoilers). In it, he describes some areas in Dallas, Texas in 1963, including a church and an alleyway. I used Street View from my iPhone to check out how the area looks now. And, I did it sitting in a waiting room – Kindle in one hand, iPhone in the other.

Sometimes we gloss right over these modern-day miracles because we understand them. We would be disappointed if we didn’t see leaps of progress in gadgets and software.

But, sometimes, all this just looks cool.

The decision to include college campuses as part of the Street View is well-timed as it’s getting close to that time of year when high school seniors will begin finalizing their decisions on where to – if they must – attend college this coming fall. As much as visits to universities by prospective students is one of the mainstays of any campus landscape (I always delighted in seeing doe-eyed teenagers herded together so as to protect them from the coed wildlife), Google seems to think it’s a burden that could be easily alleviated if you could tour campuses from the comfort of your sofa. From today’s blog post:

Whether you’re a current student trying to familiarize yourself with campus, an applicant assessing your options or an alumnus feeling nostalgic, the Street View feature in Google Maps can be your tour guide without the backward walking. We recently added imagery of more university campuses to the existing special collections already available via Street View through our Partner Program.

One bonus for you future coeds: it’ll be a lot harder for your parents to embarrass you on campus tours if you’re doing it via Google Street View. FYI.

Google has included universities from around the world in their campus-touring Street View such as Sunderland University (Great Britain), Waseda University (Japan), McMaster University (Canada), Stanford University (U.S.), and Uniwersitet Warszawski (Poland). The full list is available here. Additionally, anyone interesting in virtual-touring a campus can visit the Street View gallery of university campuses. Since you’re here, though, why not go ahead and take a look-see around Dartmouth College:

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No word yet on how long it’ll be until you can use Google Maps to attend your class in real-time. Sorry, kids.

“It’s now clear that we have been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open (i.e. non-password-protected) WiFi networks, even though we never used that data in any Google products,” Google’s Alan Eustace said at the time. “However, we will typically have collected only fragments of payload data because: our cars are on the move; someone would need to be using the network as a car passed by; and our in-car WiFi equipment automatically changes channels roughly five times a second. In addition, we did not collect information traveling over secure, password-protected WiFi networks.”

According to a CNET report today, Google Street View cars not only collected locations of Wi-Fi access points, but actual street addresses and unique identifiers of computers and various devices using the wireless networks.

Google has been providing the following statement on the matter:

Location-based services provide tremendous value to consumers and the economy. In order to provide these location services, Google and many other companies detect nearby, publicly available signals from Wi-Fi access points and cell towers and use this data to quickly approximate a rough position. This can be done by using information that is publicly broadcast, including that list of Wi-Fi access points you see when you use the “join network” option on your computer and the access point’s MAC address.

We collect the publicly broadcast MAC addresses of Wi-Fi access points. If a user has enabled wireless tethering on a mobile device, that device becomes a Wi-Fi access point, so the MAC address of such an access point may also be included in the database. Wi-Fi access points that move frequently are not useful for our location database, and we take various steps to try to discard them.

Google is no stranger to privacy concerns, but this also comes at a time when Google is trying to gain momentum for several products that may eventually make heavy use of location-based data, such as Google Offers, Google+ and Google Wallet.

Whether or not Google is in the wrong, existing concerns may hamper users’ willingness to participate in certain elements of their products, such as location-sharing.

That said, Google+ has had little trouble gaining momentum thus far, and has actually placed a great deal of emphasis on privacy itself, through the use of Circles, though not everyone’s thrilled with the way picture tagging is being handled.

The Google+ mobile app does already use location to serve “nearby” updates.

That represents a potential problem for Google.  The company’s automated blurring software catches most – but not all – faces and license plates.  Achieving 100 percent effectiveness could force Google to spend lots more money on the program.

Then one other potential sticking point includes an order to make people near sensitive establishments (such as schools and women’s shelters) completely unrecognizable, and the Swiss court wanted Google to advertise when and where Street View pictures will be taken, as well.

On the whole, that might be enough to convince Google to discontinue its Street View coverage of Switzerland.  The program remains more of a lark than a moneymaker, after all, leaving Google few good reasons to comply with the Swiss court’s demands.

Or, although no one’s committed to anything yet, there’s also a possibility that Google will try to appeal the case and bring it before the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland.

For the record, Google stated, “We are very disappointed because Street View has proved to be very useful to millions of people as well as businesses and tourist organizations.  More than one in four of the Swiss population has used it since the service launched in Switzerland.  We’ll now take some time to consider what this means for Street View in Switzerland and our appeal options.”

A big hat tip goes to GenevaLunch’s Ellen Wallace.

Along with seeing the exterior of archaeological sites like the Imperial Forum and the Colosseum in Rome, Street View has added interior views of those landmarks as well.

“Follow the Appian Way, a little path that became one of the most strategically important roads of ancient Rome. After the long walk, experience the splendor of Imperial Rome at the Thermae (Baths) of Diocletian—ancient wellness and cultural centers with 33 acres of pools, gymnasiums and public libraries.”

Google also added Street View images to the Santa Maria del Fiore and Ponte Vecchio in Florence, and Chateau de Fontainbleau in France.

A little refresher for anyone who hasn’t been following along: Germany’s the country in which so many politicians and private citizens expressed concerns about Street View that Google gave them a chance to opt out (a first for the company).   About 244,000 people took advantage of the offer, and Google eventually released censored photos of some landmarks and a tourist-oriented town.

Now for the legal matter.  Deutsche Welle reported today, “[T]he Berlin State Supreme Court (Kammergericht) announced its decision in a court case from late last year, in which a woman had sued Google, fearing that photos of her, her family and the front of her house would be posted on Google Street View and would thus violate her property and privacy rights.”

Next, the report continued, “The court ruled that it is legal to take photographs from street level, rejecting her argument that Google was trying to take unauthorized pictures. . . .  This is the first high-level court ruling, which cannot be appealed any further, regarding Street View since the service debuted in Germany at the end of last year.”

So again, this is an important victory for Google.  And, although the specific issues were different, it’s arguably even more significant since French authorities fined Google over Street View today.

Whether or not that’s a significant amount may be a matter of some debate.  Consider that Google has a market cap of about $186 billion at the moment, and regularly indulges in odd habits like buying large statues of desserts.  A sum of $142,000 won’t be missed by anyone other than the internal accountants who are tasked with keeping track of such things.

On the other hand, the head of the Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertes, Yann Padova, told the AFP, “It is a record fine since we obtained the power in 2004 to impose financial sanctions in 2004,” so French authorities weren’t trying to let Google off with just a word of caution.

This move could set a precedent in other countries, as well, since regulators there might not want to appear soft and permissive when it comes to violations of their citizens’ privacy.

Anyway, Google’s now received permission to delete the data it collected in France, so the matter should be resolved in that particular nation.

Peter Fleischer, Google’s global privacy counsel, also added, “As we have said before, we are profoundly sorry for having mistakenly collected payload data from unencrypted WiFi networks.”

The new home page is clean and simple, offering a slide show of unique places from around the world.  First up is a “learn” tab that includes a brief tutorial of how to properly use street view and a story behind “Pegman,” the little orange man you drag around to view different places on the map.

Also new is a very cool map that shows exactly where street view imagery is available throughout the world.  On that same page we get a somewhat real time list of all the locations where Google cars are driving; as of right now, places like Miaoli, Taiwan and Shoshone, Idaho.

The new site also introduces us to some of Google’s new technology for photographing hard-to-reach places around the world, such as the Street View Trike for paths inaccessible by car, the Street View Trolley to document inside buildings like museums and art galleries, and the Street View Snowmobile for, well, snow covered areas.

Last, but not least, we are treated to a collection of galleries from around the world.  Galleries include Hawaiian beaches, South African soccer stadiums, and Japanese golf courses.

To start exploring, jump here.