Posts tagged Buildings
Google I/O: Google Maps Gets 3D Buildings, Trip Planning, Offline Maps & More
Jun 27th
Google took the wraps off a bunch of new features for Google Maps at the Google I/O developer conference Wednesday. If you use your smartphone for public transit, if you’re planning a trip or if you’re visiting a city for the first time, you’ll want to see what the new version of Maps has in store.
3D Cities and Offline Maps
Google’s immersive, 3D models of cities, first demonstrated at its Next Dimension of Google Maps event June 6, have been added to Google Earth for Android. The models are built from aerial imagery, and they include fun content like guided tours of landmarks. They’ll be available to Google Earth users starting this week. The initial cities includes 15 U.S. locations as well as Rome, Italy.
The offline maps capabilities shown off at the June 6 event will also become available this week. For 150 regions worldwide, users of Google Maps for Android can download maps and use them without a data connection.
New Looks for Google Maps
Up to now, Google Maps identified places with a pin pointing to a precise latitude/longitude location. On Wednesday at Google I/O, the company released new ways to represent data on the map. It calls them symbols.
Apps can manipulate symbols to change the size, color and shape of a point, instead of just dropping a pin in the center.
Symbols can also be used to show heatmaps. Maps product manager Thor Mitchell said that app developers frequently ask him the following question: “How do you recommend that we visualize very large data sets?” For example, how would a (hypothetical) app that tracks electricity use in a city in real time display that on a map?
In the past, developers had to build their own solutions, but now they can plug in the feed of data, changing constantly as light switches and garbage disposals flip on and off throughout the city, and Google Maps can natively draw a swatch of color over the selected area that shows the level of energy consumption.
Google is also giving apps more fine-grained control over the appearance of styled maps. Last Friday, Google announced that it was eliminating the distinction between styled and unstyled maps in its fee system for apps that use Google Maps data. On Wednesday, it released a new set of “adjustment filters” that let developers subtly modify the appearance of maps to match their apps.
Public Transit Info in Any App
The Google Maps apps on Android and iOS offer handy public transit directions. Now Google will let developers of third-party apps pull in the transit data for 475 cities as well. Not just schedules; Maps will display map layers showing public transit routes, as well as color-coded traffic layers.
It’s great timing for Google, since Apple demonstrated its new iOS 6 maps on June 11 with no Google data and no transit data whatsoever. Apple’s maps application is accessible for developers to make their own transit apps, but they have to find the data on their own.
Providing public transit data has been a bit of a headache for Google, since, as Cocoanetics eloquently described, some cities are hostile to outside providers like Google owning their transit data.
Apple decided to avoid that altogether (for now). But Google has gone the other way, offering its extensive transit database as a platform for other apps.
Mitchell says that this is “one of the most requested features that we’ve ever had.”
Planning Places to Visit
So far, Google Places has been concentrated on mobile, location-based apps using the GPS signal from your phone. Apps that use Google Places check to see what restaurants, shops and other attractions are around you right now. On Wednesday, Google opened up Places to a broader range of apps.
Google Places is now available to less real-time use cases, as well as the desktop. Apps can use it to plan trips with specific hotels or museums on the agenda. It will also incorporate searches you’re entered in Google’s search box, including voice entry and auto-completion. All Google’s search and suggestion capabilities can now be applied to applications that help you find stuff to do and places to go.
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Want To Revive The Economy? Open Public Buildings To Remote Workers
Jan 5th
The City of Palo Alto, Calif. and mobile workspace-finding app LiquidSpace have teamed up for an exciting step in public co-working. The Palo Alto City Library will make rooms available on LiquidSpace in a 3-month pilot. This is the first instance I can find in the U.S. of a public facility using a location-aware mobile app to reduce its unused capacity.
Co-working is the new normal, and city governments could drive lots of high-tech productivity if they make their latent space available to flexible, remote workers. Palo Alto is an obvious place to start, but every city in the world should start thinking like this.
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The partnership began this week. Two of the library’s study rooms, with room for around 10 people, are available on LiquidSpace, a free iPhone app that lists available workspaces in business centers, hotels, offices or co-working spaces. During the pilot, the library will assess whether it will benefit the public, as well as the library itself. If so, it will work with other city departments to expand the program to other facilities.
We like the looks of this. Coffee & Power, another remote working story we’re watching, has figured out how to make a win-win out of helping private spaces open up to remote workers. LiquidSpace is doing a civic service by pushing municipal governments to open their doors to co-workers, too.
If you want to learn more about this topic, Phil Shapiro wrote a cool post about co-working in public libraries in PCWorld.
Do you work remotely? Share your experiences in the comments.
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Google Opens the Door to Mobile Maps Inside Buildings
Nov 29th
Google Maps just went indoors. Starting with Google Maps 6.0 for Android, users of Google Maps can now navigate inside of mapped locations such as airports, malls and IKEA stores. The program launches with selected partners, and any business owner can apply to have a floor plan included.
This is a key move for Google’s mobile business, which up until now could only take you to the front door of the place for which you were searching. Google Maps on the desktop recently got 3D photo tours of small locations, an extension of Street View, but this is a bigger step. When Google Maps goes inside, Google can take you all the way from searching for something to holding it in your hand, advertising and data-gathering all the way.
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This is currently only available on the native Android version of Google Maps, but that’s where it makes the most sense. At your desk, a photo tour is all you need. This location-based technology is a mobile innovation for once you’re actually there. Google Maps is now an end-to-end service, and that means Google has your eyeballs every step of the way.
Maps & Mobile Platforms
Location services are the heart of any mobile platform, and mapping is the most fundamental interface for them. Naturally, Android users (with the latest versions of everything) will get this powerful new service straight from Google. What about other mobile platforms?
The iPhone uses Google for mapping, too, at least for now. Based on the way Apple and Google are butting heads on mobile and location tools, that partnership can’t be long for this world. When iPhone 4S users ask Siri about local businesses, she skips Google and goes to Yelp, even though Google is likely to be the place a user would go first if given the choice. Apple is clearly trying to squeeze Google out of this picture. It recently bought a 3D mapping company of its own. This stand-off is why Google Maps and Siri were head to head in our Top 10 Consumer Web Products of 2011.
Interestingly, Bing Maps got interior mapping on its mobile Web version this August, but it didn’t make much of a splash.
Mapping The Inside World
Interiors are the last frontier of location services, and Google is looking to annex it. It’s the next big thing for Google’s business.
This is interesting news for startups working on this problem. Meridian, a Portland, Ore.-based company, just took $1 million in funding to make interior mapping into a platform. It provides its partner businesses with an interface to turn a 3D map of their building into an interactive, standalone application. That’s a competing vision for how mapping the inside world should work.
How will Apple’s mobile location interface be different? What will Bing Maps do? It’s go-time for location services right now, and Google has a very strong hand.
Read more about Google Maps 6.0 for Android on the Google LatLong blog.
How do you use your mobile devices to navigate the inside world?
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Live Blog: The Data World – Buildings, Homes…You Name It
Feb 28th
Today’s live blog comes from IBM Pulse where we will explore how data moves to the greater physical world, be it buildings or physical objects.
It’s also an event that demonstrates how deep Tivilo is still embedded into the enterprise data center for the the management of IT assets. We’ll be sure to hear more about that in the keynotes this morning.
Let’s get started.
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Press F5 to refresh periodically.
8:13 A.M PST: The event is just getting started. IBM is setting the stage with three main themes:
- Better optimization
- Developing better systems
- Analytics
8:30 a.m. PST: Dr.Danny Sabbah of IBM is on stage. He is discussing the instrumented world that is interconnected and intelligent.
8:39 a.m. PST: Starting to get into instrumentation, discussing DC Water, the Washington D.C. water system with pipes that date back to the ivil war. Instrument data on the pipes and in the system allows for the assets to communicate with the people who administer the system. That’s cool
(Image courtesy of @nitinraut
)
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Google Leases 100,000 Square Feet In Historic SoCal Beach Buildings
Jan 26th
Google is leasing 100,00 square feet in an architecturally significant complex of buildings (by Frank Gehry) in Venice California. Venice is near Santa Monica and home of the famed beach boardwalk, body builders, patchouli oil-wearing street vendors and a quasi-bohemian scene left over from the…
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Yahoo Building 13 Six Story Buildings Near Google
May 13th
Yahoo’s massive new headquarters plan approved from MarketWatch reports Yahoo can now build enough buildings to house most of their existing worldwide employees, all in Silicon Valley.
Tuesday night the Santa Clara City Council unanimously voted to approve Yahoo’s development plan for thirteen six-story buildings. The buildings will be about 10 miles away [...]
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