Posted by Dr. Norbert Schmitz, Managing Director of Meo Carbon Solutions

Editor's note: This is the first in a series of “Mapping a better world” blog posts highlighting ways in which organizations are using location data to affect positive local and global change. Google Maps APIs continues to create opportunities and tools to support our community.

Today we hear from Dr. Norbert Schmitz, managing director of Meo Carbon Solutions. Read how Meo Carbon Solutions and Google for Work Premier Partner Wabion used Google Maps APIs and Google Cloud Platform to develop Global Risk Assessment Services (GRAS). The tool provides reliable information about the ecological and social risks of expanding agriculture into natural habitats.


In the European Union, companies that sell biofuels must get certifications to show that producing their fuel — often made from agricultural crops — does not cause deforestation, the loss of biodiversity or the loss of carbon stocks. We established GRAS to provide a single tool to gather and visualize this data required to support a credible certification.

Through GRAS, we’ve made this information accessible not only to governments and NGOs, but also to businesses, financial institutions and individuals. For example, a U.S. company buying soybean oil from Brazil can use GRAS to verify the ecological and social risk exposure of the mills and the farmers supplying the mills.

We decided the most effective way to present this complex set of information was to build a web app that would overlay data from multiple sources on top of a map. Using this tool, auditors can compare before-and-after maps of a certain area, and based on changes to the habitat, either grant or deny certifications.

To build GRAS, we partnered with IT consultant Wabion, a Google for Work Premier Partner. After testing several map solutions, we chose Google Maps because of its high performance, ability to easily integrate data from multiple sources, flexible APIs, solid support and large user community.


The GRAS website combines mapping information with data from dozens of government agencies, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and other global databases. It uses the Google Maps JavaScript API to display the base maps for the site. The API also visualizes layers and more than 100 types of data — including agriculture, deforestation and social welfare — on top of the maps.

Users can upload and visualize their own data sets. The Google Maps Geocoding API verifies map locations, and the Google Maps Places API autocomplete makes it easy for site users to choose locations that they want to learn about.

A GRAS visualization of biodiversity risk in Brazil

GRAS is powered by the Google Cloud Platform — specifically, Google App Engine and Google Compute Engine. Combining these services with the Google Maps APIs lets us handle geodata in a 10-terabyte database, which hosts more than 100 layers, many of them extremely large.

We’ve recently expanded GRAS beyond our original mission to provide insights for other industries by expanding the data layered on top of maps. We’ve included new information on biodiversity, land-use changes, and available carbon stock. We’ve also been able to incorporate numerous measurements of social health — ranging from the Global Slavery Index to the Global Hunger Index and the UNICEF index of access to drinking water and sanitation.

Through GRAS, we’ve made this information accessible not only to governments and NGOs, but also to businesses, financial institutions and individuals. For example, a U.S. company buying soybean oil from Brazil can use GRAS to verify the ecological and social risk exposure of the mills and the farmers supplying the mills.

Far exceeding our initial vision, the GRAS website combines transparency with the power of technology to help users in wide-ranging industries, —from food, to chemicals and energy — operate environmentally and socially sound supply chains.

Posted by Elizabeth Schreier, Director of Digital and Social Engagement at Allstate Insurance

Editor's note: This month Google Maps turns ten! Since launching ten years ago, use cases for maps have come a long way. To celebrate a decade of mapping, we’re highlighting new and innovative ways developers are deploying maps. Read how guest blogger, Elizabeth Schreier, Director of Digital and Social Engagement at Allstate Insurance, is relying on Google Maps APIs to bring unique mapping experiences to their users.

Imagine looking at a map of your house and seeing a visual diagnosis of the biggest risks in your area — whether the risk is fire, theft or even freezing pipes. Then imagine getting helpful tips that could help you protect your home against those risks. That’s what we’ve done with GoodHome, a project we created at Allstate with our agency, T3.

We built GoodHome to make a tool that anyone would find useful, whether or not they were an insurance customer or even a homeowner. We realized we could use our proprietary information about insurance claims to help people identify the most common and costly claims in their respective ZIP codes. We decided to visualize this information, along with relevant property statistics, on an interactive map that included tips to help people mitigate potential risks.
We built GoodHome using the Google Maps APIs because of its familiarity, ease of use and comprehensive features. The development team at T3 created the GoodHome prototype using three Google Maps APIs: Static Maps, JavaScript and Street View Image APIs. They customized the maps by drawing layers, integrating a weather API and using CSS to create animations that brought the experience to life. The development process went smoothly and took just three months from concept to completion.

GoodHome is more than informative, it’s compelling. A visitor who uses the GoodHome tool is over 350% more likely to request an insurance quote than one who doesn’t. Forty percent of people type more than one address into the map, and on average, visitors stay on the site for six to seven minutes.

GoodHome also helps our agents build better relationships with customers. When an Allstate customer receives a link to the GoodHome website from their agent, the map automatically opens up to the customer’s home address. The personalized interaction helps agents connect with their clients and provide a great consulting tool that opens the door for a conversation. We plan to introduce GoodHome to all 10,000 Allstate agents across the country so they can spread the tool to their customers.

We’re excited to play a role in enhancing the home insurance experience for consumers. The power of Google Maps has helped us make a product that we hope will help people see their homes in a new way and think differently about what it means to protect what matters to them.

Posted by Ed Bindl, Senior Software Engineer and Jacinda Shelly, Lead Platform Engineer, Doctor on Demand

Editor's note: Since the launch of Google Maps ten years ago, maps have come a long way. To celebrate a decade of map innovation, we’re highlighting unique maps built by our developer community. Read how guest bloggers, Ed Bindl and Jacinda Shelly, Software Engineers for Doctor on Demand, use the Google Maps APIs to bring unique mapping experiences to users.

Maps can do much more for an online business than help people get from point A to point B. You might not think that a website for making video appointments with medical professionals would benefit from mapping — but at Doctor on Demand, maps connect our patients to physicians faster and allow physicians to prescribe medications at the right pharmacies. Google Maps make our user experience much more satisfying, which means patients will use our service again.
We use the Google Maps APIs, including the Geolocation and Javascript APIs, to show patients a map of nearby pharmacies before they start a video call with a medical professional. For our users, maps make it easy and convenient to connect with physicians and pick up prescriptions at the pharmacy. But maps can be helpful for other businesses in other ways. And now that we see the great value of incorporating reliable map functionality into our app, we'd love to share how you can do the same:

• Choose a familiar interface. Use a map that’s easy for people to navigate – if it’s hard to understand and requires extensive instructions, they won’t use it. We picked Google Maps because our patients know them well.

• Configure maps for many platforms. If your users find maps helpful on your desktop website, they’ll want to use maps from any browser or device. We’ve made sure our maps work just as well on iOS and Android devices as they do on a desktop computer.

• Maintain accuracy. In our case, we have to update the geolocation information for about 65,000 pharmacies across the country every evening. We use the Google Maps Geocoding API, which minimizes the time it takes to keep our map accurate. We keep a database of all pharmacies from Surescripts, a healthcare network, and each night we get an update to that database that adds, removes, and updates pharmacies and their locations. We use the Google Maps Javascript API to place the pharmacies on our map when a patient is asked to select a pharmacy.

• Meet compliance standards. In order to comply with medical regulations, Doctor On Demand must connect patients with physicians licensed in their state. We use the Google Maps Reverse Geocoding API to accurately determine the state a patient is located in before connecting them with a physician.

• Help users save time and make better choices. Before we built our pharmacy map, patients had to tell doctors which pharmacy they wanted to use. Then doctors emailed us the details. However, our support team had to follow up with doctors and patients to make sure we had the right pharmacy, since patients might say something like, “the drugstore down the street from my house.” Today, there’s no doubt about which pharmacy is the right one, since patients can clearly see their local outlets on the map.

Our pharmacy map inspires us to think about new ways to use maps in the future – like plotting the movement of cold and flu outbreaks and sharing this data with patients and doctors. We see a direct connection between maps and improving patient care. In the greater scheme, Google Maps improve the health of our patients, and, the health of our business.

Posted by Goldy Arora, Director of Google for Work Solutions, MediaAgility

Editor's note: Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Goldy Arora, Director of Google for Work solutions at MediaAgility, a technology consulting company building industry specific solutions. See how MediaAgility and other developers are using the Google Maps APIs to bring maps and location content to their users. 

I love using elegant code to come up with cool applications, but I also know that being a great developer means thinking both like a business person and an engineer. When we create map-based applications at MediaAgility, we think about not just what we are building and how it will look and operate, but why we are building it. How, in other words, do the maps we make meet both our business objectives and make a positive impact on people’s lives?
We use the tools in the Google Maps API to develop solutions in a way that helps businesses make sense of data. Right now, we’re working on an application called Insurance Insights, which will help sales teams at Insurance companies create campaigns and base decisions on geographic data related to crime, income and natural disasters.

When working with maps, we aim to understand the business objectives of the end customer and how it will impact lives. In the case of Insurance Insights, we are taking several steps in the development process that we think will result in a valuable and user-friendly product, including:

• Publishing data from multiple sources. We’re adding back-end systems and databases so we can add useful information to Google Maps. For example, we’ve integrated income data for residents, locations of recent natural disasters and sales databases. For this product, we built a script to obtain Salesforce data using their API. Then we employed the Google Maps API to publish the Salesforce data to our maps.

• Creating multiple viewing options. Our map overlays allow users to choose how they want to view the information. An agent may want to market insurance for valuables in high-income neighborhoods, or perhaps offer flood insurance to people in flood-prone areas. They’ll benefit from the insights provided by the various overlays for different marketing campaigns.
• Erring on the side of more data. We upload as much data as we can. We then call the data with the Maps API whenever we want to test a new feature on the map. Since we are data-ready, we create prototypes within an hour instead of taking days – and build rich, insightful features in less time to market.
• Experimenting and improving. We iterate frequently to make the best possible product. In the case of Insurance Insights, we created a basic application using Google Maps so we could show it to potential customers. As we work with real market feedback, we add more features. This iterative approach is much smarter than spending six months on an application before finding out if customers like it – we’d rather go to market every six weeks so we know which direction to pursue.

Maps are an important part of people’s daily lives, and we're eager to engineer more applications built around new ideas. For example, visual forecasting and pipeline metrics are some of the key features in our next release of Insurance Insights.

In many cases, maps are an intuitive and highly visual way to understand a business — much richer and simpler than spreadsheets or presentations. Even if the information is complex, the user experience need not be, all thanks to the Google Maps APIs.

Posted by Matt Laroche, Android Engineering Lead, Strava

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Matt Laroche, Android Engineering Lead at Strava, a social network and community for athletes. See how Strava and other developers are using the Google Maps API to bring maps and location content to their users.

In distance training, runners and cyclists always want to know how far they’ve gone and track where they’ve been. At Strava, we provide them with this information and a lot more: we measure, map and analyze the runs and rides of millions of athletes around the world so they can get the most out of their workouts.

To do this, we use Google Maps to show them exactly where they’ve run or cycled. We can even help them plan future routes.

Mapping is a big part of what our members do with Strava. Maps help them relive past workouts, visually share their run or ride with friends, and engage in friendly competition. We started using Google Maps API when we launched five years ago. We tested other mapping providers, but found that Google Maps was the best API for mobile — it’s the easiest to use to create new maps, especially when using polylines to draw routes and mark items on a map. It’s a straightforward, developer-friendly API.


Because maps are key to the Strava experience, we pay close attention to the tools we use and how our members will benefit. Here are three areas we focus on when developing our maps using the Google Maps API:

We compile a huge amount of location data — including 400 billion GPS data points of the activities our members share from around the world. GPS data can tell us where our members are going in real-time. With the Google Maps API, interaction and display or map tile latency is minimal and rendering was faster than other services we tried, despite the large amounts of data in use. To make the app work even faster, we trimmed down the data points that are delivered back to the user’s device.

Our members spend a lot of time looking at maps on the Strava app and have different needs, although all of them want detailed information. They also want the power to play with different views. With Google Maps, they have a lot of options. They can switch between different map tiles, including normal, satellite and terrain. Terrain view is key for showing them if a particular route will send them uphill, and if so, what elevation changes they can expect. The maps also have an intricate level of detail, such as bike lanes and paths, which gives users vital information for planning their workouts. The interaction is smooth too — zooming, rotation, and map tilting work in a way our members expect.

With Google Maps API, we have a lot of room for creativity and experimentation. For example, we created a Heat Map that visualizes the most popular trails and roads based on 160 million rides and runs. Our Activity Playback project lets users watch their rides and runs and see where they might have passed friends who were on the same path at that time.

Google Maps lets us plot new ways athletes can visualize their data. We’re testing Google My Maps, a feature in Google Maps on Android that offers a simple, fast version for users on the go. We can launch new web ideas on Strava Labs, which doesn’t require us to do full support or commit to integration in the long run. This gives us flexibility to try new things and see what resonates with our users.

We’re able to focus on the user experience — particularly performance, control and creativity — because Google Maps is developer-friendly. It minimizes grunt work, like re-writing thousands of lines of boilerplate code. The API natively handles features we’d otherwise have to build — like identifying which map marker is nearest to a user when she searches for a location. Because of this simplicity, we can focus on making the app more useful and intuitive.

Posted by Demitris Memos, Managing Director of MarineTraffic

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Demitris Memos, Managing Director of MarineTraffic, whose website and app are widely used for tracking ship movements worldwide. See how MarineTraffic and other developers are using the Google Maps API to bring maps and location content to their users.

Ships play a major role in global commerce, but locating them is not as straightforward as it might seem, even for their owners. That’s a problem if, for example, you’re trying to track your cargo, which is on a containership crossing the Atlantic. It’s even worse if you’re a tanker spilling oil offshore and the nearest coast guard ship can’t be found. At MarineTraffic we aim to solve that problem. What began as an experiment in 2007 has become the most popular vessel tracking service in the world. We’ve seen our website traffic double in the past two years to a peak of 6.2 million monthly active users lately.

A key component to maritime data is geography. You would think that mapping ships as they traverse the world’s waterways and oceans would be a no-brainer, but until the introduction of AIS (Automatic Identification System) in shipping and the launch of MarineTraffic, such a capability was not available for the masses. Today, using the Google Maps API we are able to overlay data we get from ships around the globe onto an easy-to-use map with the help of Google’s intuitive mapping platform.
We worked with Google Maps partner Ancoris to set up the mapping service. Our maps use the Google Maps API to plot shipping movement around the world. The data is acquired by our proprietary, global AIS receivers network. This way, we collect radio frequency signals from transponders aboard vessels and display them on the MarineTraffic website and our mobile apps. We offer Density Maps on top of the API to show, for example, which routes tankers are taking versus cruise ships.
Geofencing is used to keep track of distances between vessels and record arrivals and departures at ports. A variety of other types of information are available on top of our maps in layers, such as wind speed, temperatures, photos and more besides.
The good thing about Google is that it makes it easy for developers to port data in through their API and, above all, the high availability of the service, which is always there, no matter how big the spike in traffic is.
Google Maps has proven to be very reliable, thoroughly supporting MarineTraffic as an essential tool for maritime professionals and marine enthusiasts. Using Google Maps, we are able to provide a valuable service to the general public and commercial organisations, filling a need that is highlighted by the rapid growth of our business. Google Maps is helping to put ships on the map!

Posted by Bilal Karim, Lead Geoweb Analyst, MyHEAT

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Bilal Karim, Lead Geoweb Analyst for MyHEAT, a commercial energy mapping product spun off the HEAT research project at the University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada. See how other forward-thinking organizations are investing in mapping technology and transforming their business: Maps are Going Google.

If you get winter temperatures around -20°F, like we do in Calgary, keeping your house warm while saving energy — and reducing heating costs — is a high priority. As a former master’s degree candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of Calgary, I worked with Dr. Geoffrey J. Hay, who came up with the idea of quantifying and visualizing the waste heat escaping from homes, communities, and cities in an effort to improve urban energy efficiency. If residents could click on a map and see the inefficient areas of their homes, they could take steps to lock heat inside the house, where it belongs. And so the Heat Energy Assessment Technologies (HEAT) project was born.

Our research team brainstormed how to use detailed airborne thermal imagery to map the energy efficiency of Calgary homes. We developed a number of multi-scale maps and metrics, including “HEAT Scores” which we assign to houses and neighborhoods so residents can compare their homes’ energy efficiency to their neighbors’. To showcase these levels of detail, we implemented the Google Maps API. In particular, the Google Maps API allowed the maps to be user-friendly, included useful customization, and built on user’s prior knowledge, experience, and familiarity with the Google Maps products.
Here’s what we did:

• We deployed custom styling using the Google Maps API to choose our own colors for the base map. The thermal maps already have many hues to indicate heat efficiency, from blue to orange to red, so we picked neutral shades of gray for the base maps to establish a visual balance.

• We integrated code from the Google Maps Utility Library to display information to homeowners in three tabs. These tabs show residents (a) their home’s HEAT score, (b) a thermal image of the home showing “Hot Spots” where the most heat is escaping, and (c) estimated savings and reductions in greenhouse gases based on heating with different fuel types.

• We also integrated the Google Maps Street View from the Google Maps API. The Street View images show a great amount of detail, linking our colored thermal images for each home, to allow residents to figure out where heat might be escaping – like through sliding-glass porch doors, windows, or from their roof.

• Since we began this project, we used KML Layers to sub-divide the larger city and community maps into tiles, which helps our application load faster. However, these will soon be replaced by new additions to the Google Maps API such as GeoJSON for better performance.

• We also invite HEAT users to upload information about their roofing materials so we could refine their HEAT scores and provide better information back into our energy models. So far, about 2,600 people have volunteered this data.

We’re currently showing 37,914 houses in 29 different communities, and plan to expand to nearly 300,000+ single-dwelling homes in Calgary. In the meantime, we’ve launched MyHEAT, a startup company that will offer commercial products to utilities and municipalities based on our HEAT project. These new products, aimed at utilities and municipalities, will also use the Google Maps API to help people stay warmer every winter.

Posted by Paresh Nagda, VP of Engineering and CTO, Navman Wireless

Editor's note: Today we hear from guest blogger Paresh Nagda to find out how Navman Wireless, a global leader in GPS-based fleet optimization, uses Google Maps to monitor more than 190,000 vehicles for over 16,000 customers across five continents. This post is part of our series on the Transport and Logistics Industry and the ways they’re relying on Google Maps for Business to get people, products and assets to their destinations faster.

Fleet tracking & Google Maps--available wherever business demands

Every day, all over the world, millions of drivers hit the road to deliver goods and services. For our 16,000 customers – in dozens of sectors as diverse as mining, construction, transport, street cleaning and more – fleet monitoring is critical to their business success. Owning, operating and maintaining a vehicle fleet is a big expense, so more organizations are turning to advanced tools to maximize those assets. At Navman Wireless, our fleet optimization platform allows companies like Rio Tinto Group, Lloyds Pharmacy, JC Restoration, and Riviera Utilities to manage workers and keep track of important assets.

Before Google Maps, we had a hybrid solution – Microsoft Bing Maps combined with an in-house map engine. It was a drain on cost and engineering resources, and we struggled to keep data current. For example, map data updates required hours of our engineering team’s time; now with Google Maps, all updates are made automatically.

Google Maps was an obvious choice for us because it’s a cost-effective, reliable solution that works across geographies. We have customers in 14 countries who rely on us 100% to manage huge multimillion-dollar fleets, projects and logistics systems. With Google Maps, our customers see a visual display of their fleets constantly updated in real-time. One cool thing our customers love about Google Maps is the ability to use reverse geocoding to translate GPS data points into human readable addresses, so they can see where drivers are at all times.We can also draw polygons on maps to highlight customer sites, so they can see which trucks are coming and going.

Our customers can’t stop raving about Google Street View and traffic information. Dispatchers use Google Maps to get real-time traffic information and preview streets to help their drivers be more efficient. For example, a dispatcher could tell a driver to take a different route to avoid traffic, or to take a side road to deliver a package, since Street View shows the freight door is located on a back alley.

Using Google Maps has lots of benefits, but perhaps the best one is it just works — and that means we can focus on our work. Previously, 12-15% of our customer service calls were related to problems with our maps. Once we switched to Google Maps these calls went to almost zero. Our customers love how easy Google Maps are to use, and so does my engineering team. Quite simply, Google Maps helps make the Navman platform more effective, interactive and engaging for our customers.

Posted by Athena Hutchins, Executive Director, NITTEC

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Athena Hutchins, executive director of the Niagara International Transportation Technology Coalition (NITTEC), a group of agencies improving traffic mobility and safety in Western New York and Southern Ontario. Join Athena on a webinar to hear the NITTEC story from her directly on December, 12 at 11-12 PST. Register here.

There’s a lot of traffic activity at the border of Western New York State and Southern Ontario: every month, an average of one million vehicles cross the three bridges with border checkpoints between the U.S. and Canada. Our job at Niagara International Transportation Technology Coalition (NITTEC) is to help vacationers and commuters in the Niagara Falls area see any traffic and road issues that might stand in their way. That’s why we created our new map — built with Google Maps — which takes a complex mix of data from local, state and federal agencies and gives drivers a single view of their trip.
We’ve used Google Maps on the NITTEC website since 2007. This year we developed a multilayered map as part of our efforts to improve traffic movement in the cross-border region. The new map uses the Google Maps API to help us pull together a wealth of useful data, including construction projects, delays and border crossing times. This information is available piecemeal from other agencies, but a traveler would have a hard time patching together a true picture of traffic conditions at the border, especially since we’re dealing with data from two countries.

The map is on the homepage of our new NITTEC website, so visitors can quickly find out how long it will take to get to the border, how much time they’ll have to wait at checkpoints and which alternate routes might be less congested. For instance, when the Lewiston-Queenston Bridge has long wait times, a quick glance at the map can tell drivers if they’re better off heading for the Peace Bridge or the Rainbow Bridge. Travelers can use the map’s control panel to choose which overlays they see, such as satellite views, highways, and live camera images.

To develop the new map, we incorporated 10 data feeds from across our 30 coalition agencies. The map refreshes every 20 seconds, using this constantly updated information. A mobile version of the map allows drivers approaching the border to get up-to-date info while they’re en route.

People are already familiar with Google Maps, so seeing our map provides clear, customizable and up-to-date traffic information that can be viewed at a glance and that’s easy to digest. It also helps us send a message about the NITTEC brand – that we’re on a mission to help people in the area get where they’re going safely and more efficiently.

Posted by Mario Brandao, CTO of T Dispatch

Revised Editor's note: As of fall 2013, T Dispatch stopped using Google Maps for Business.

Editor's note: Today's guest blogger is Mario Brandao, CTO of T Dispatch, a fast growing global provider of fleet management software. This post is part of our series on the Transport and Logistics Industry and the ways they’re relying on Google Maps for Business to get people, products and assets to their destinations faster.

If you’re like me, wherever you are in the world, you often depend on the knowledge of taxi and minicab drivers to get you where you want to be. And the firms that manage, equip and train these drivers are on a constant quest to improve the way their cars get around the many cities they travel around in. We started our company back in 2010 with the aim of creating an affordable mapping and dispatch technology that could be used by all sizes of fleet companies to become more efficient and more profitable.

Our clients tell us that drivers can spend around 30% of their time with the car empty; this is ‘dead’ mileage, which is costly and bad for the environment. We use Google Maps and an intelligent autodispatch algorithm to send jobs to the nearest driver, to find jobs within their catchment area and even to allocate jobs on their route home at the end of a shift. Controllers can create and dispatch a booking within 15 seconds, and we’re able to reduce time spent ‘empty’ by up to 50%.
We’ve found our clients love all the different features, too. The Google Tracks API makes it easy to pinpoint exactly where their drivers are at any one time, allowing jobs to be allocated more efficiently by dispatchers. And as this location data can be saved for up to ten years, clients can also use the technology to recognize trends and patterns and create more efficient processes in due course. Google’s snap-to-road tool even helps call centre dispatch managers to find out which side of the road the driver is on, which is especially helpful in some cities with complicated one way systems.

In the future we plan to integrate live weather reports, traffic information and use historical data to predict where busy areas will be, allowing fleets to anticipate where to send the drivers.

From a driver’s point of view, not only does the software help calculate the fastest route with the least mileage, but with Google Directions, drivers are able to calculate directions between locations before setting off, which prevents them from getting lost. Most importantly, most people are familiar with Google Maps and find it easy to use - which is important in a job when you’re often dealing with stressful circumstances like traffic and road closures.
Google Maps provides us with a comprehensive feature set too, so we’re able to offer our customers features like Directions as part of the package, which is a huge selling point for us. Furthermore, if we used some of the competition’s offering, every customer would have to pay a licensing fee but with Google this is avoided.

Google Maps has played a crucial role in helping us grow and move into new markets seamlessly - we’ve won clients across six continents, in over 30 different countries. I’m now looking forward to taking our technology with us to our next area of expansion - South America.

Posted by Elena Kelareva, Product Manager, Google Maps for Business

Editor's note: For transport companies, getting things from point A to point B in the safest, smartest and most efficient way is a top priority. This week we're showcasing the Transport and Logistics Industry and the ways they’re relying on Google Maps for Business to get people, products and assets to their destinations faster.

GPS technology and digital mapping have had a huge impact on making transport and logistics companies more efficient. This week we’ll be demonstrating innovative ways transport and logistics companies can use maps for smarter fleet and asset management, routing, tracking and planning. To kick things off, we’re announcing a new snap-to-road feature of the Google Maps Tracks API that can help organizations gain access to valuable data about where they’ve been.

Launched last year, Google Maps Tracks API allows users to store, display and analyze GPS data on a map. For a shipping company with a fleet of delivery trucks, for instance, the Tracks API offers a way to record all the routes and places its vehicles have traveled to and from. Stored in the Google cloud and visualized on a Google Map, fleet managers can access their information reliably, securely and using a map interface they’re familiar with.

With snap-to-road, transport and logistics companies can have an even more accurate view of their GPS information. Based on GPS data points, it identifies the most likely road a truck has been traveling on and plots the route on a map. This allows an organization to easily decipher driver behaviors and routing trends.

The images above show the same GPS data from a delivery truck before and after applying snap-to-road. With snap-to-road, the delivery route is correctly shown on a Google map, indicating that the driver traveled down a major highway.

For a transport company, having more accurate ways to track and understand GPS data means they can plan and predict routing and logistics with greater precision. Contact our sales team for more information about the Tracks API and how Google Maps for Business solutions can help your business.

Posted by Benito Martinez, Senior Manager, Online Marketing at TIM

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Benito Martínez, Senior Manager of Online Marketing at TIM Brasil. TIM is Brazil’s second largest telecom provider and has 1,800 stores and sales points located in different states around the country. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.


In August 2012, Brazil's National Telecommunications Agency (Anatel) demanded Brazil's national service providers to improve the quality of service and support for mobile phone customers. We responded by developing a three-year action plan funded with R$9,5 billion. In order to communicate the plan to customers and society, we designed a mapping service to reinforce the transparency and allow over to 70 million customers to keep track of our services.

We chose the Google Maps API and Google Maps Engine for this mapping project, because they would provide our workers and customers with a familiar service, a very easy and understandable user experience, and a manageable tool to monitor and update all the information regarding the coverage of our services. Using Google Maps, we can show the location of all the company’s antennas and WiFi Hotspots, so both TIM and our clients can locate our services. We can also display where there is 2G, 3G or 4G coverage. The map details the spots that are covered by the company, as well as those where there is no coverage, and informs transparently clients on the current and future activities like antennas installed recently and those that will be installed in the future.

Since deploying these tools three months ago, we’ve been impressed with the results. We’ve increased the number of visits to our web site from 500 visits per month to over 300,000 queries on the Google mapping tools, showing the increase in customers searching for the coverage range and services we are providing them in their respective areas. We update our data monthly, so we expect this number to grow as we add more and more information. This project also generated a tighter integration between the different areas of the company. For example, the marketing and network technical departments are now working together cooperatively to offer richer information about the service to ensure the constant flow of information for our customers.


We also developed a smartphone app which provides consumers fast access to all the services that are available online. This mobile app offers more customers the tools available from our “Open Doors” website on their smartphones and tablets. We are using Android OS as one of the main development platforms due to the widespread availability of Android smartphones in Brazil.

In the future, we plan to expand the Google Maps usage in our CRM initiatives in order to communicate in a more personalized way with our customer base by offering segmented maps. Overall, we’ve seen very positive benefits from adopting Google Maps Engine and the Google Maps API.

Posted by Bryan Friehauf, product line leader-software solutions for GE’s Digital Energy business

Editor's note: They power our homes and supply clean water - utility companies fulfill our most basic needs. This week we're showcasing the Utilities Industry and the ways they’re relying on Google Maps for Business to improve operations and keep the lights on. Today’s guest blogger is Bryan Friehauf from GE.

Electric companies are responsible for providing safe, reliable energy to thousands of households. At GE’s Digital Energy business, we know our utility customers have a big job to do and are constantly looking for efficient ways they can meet growing energy demands.

To help our clients improve mission-critical operations, we’ve developed a suite of applications for the utility industry. GE’s Smallworld™ technology brings users smarter ways to plan and design networks, manage jobs in the field and visualize assets using Google Maps. With access to Google’s mapping tools, we’re giving our customers location-based technology that is fully customized for their operations and easy for their employees to use.

By integrating the Google Maps API, GE’s Smallworld-powered Distribution and Outage Management Systems can display location-based information on a Google Map. With a GE device in-hand, a utility worker can see infrastructure that’s down in real-time and quickly respond to the situation. This gives our utility customers a portable solution for gaining information on-the-go.
In addition to having instant, mobile insights, our Smallworld applications give users access to data visualization on a map that is familiar and accurate. Teams in the field can use features like Google Street View, helping them more efficiently locate assets that are hard to uncover, such as transmission lines, or a repair job.

From planning electric, gas and water distribution systems to designing telecommunications networks, having the right tools to visualize and manage complex infrastructure is critical for today’s utility industry. But with Google Maps integrated as part of our applications, we’re making it a little easier.

Posted by Pat Doyle, Manager IT, FedEx

Editor's note: Today we announced the availability of the Google Maps Engine API, letting organizations build their own applications on Google’s cloud infrastructure. Hear from guest blogger, Pat Doyle, to find out how FedEx helps its customers locate their nearly 50,000 retail touchpoints on FedEx.com, using Maps Engine.

Delivering packages to almost any location in the world is just another day on the job at FedEx. On average, we ship more than nine million packages daily and guarantee they’ll arrive on-time, at the right place and unharmed. However, our commitment to a superior customer experience extends far beyond delivering packages. To make it even easier for people to find the information they need online, we launched a new store locator site using Google Maps.

Using Google Maps, and more specifically Google Maps Engine, allowed us to completely re-imagine FedEx.com. We turned to Maps Engine because it gave us a powerful platform to build and share our own FedEx maps. By integrating features that so many people use everyday, like Google Street View and driving directions, FedEx.com visitors can easily find the nearest FedEx.

In addition to providing a much easier way to locate us, Google Maps Engine gives us another big advantage: global accuracy and consistency. Central to the cloud-based offering, we can rely on Google’s core infrastructure to host our always-changing and growing database of store information. By hosting attributes, such as street addresses, opening hours, holiday schedules and local pick-up times on Maps Engine, we can update details for nearly 50,000 retail touchpoints in real-time and share this information to FedEx.com visitors within minutes. This helped us replace a patchwork of region-bound store locators with a single, global site.

Posted by Jen Kovnats, Product Manager, Google Maps for Business

Maps tell stories about the world around us. With a single map, an organization can locate underground pipelines, decide on the best place to build their next store, or inform customers about cell phone coverage areas. Today we're announcing the Google Maps Engine API, allowing developers to bring the power of Maps Engine into their own applications.

Maps Engine lets organizations use Google’s fast and reliable cloud infrastructure to layer their data on top of a Google Map and share their custom-made Google Maps with employees, customers or the public-at-large. At the push of a button an organization can share their maps internally or publish them on the web, making it easy to access their data from anywhere.

The API provides direct access to Maps Engine for reading and editing spatial data hosted in the cloud. With the API, organizations can develop on any platform - web, Android, iOS and server-to-server - and build applications like store locators, crowdsourced maps or crisis-response maps. For example, FedEx.com uses the API to query its more than 50,000 retail locations and IRIS creates applications for utilities to track underground pipelines.

Google Maps Engine is changing the way enterprises create and use maps - replacing complex GIS technologies with accurate and comprehensive Google Maps-based tools. Contact sales if you are interested in Google Maps Engine or learn more about today’s newly launched API.

Posted by Jeff McConathy, VP Engineering at Trulia

Editor's note: Our guest blogger is Jeff McConathy, Vice President of Engineering, Consumer Services, at Trulia, a San Francisco-based company that gives home buyers, sellers, owners and renters the inside scoop on properties, places and real estate professionals. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

There is an old saying in real estate: it’s all about location, location, location. With this in mind, it’s natural that maps are key to the success of any real estate business. They’re the first real guidepost that homebuyers look at when searching for a new home. At Trulia, we want our maps to do more. Maps are the canvas that let us tell the story of every property on our site – not just where it is, but what the neighborhood is like, how safe it is, the quality of the schools, how long it takes to commute to work and more. By using the Google Maps API for Business, we’re able to connect bits of data with home listings to give the 31.4 million people who visit Trulia each month a complete picture of a potential new home before they ever step inside it.

Google Maps API is core to Trulia’s user experience. It’s the common interface that lets homebuyers search for and browse through properties, explore neighborhoods, and jumpstart their home buying process. We’ve been working with Google since 2005, after we gave both Google Maps and Microsoft Virtual Earth a trial run. Google Maps proved to be the easiest to customize and had the best functionality. Since then, our partnership has grown seamlessly – Google constantly adds new features to the API and we update our maps weekly.

Google Maps let us visualize data in a context that’s important to homebuyers. Instead of a list of crime statistics, we can create a color-coded heat map where our users can look around the city or town they’re exploring and compare neighborhoods, or even streets that are close to each other. We can present home buyers, sellers, and renters data about schools, public transit, nightlife, environmental and natural disaster risks, property valuations, and sales trends.


Google Maps also lets Trulia run efficiently on all mobile platforms. In addition to our mobile site, we have 14 different apps for homebuyers, agents, renters, mortgage representatives and more, with over 11 million mobile users each month. The Google Maps API ensures that we have full functionality across all of our apps, no matter the platform.

Trulia’s business is built on providing insights to consumers who are looking for the right place to live and then connecting them to a real estate professional. Google Maps adds color and life to that process by giving us a platform to tell a story about a particular neighborhood or property. It gives users clarity and simplicity in what can be an extremely complicated and confusing process, and that’s the absolute most valuable thing we can offer our users.

Posted by Tom Touchet, CEO, City 24/7

(Cross-posted on the Google Geo Developers Blog)

Editor's note: Our guest blogger this week is from City 24/7, a non-traditional media company with a mission of providing “what you need to know, when and where it helps you most.” See how the company uses Google Places APIs as a way to give the public access to vital local information.

Imagine you are visiting New York City for the very first time. The lights, sounds and endless city blocks are all pretty amazing – yet a little confusing. That’s where City 24/7 comes in.

To give you an easy (and free) way of learning about your surroundings, we’re installing 250 Smart Screens in retrofitted telephone booths across NYC. City 24/7 Smart Screens are large, interactive touch screens that give you a range of information about local businesses and points of interest. And in the case of an emergency you can also access vital safety information, such as safety tips from the police department or updates from the mayor’s office.

We turned to the Google Places API to help us provide you with accurate, reliable information about events and places in any given neighborhood. The Places API includes location info from Google Maps, content from Google+ Local, Zagat-recommended establishments and (as of last week), Place Summaries - which include curated reviews and ratings.


Cities should be easy to live in and fun to visit. And with access to Google+ Local data, everyone can feel like a local, knowing all the best places to eat, shop, play and hang out. With the help of the Google Places API, we look forward to bringing our Smart Screens to bus shelters, train platforms, and major pedestrian streets in cities all around the world, as well as to launch our mobile application.