Jan 31
Never been to the Grand Canyon? No problem, virtual hiker—Google can be your guide with new interactive, 360-degree imagery of the famous national monument. More »
Jan 30
Now this is getting rather frustrating for Nintendo Wii U owners, as we were supposed to be on the receiving end of the TVii service when the Wii U first rolled out in the US last November. Sure, let us give the House of Mario a chance as they might have suffered from some release hiccups, but when the TVii service rolled out last month, TiVo and Netflix features were unavailable, having got stuck in some of Mario’s pipes somewhere, we presume.
Nintendo then claimed that TiVo will first hit the market sometime in January 2013, and we are already racing towards February with less than two full days on the calendar left, only to have Nintendo inform the masses that the January release date is not looking too good, and has shifted the release to sometime in “early 2013.”
As for Google Maps and Street View that were specially configured to run on the Wii U’s tablet-centric GamePad, it has also missed the January 2013 release dateline, and is now targeted for a “first quarter of 2013″ rollout. Are you bummed out by all this?
By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Valve’s Gabe Newell Believes Apple, Not Consoles, Is The Biggest Threat For Living Room Gaming, University Lecturer Conducts Class Within Minecraft, 
Jan 29
“It has been a wonderful success for us,” says Daniel Graf about Google Maps for iOS. Originally from Switzerland, Graf worked for Leica and Philips, and went on to co-found video service Kyte before landing at Google in 2011. There, he ran the mobile apps lab before taking the role of director of Google Maps for mobile, where he oversees the Android and iOS versions of the iconic mapping app. We recently got the chance to spend a few minutes with Graf at Google’s Mountain View headquarters to discuss the iOS app, which launched last December. He’s clearly passionate and proud of his work: “It has been an interesting project, because we got the opportunity to start from scratch.” Graf explains that the Android version “is actually seven years of history, seven years of product, […] seven years of user experience. On iOS, we didn’t have those seven years so that gave us a chance to take a step back and say. ‘Hey, what would be the next-generation mobile mapping experience?'” Read on after the break.
With iOS 6, Apple ended its partnership with Google and experienced some growing pains with its own mapping app. Still, even in iOS 5, the app only offered a fraction of the functionality provided by Google Maps for Android — lacking voice guidance and 3D views, for example. Graf and his team set out to create an iOS app that wouldn’t just catch up with the Android version, but would also showcase the direction the company was taking in terms of user experience. “When Larry [Page] came on board as CEO two years ago, he talked about beautiful experiences and we had very functional and very useful experiences and in term of beauty I think there was work to do,” says Graf. “Now two years later if you actually use our product on desktop, on Android, on iOS there’s a theme there … there’s a design language there, and I would say actually they’re beautiful.”
It’s not just Google Maps for iOS that’s been revamped. Over the past nine months, the company’s been busy updating its mobile apps across the board with a more cohesive look and feel. It all started with Google Now — launched alongside Jelly Bean at Google I/O — followed by Google+ on both platforms, and more recently GMail and Google Maps on iOS. Interestingly, the Android version has not (yet) been updated to reflect the new design language. The iOS app makes extensive use of info sheets similar to those used in Google Now. “Given the feedback we have gotten from our audience about the user experience here, I would say this is kind of the direction we want to move forward,” says Graf. “It’s way more use-case driven … It should actually happen based on your actions.”
We asked Graf what challenges his team encountered while building Google Maps for iOS. “With a mapping app, it’s actually similar to a gaming app because the map you see here, the 3D rendering we have here, so you need a 3D renderer; you need an engine for that, and that was new for us — a 3D renderer for iOS.” The iOS app is written in Objective C (versus Java on Android) and required fine-tuning: “To get that to a performance [level] where we have it now, that was definitely a technical challenge.” But there was another hurdle on iOS: “There’s no common login infrastructure like we have on Android — hopefully that’s coming.” When pressed whether this is a political issue (related to Apple’s stringent app requirements) Graf mentions that “it’s a business decision, but it’s a technical challenge as well.”
Despite being more polished than its Android counterpart, Google Maps for iOS lacks some features, such as Latitude (it’s a separate app). Graf admits that “it would be quite interesting to see your friends on the map within Google Maps for mobile.” For this version, however, it was important to simplify: “We obviously wanted this app out before the holidays, which we managed to do in December, so there was a lot of time pressure to get it out but we didn’t want to make compromises so we said is let’s focus on the key use cases which I think we nailed.” We inquired about how much Google Maps development is cross-platform. “Of course we have an Android team; we have an iOS team; we have different platform teams and they work very closely together,” says Graf. “You do want basically the best experience possible for a platform, so you probably have to develop native.” Watch the full video interview above.
Filed under: Cellphones, GPS, Tablets, Software, Mobile, Apple, Google
Jan 29
Google Maps opens North Korea
Posted in: Today's ChiliGoogle Maps has begun to fill in the blanks on North Korea, using crowd-sourced geography data to add roads and city data about the secretive country. The new information has been gathered though Google Map Maker, the search giant’s tool to allow road names, points-of-interest, new routes, and cartographical errors to be manually added and amended by users themselves. The North Korean data has been several years in the making, Google says.
As the comparison photos of Pyongyang above show, the new data being added is considerable. Where previously there was little beyond the river system, now there are highways, district information, and green spaces all marked on the crowd-sourced map.
Nonetheless, there’s still plenty of work to be done, something Google is the first to concede. “We know this map is not perfect” Jayanth Mysore, senior product manager for Google Map Maker says of the updated information. “One of the exciting things about maps is that the world is a constantly changing place.”
Mysore argues that keeping the North Korean maps updated is about more than just Google’s hunger for data, or catering to public fascination with the country. Many citizens in South Korea have “ancestral connections or still have family living there,” for instance.
Future approved changes to the North Korean mapping in Google Map Maker will also be rolled out to Google Maps. Google’s efforts in the country have been in the headlines earlier this month, too, after chairman Eric Schmidt travelled there to discuss the importance of internet openness.
Google Maps opens North Korea is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Jan 25
Google had quite the 2012 on iOS as it released its dedicated Google Maps and YouTube applications onto a competing operating system, and were downloaded a ton of times by grateful iOS users. But would you believe five of their applications were ranked in a top ten list for the most-used applications on iOS? Of course you would.
Even though Apple tried to rid itself of Google-related products from iOS, it looks as though their customers absolutely love Google products. A new report from comScore shows just how much as within the top ten list or applications most used in 2012, Google Maps, Google Play, Google Search, Gmail and YouTube were ranked second to sixth place, with the top spot going to Facebook. Pandora Radio, iTunes, Cooliris and Yahoo! Messenger rounded out the top 10.
2012′s most-used applications list speaks volumes to just how popular Google-related products are, even on a competing mobile operating system. We know Apple wants to break itself away from being dependent on Google products, but after the embarrassing fiasco that occurred with Apple Maps, we’re sure Apple knows just how much it needs Google products on iOS.
By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Doom & Destiny Hitting The Nokia Lumia Platform, NVIDIA Smartphones And Tablets Coming Your Way?, 
Jan 23
Google spent a lot of time in the last part of 2012 improving its iOS app offerings through updates, and today we’re hearing that those updates did quite a bit to boost market share. Though many of Google’s apps will of course always be popular regardless of the platform, the company’s iOS apps are looking pretty good going into 2013. Onavo Insights today published a list of the Google iOS apps that saw their market share grow as 2012 came to a close, with YouTube and Google Maps perhaps making some of the biggest gains.
YouTube showed some pretty impressive growth in the final months of 2012, climbing from 20% market share when it was released in September to 44.5% by the end of December. It isn’t much of a surprise that YouTube has become so popular on iOS, considering that it’s far and away the most popular video streaming site on the Internet. If YouTube’s growth is impressive, that makes the rise of Google Maps astounding, as the app launched to 5.7% market share in mid-December and managed to reach market share that was just under 30% by the end of the month.
Though Google Search was holding pretty steady over the last half of 2012, Onavo’s graph shows a significant uptick in the app’s market share in the lead up to its October 30 voice update, rising from 14% to 16%. Gmail spent most of the second half in the single digits, but after the launch of Gmail 2.0 on December 4, we see the service begin to climb toward 10% market share. Google Drive was another iOS app to benefit from updates, as it only had a US market share 0.8% in July. That rose to 3.6% by the time December was over, and the fact that Google added all new features to the app on November 28 probably helped with that.
Google Chrome also has an update to thank for a rise in market share, as it was actually suffering a bit of a decline before a November update hit. In October, Chrome’s market share was down to around 7%, but thanks to that update, it has come up to 9.5%. That isn’t bad at all, so it seems that Google has a handful of attractive iOS apps on its hands as we head into 2013. If you’ve got a few minutes on your hands, be sure to check out Onavo’s full report on the state of Google’s iOS apps in the US.
Google apps on iPhone and iPad quickly gaining steam is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Jan 23
According to the latest comScore Mobile Metrix ranking working with the audiences of the top mobile apps in the USA, Facebook has taken a relatively massive leap ahead of Google Maps through 2012 to become the top app in the USA. This listing includes polling of users aged 18 years or older on both iOS and Android devices with a time frame between March and December of 2012, and you’ll find that this isn’t the first month in which Facebook has taken the lead. Google Maps and Facebook have been nearly neck-and-neck since the earliest results from March of 2012, with Google Maps in the lead until September where usage of Google’s mapping solution appears to take a bit of a fall off of a cliff while Facebook continues to steadily rise.
Of course when you measure Google’s success in apps across the board, they’re still doing extremely well for themselves. Have a peek at the top US Mobile Apps as ranked by comScore according to unique visitors (again, from polls of 18+ year old citizens on both iOS and Android) and you’ll find that in December of 2012, Facebook still has the lead. It’s Google though that holds every position from number 2 to number 6, YouTube and Gmail as well as Google Maps, Play, and Search included.
This set of polls also includes comScore’s monitoring of time spent on Google and Facebook apps specifically, this accounting for Instagram (owned by Facebook) and YouTube (owned by Google) as well as Facebook, Google Maps, Gmail, and the rest. You’ll find that the largest piece of the pie goes to “Other Apps” for those polled that don’t actually find themselves on Facebook or Google apps all that much. After that though, It’s all about Facebook taking the number one spot with 23% of the time users spend on their smart devices.
It’s a tie between several other apps after that, with 3% of users’ time being spent on Instagram, Gmail, YouTube, and Google Maps. An ever-so-slightly smaller amount of time is spent (2%) on Google Play, Google Search and “all other Google apps” get another 1% of the pie each, then it’s that massive hunk for everything else in the universe. If there’s one thing this set of charts shows us, it’s that comScore wants to make it clear that both Facebook and Google are here to stay – in the mobile universe at least!
[via comScore]
comScore: Facebook ends 2012 as #1 mobile app in the USA is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Jan 22
This new web app mashes together insecure feeds from Trendnet home security cameras with Google Maps to let you spy on people all over the world. It’s horrible, dreadful, disgusting—and utterly compelling. More »
Jan 16
A Street View image in Botswana shows a donkey lying on its side on a dirt road over tire tracks, which prompted rumors that one of Google‘s Street View vehicles ran over the animal. As one backs away from the animal in Google Maps, it can be seen in various states of distress in each frame. Google has responded to the claims, saying that it has reviewed the footage and that the animal was not harmed.
According to News.co.au, Google provided the website with images offering proof that it did not run over the donkey, although the website was not given permission to make those images public. What really happened, according to Google, is that the Street View car came upon the donkey, which was already laying in the road. As it neared, the donkey got up and walked away.
You can see this for yourself here. By zooming away from the donkey, one frame shows it standing on the side of the road as the vehicle passes by. The images visible on Google Maps are said to be in sequential order, and to have been taken with the camera on the front of its car. Still, some are expressing doubt over Google’s official explanation.
As noted by News.co.au, the donkey moves a considerable distance from the frame of it on the ground to the frame of it standing. Likewise, when you move through the frames away from the fallen donkey, it shows the animal still thrashing about in the road as the vehicle drives off into the distance (or nears it, according to Google’s explanation), something one wouldn’t expect from a donkey just chilling in the road.
[via News.co.au]
Google denies claim that a Street View car hit a donkey is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Jan 16
Before you go hurling insults like “donkey killer” at a multinational software giant, it’s probably best to get the other side of the story. In spite of visual evidence to the contrary, Google insists that it did not, in fact, run over a burro while gathering shots for Street View. In fact, the company has laid the whole thing out Zapruder-style over on its Maps blog, highlighting how the donkey, which appears to be dead, gets up and walks away, after lying down in the road, “perhaps enjoying a dust bath.” So, rest assured, Botswana’s equidae are safe from Google’s reach — for now.
Filed under: Google
Via: The Next Web
Source: Google Maps Blog
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