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KEN HOETMER: All right.
Well, let's get started.
So welcome to the Fireside Chat with the
Google Maps API Team.
This is a chance for you to ask any one of us a question
that is appropriately contextual to maps, and we'll
do our best to answer.
So just a chance for you to interact with us.
And this session is being recorded, so people who watch
later, it's not Livestream, but it's being recorded.
So people on YouTube can watch us later and hear the
questions that you ask and our answers as well.
So before we go into questions-- and if you want to
ask a question, just start lining up behind the
microphones--
we'll just go through and introduce ourselves.
So my name is Ken.
I'm product manager based in Sydney working on a number of
different Maps APIs, but probably the largest one being
the JavaScript Maps API.
MIKE PERROW: Hi.
My name is Mike Perrow.
I'm the engineering lead for Geo Down Under in Sydney,
which includes our Maps APIs, Google Maps Coordinate, and
some advertising products for Maps.
DAVID ***: Hi, My name's David ***.
I'm also based in Sydney.
I'm the manager for a number of API projects including Maps
API, Android API, iOS API, and a few others, too.
MANO MARKS: Hi.
I'm Mano Marks.
I'm the lead developer advocate for the Google Maps
Developer Relations Team.
JEN KOVNATS: Hi.
I'm Jen Kovnats.
I'm a product manager in Sydney working on Google Maps
Engine APIs.
ANDREW FOSTER: Hi.
I'm Andrew Foster.
I'm the product manager for Google's GO Mobile APIs, so on
Android and iOS.
DAVE DAY: Hi, my name's Dave Day, and I'm the technical
lead for all the web-based Maps APIs, so things like the
JavaScript API, Static Maps, Geocoding, all
those sort of things.
JAMES MCGILL: Hi.
My name's James McGill, and I'm the technical lead for the
Google Maps Engine APIs.
MANO MARKS: So if you have any questions, please just come up
to the mics in the center, because if you don't, we'll
all leave here.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
I was just wondering if you guys have any plans to add
support for tracking aircraft to Maps, to the Maps APIs or
the Maps products?
KEN HOETMER: I'll take that one.
It's a good question.
We have the Google Flight Search products, which are
about booking.
But I don't know of any plans offhand that I'm aware of to
start doing live tracking of planes within that.
I think if we were to start doing live tracking of planes,
you'd probably see it emerge in our consumer Google Maps
applications before you'd see it emerge in an API.
MANO MARKS: But we can't talk about features
that we haven't released.
We're not allowed to say anything about--
KEN HOETMER: I'm just postulating
what would be cool.
MANO MARKS: Just postulating.
Sorry.
Just doing the thing that I always have to do at these.
AUDIENCE: I also had an API question.
I was wondering if there are any plans in the future to
have some sort of route optimization API or some sort
of thing like that in Google Maps?
MANO MARKS: We have that.
That's in the Directions API or in the Directions service.
You can add in a number of waypoints and tell us to
optimize it.
In the free Maps API, you can add up to eight waypoints,
plus your start and end locations.
And in the Google Maps API for Business, it's start
and end plus 23.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
MANO MARKS: Sure.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
I'm going to ask a question somebody else asked yesterday,
and I didn't really hear an answer to it, quite.
The person asked if there was a negative version of
waypoints, like a no waypoints--
places that you set as places you want to avoid.
For example.
I want to get across town, but I don't
want to take the highway.
MANO MARKS: Right.
We don't currently have that in the Maps API.
AUDIENCE: I know you're not allowed to speculate about
what you might be doing in the future, but--
MANO MARKS: It's a great idea and certainly, if that would
be a feature you'd be interested in, I would
recommend adding it to the Issue Tracker
as a Feature Request.
Because we actually spend quite a bit of time looking
over that and are really excited to get input about
what developers want.
So yeah, do it, and then get all your friends to star the
issue, so then it'll raise that.
We'll see that people are interested in it.
AUDIENCE: There's one other one that I put into the Issue
Tracker actually today, which was about places, about nearby
searches for places.
I'd like to be able to do that along a polyline, like to pass
a polyline rather than a point, and see all the coffee
shops on the route home, for example, or
something like that.
MANO MARKS: That's a really good idea.
AUDIENCE: Is that--
I heard that some people have proposed that, but I haven't
heard if it's actually coming down or not.
KEN HOETMER: The phrase that's often used for it is Search
Along a Route.
And at the moment, we don't have that functionality.
But star it.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
We've seen some areas get Street View imagery updates.
Has there been any thought put to interfaces to see older
versions of Street View imagery?
KEN HOETMER: That's an interesting question.
I typically hear the question of can I get access to older
versions in Satellite Imagery?
That's the way it's typically answered.
At the moment, that's not something that we're able to
offer, so I don't have anything that I can say at
this time, no.
MANO MARKS: Although for satellite and aerial imagery
in Google Earth, we do have older versions, just not for
Street View.
AUDIENCE: I had one quick question.
Can we have an API where we combine the location and the
camera, everything put together, so that I can take
the picture and the location together with one API?
MANO MARKS: I'm not sure I--
AUDIENCE: It's for augmented reality.
Supposing if I'm going somewhere, I take a picture,
and I also want to share my location,
together with one API.
I should be able to do that and put my location and my
picture on the Google Maps in the map.
Right now, I'm trying to do it separately with
two different APIs--
the Camera API and the Location Manager API.
But if you have an API which does just both of them
together, then it can be a good
augmented reality app easily.
Right now, we have to do it with multiple things.
MANO MARKS: It wouldn't be that hard to actually
implement that.
If you take a photo on a phone that embeds the location, you
can parse out the Exif headers.
And then you could use that to determine the location the
camera was at when it was taken.
AUDIENCE: Now we use two different APIs.
Supposing if I'm writing an app to have a camera intent,
then I have a location manager intent, everything.
So I have to get a location from my Location Manager, and
then from the Camera, I have to get my picture, and then
combine both of them together.
Instead of that, there is one API, which is both of them.
MANO MARKS: You're talking about on a phone, an Android.
AUDIENCE: On the API level.
If we get an API level, we'd see Get My Location
along with the image.
If there is an option, then it will be--
MANO MARKS: That's an interesting idea.
AUDIENCE: It would be good for so many other things.
MANO MARKS: That would be one for a Feature
Request Issue Tracker.
DAVE DAY: I mean, I think in general, one of our
philosophies is to give small composable parts and then, as
the developer that brings all those pieces together and
builds her application, and that way you can mix and match
them however is the most appropriate to your
application.
Whereas if we start bundling them, then they start really
becoming used for only very few specific applications, if
that makes sense.
AUDIENCE: OK.
DAVE DAY: So that's what we found works better.
MANO MARKS: Our preference is to not control how you use
your own data within the
experience as much as possible.
AUDIENCE: You could have something like a fused API or
something like that, like if you have a fused location
manager and [INAUDIBLE], which does the cell Wi-Fi and the
GPS together, something like that.
One more question I had.
I had once gone to another conference where Motorola was
displaying their phones.
They said they have a barometer
to measure the pressure.
So can we have an API to get the pressure?
That way, along with the location, you can have the
pressure also together put?
MANO MARKS: Well, I believe on the Android devices that are
produced by Motorola, you can actually access that sensor.
So most Android devices don't come with that, but I know the
Motorola Xoom did, for instance.
And there was some really interesting work done in
Germany by some researchers who are able to do things like
determine elevation within the subway system
using barometric pressure.
So certainly I think Motorola does expose that within that.
And the Android platform gives the ability for OEMs for phone
manufacturers to expose additional sensors beyond the
ones that are within the standard Android platform.
AUDIENCE: Like if you combine the location with the
pressure, and if there is any tsunami or anything coming, we
can know easily that way.
MANO MARKS: Yeah, you could do things around weather and
stuff like that.
That would be interesting.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
I had a couple questions about indoor locating technology.
Do you guys have a target accuracy level that you want
to get to consistently when you're
locating phones indoors?
And I mean consistently.
I mean, obviously, sometimes you'll be--
do you guys have a target accuracy level
that you want to hit?
MANO MARKS: You mean for indoor maps, how accurate?
We try and get as accurate as possible.
KEN HOETMER: I think this is a question about
the hardware, right?
So we have maps of indoor locations, and then when you
take your phone into the indoor location, your phone
needs to be able to find out where it is.
And that's something that's typically built into the
hardware that you're using, and then would be exposed
through the kinds of services that Android would perhaps
build on top of that, on top of the hardware.
MANO MARKS: But for indoor, part of that is built on the
Wi-Fi, and so that's part of the Google
services that are done.
DAVID ***: I can say something here.
If you saw Waleed's talk on Beyond the Blue Dot, they're
doing some very interesting things with sensors, and his
mission is one centimeter accuracy everywhere.
So one centimeter's the target, I guess.
AUDIENCE: OK.
Thanks.
MANO MARKS: [INAUDIBLE]
AUDIENCE: OK, thank you.
Not some random person.
I could just ask you.
On that one too, can you talk about some of the-- and you
kind of alluded to with the hardware--
any kind of hardware enhancements, or anything
you're looking at to enhance the indoor locating
technology?
Obviously, Bluetooth is one of them.
Obviously, you talked about Wi-Fi and Blue Dot today.
Are there any other ones that you guys are looking at to
enhance that accuracy?
MIKE PERROW: I think that comes under, a little bit, the
answer to the last question in that I think between us on
stage, we don't have anyone on the Android
Platform Team here.
Waleed, who gave a talk earlier or yesterday, should
be around the conference.
If you come by the Maps booth tomorrow, we can probably
point you in the direction of someone who can talk a bit
more intelligently about that.
AUDIENCE: OK, thanks.
MIKE PERROW: Thanks.
AUDIENCE: I'm a little nervous about that gong.
Is that for poor questions or for poor answers?
MANO MARKS: I was wondering about that, too, because that
was up here when we got here.
So I'm thinking at some point, we vote one
of us off the island.
AUDIENCE: I've got two questions.
The first is about the GME API.
And I could be wrong, but I'm under the impression that
currently, it's not possible to create a table.
If that's true, I'm wondering if there's a timeline of when
that might be possible?
JEN KOVNATS: Either of us.
James is the TL, I'm the APM on that.
So that's right.
Currently, it's not possible.
What we did on this past Friday was actually a soft
launch of the complete Google Maps Engine API, it's SLA.
And we wanted to start with a small feature set to begin
with, just to make sure that we could get it out the door,
make sure it's really stable, and get people using it.
It's sort of a logical progression to be able to
create tables.
So it's on the roadmap, but we don't really have a
date to give you.
AUDIENCE: OK.
JEN KOVNATS: Yeah.
And so the other thing Mano's just whispering to me to
mention is that we have the option now to give trial
accounts on GME.
So if you're interested in trying out Google Maps Engine,
come by our Maps booth on the second floor and we can give
you a trial account.
AUDIENCE: So my second question is probably a lot
more basic, but it has to do with kind of maybe throttling
through APIs.
I'm not sure if all Google APIs
authenticate the same way.
I'm more familiar with Fusion tables where you've got an
application key and an OAuth kind of option as to how to do
it, and whether throttling is different in terms of how much
you can do, whether use one or the other or both for the
Google Maps APIs.
Is that similar there?
DAVE DAY: So we've actually got a pretty diverse mix of
authentication stories across the APIs, mostly because of
the historical.
Some of our APIs are many years old.
Eight years old is our oldest, so it's
quite a different story.
We are looking to go increasingly uniform, so
things like the GME API is using what we consider the
best of our current technology.
And that's the sort of thing we'll be
going towards, generally.
AUDIENCE: Which is what, specifically, for throttling?
Is it per OAuth, I guess?
DAVE DAY: Yeah, it's an OAuth-based--
JAMES MCGILL: Yeah, so the limits in place for the GME
API, there is a per developer limit tied to the simple API
access key that you use when you're accessing the API.
If you're accessing through OAuth, the tie back to your
developer account is encoded in the client
secrets you use for OAuth.
That's used to make sure that in GME, because data is
centrally hosted, it's used to make sure that one developer
isn't using up a lot of quota against
someone else's hosting.
There's also quota limits applied against hosting that
you configure as well, in terms of how many requests are
allowed per day and how much quota you have in
your account overall.
AUDIENCE: Great.
Thanks.
AUDIENCE: Hello.
I have a question about tracking assets with GPS.
Since the accuracy is not very high, sometimes the points get
very far from the road.
For example, if you visualize it in Street View, the point
gets behind a building and is not visible.
Is there a way to project the point back on the road via an
API, or is it possible to access now the vector data of
the road and do something with that?
KEN HOETMER: So potentially, yes.
We call that feature Snap to Road.
The idea would be that you have a trail of crumbs coming
from a mobile device.
The mobile device is probably on a road, but they do this.
Right?
And what you want to know is, which road did the vehicle go
down and how far?
And then where did it turn and what road
did it go down again?
So stay tuned for something in that space.
I can't give you a date, but I'll say stay tuned.
AUDIENCE: OK.
Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Hello.
I was wondering about what kind of data you possess in
your maps regarding, for instance, speed limits, the
width of the road.
Say we have a bridge, how tall it is, what kind of trucks can
go through it, and such?
KEN HOETMER: Are you referring to the Ground Truth project
and the kind of data that we pull out of that and pull into
the base maps?
I'm trying to--
AUDIENCE: I'm kind of wondering about what kind of
metadata you have for your maps.
KEN HOETMER: Right.
So unless somebody wants to jump in and reinterpret the
question, I think what we do and we've talked about in our
Ground Truth project is a lot of the imagery that we collect
from Street View is actually used by operators to make our
base maps better.
This is something that the Google
Maps team does, generally.
And a lot of the things that they pull out of that are
things like stop signs and one way streets,
and names of streets.
And that's done in a hybrid automatic, as well as there's
some operators who look at that.
And that's one of the major sources we use for that kind
of information and to verify that kind of information.
MANO MARKS: So there was actually a talk on that, the
Ground Truth talk yesterday, which will be
on YouTube as well.
And they also talked about things like place names.
So that's used to improve Google Places and the Places
API, and a lot of that sort of thing.
Yeah, it's really great.
And speed limits was one of the ones
that they talked about.
Speed limit data turns out to be one these ones that's
really difficult to get canonical
sources for speed limits.
And this is kind of the only way, I think, it can be done
is by driving all the roads and picking up images.
KEN HOETMER: So I'll just tell you a bit of a story about
speed limits.
I had lunch with one of the engineers in Zurich who's
working on this, and he was telling me how difficult it
is, because there's a difference between posted
speed limits and actual speed limits.
Sometimes people drive slower than the speed limit, and
sometimes people drive faster than the speed limit.
And sometimes that can change between when the
speed limits change.
And so actually creating a model of how fast vehicles
actually travel and whether or not they're over the speed
limit or under the speed limit is actually very, very
difficult, because it turns out that the data is just
very, very noisy.
AUDIENCE: I was just thinking governments, for instance,
possess usually information about their streets and the
speed limits and such.
Can you get that information and incorporate
them into your maps?
MANO MARKS: Governments publish that?
Actually, it's pretty hard to get it, but we do.
Whenever we can find open data, we do acquire that data.
Part of the Ground Truth project is doing that.
And it's part of why we do encourage open data,
particularly from governments, so not only Google but
everybody has access to that data.
AUDIENCE: Hello.
I'm coming from Hong Kong, and I've
got a couple of questions.
First of all, is a very hard problem.
We still do not have Google Earth in the Hong Kong Apple
App Store--
I don't know why--
still now.
Because we [INAUDIBLE]
Google Earth as a very useful client to the Google Earth
enterprise.
So if it's not available, that would be a problem.
And the next question is I've heard about a business photos
program as mentioned by some talks before.
And I'm just wondering if the Google Maps API, no matter if
it's Android API or the JavaScript API, is able to
call those business photos?
I mean the Indoor Street View.
And the third question is about the--
MANO MARKS: I'm sorry.
Hi.
I don't think I quite
understood the second question.
The first question was Google Earth is not in the Hong Kong
App Store, which I've talked to Peter Birch about this, and
he said that shouldn't be true.
But I'll follow up with him on that.
What was the second question?
AUDIENCE: The question is whether we can, for business
photos, they take the Street View of the shops.
But for developers, we can call the
Street View on the roads.
So is it possible for us to call the Street View inside a
shop to display on our own application?
DAVE DAY: So at the moment, it is possible in the JavaScript
API to navigate to the Indoor Street View through just the
user interaction model.
The only piece that's really missing there is giving you a
programmatic way to find which places have Street View and
then landing them directly into the [? library. ?]
But definitely, the imagery's already available.
AUDIENCE: OK.
And so [INAUDIBLE].
And also, we have been longing for the Mapmaker to be
available in Hong Kong, because our customers usually
complain about some of the map data.
So there is no news or timeline that Mapmaker will
come to Hong Kong, so we are looking for this.
MANO MARKS: Yeah, so we are rolling out Mapmaker and
Ground Truth around the world.
And I can't give you a timeline for when it will come
to Hong Kong, but we're hopeful.
We've got Ground Truth in 40 some countries.
Does anybody know off the top of their heads?
Yeah, but basically most of the world.
If you look at the Ground Truth talk that was yesterday,
he talked a bit about Mapmaker as well.
So definitely, our plan is to make it as global as possible.
AUDIENCE: So here's the last question.
In the Android API for the indoor positioning launched
yesterday, and I find it really accurate for the
Moscone West Center.
But for building applications for our customers, they were
asking whether this feature will be available in their
[? radio, ?]
because they may not have that kind of AP density
and things like that.
So just wondering if there is anything that we, as a
developer, can help them, like setting up APs or anything
that we can do to help enhance the user experience or the
accuracy on their [? radio ?] instead of just waiting for
Google to come and take the data?
DAVID ***: Yeah.
So I think we'll have to defer this to--
you know, Mano.
MANO MARKS: And yes, you can see this in Waleed's talk as
well, but there's an app in the App Store.
Once you've uploaded a floor plan to Google--
and just search on Google Floor Plan Manager, or
something like that.
Once it's been uploaded, then you can get an app that allows
you to walk around your store or your location, and it will
map the Wi-Fi locations.
So yeah.
You can absolutely do this.
And I think this is actually a really great way for
developers to have business be on a developer story, is
becoming part of the Business Photos program, and then also
doing this indoor floor plans and mapping to become a more
full service person, people.
And this is [INAUDIBLE], who is one of our Google Developer
experts in Hong Kong.
So thank you, [INAUDIBLE], for your hard work.
AUDIENCE: Thank you, Mano.
DAVID ***: So Waleed actually gave a talk--
I think it was yesterday--
where he showed how to use the tool where you can do that.
And the Android API today essentially shares the same
infrastructure.
So once that process goes through, you should be able to
use it in your API, and it will just magically appear.
There's nothing we need to do.
AUDIENCE: These are probably feature requests, but in Maps,
getting transit mode directions, is it possible to
coerce the walking portion of your trip?
MANO MARKS: Coerce it to be longer, you mean?
AUDIENCE: Yes.
Or to be a proportion, or some minimum value.
MANO MARKS: We don't currently have that capability.
Yeah, you know, it's interesting.
I remember a long time ago, 511.org had that ability where
you could set minimum and maximum walking distances for
their transit tool.
Yeah, you might be able to fudge it with some combination
of multiple calls and doing a walking thing to a certain--
but yeah, there's currently not a way to do that.
AUDIENCE: Unrelated, when you get directions, a way to have
them transported over to your Google Activity Report.
MANO MARKS: Your Google Activity Report?
KEN HOETMER: I think this is more a question about the
Google Maps consumer application, I think.
MANO MARKS: Is that right?
KEN HOETMER: Well, if it's going to be in your Google
Activity Report, you have to be logged in, and it would be
you using Google Maps.
So that's a good question.
It would seem to me something that would be appropriate for
the Activity Report.
But I don't have a good answer for that.
As an API team, we don't actually work on the
maps.google.com product ourselves.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
MANO MARKS: I think you were first in the front.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
So I'm working on a project similar to the Igloo upstairs.
I was wondering if there is a way to get the equilateral
projection of a Street View coordinate?
DAVE DAY: Are you talking about the Google Street View,
or the ones that have been taken on your phone?
AUDIENCE: The Google Street View.
DAVE DAY: Not at the moment.
We have the Street View Image API, but that comes back
pre-projected to try and give you the right look.
And we have the client side one, which does the projection
in the browser to make it look right as
you're moving it around.
But we don't actually expose any way to get to the
underlying geometry at this stage, of the image.
AUDIENCE: Is there someone that I can talk to
advocate for that?
DAVE DAY: Yeah, if you want to have a chat with me
afterwards, I can try and understand exactly what you're
trying to do and see what's possible.
Yeah.
AUDIENCE: OK, awesome.
DAVE DAY: Chris might also be a great help, just
there next to you.
Hi, Chris.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
Is there any way to embed a sphere photo to info window?
MANO MARKS: I'm sorry.
Embed a what?
AUDIENCE: I would like to use a sphere photo to embed to
info window.
MANO MARKS: A photo sphere in an info window?
Are you talking about in JavaScript or on
an Android or iPhone?
What platform are you?
AUDIENCE: Not Android.
On the PC.
MANO MARKS: On PC.
Well, Dave, you look ready.
DAVE DAY: Yes, that's possible.
So it's a matter of taking your photo sphere and
projecting it in a way that you can make a custom Street
View panorama out of it.
And then it's possible to put a Street View panorama within
an info window inside the JavaScript API.
So it is a little bit of effort, and you have to make
sure that your image is in the right format, and there's a
bit of coding involved.
But it is definitely feasible.
AUDIENCE: Are you guys--
AUDIENCE: Sorry.
I can answer this one, too.
I created a project called Street Sphere, which does this
conversion.
I'll show you that afterwards, I guess.
DAVE DAY: To elaborate on what Chris said, he's got a project
which, once you have your photo, then it converts it
into a Street View panorama and makes it really easy to
put it on a web page.
So then really, your job would be to take that panorama and
embed it how you'd like within an info window.
AUDIENCE: So that's street-sphere.appspot.com.
MANO MARKS: Any other questions?
AUDIENCE: Hello.
First of all, congratulations on WebGL Maps.
It made the keynote, so that was spectacular.
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
AUDIENCE: Spectacular.
One thing that I noticed in playing with it is you can't
look at a pole, for instance.
So you can reach the North Pole, but you cannot go over a
pole, necessarily.
So I was curious, because I have a very young cousin who
loves Santa Claus, and I would love to teach
geography with this tool.
And I was curious what's coming down the
pipe for WebGL Maps?
MANO MARKS: So the pole, you mean in the Globe Mode?
AUDIENCE: Globe Mode, yes.
MIKE PERROW: Yeah.
I can understand why that's the case.
There's nothing announced at the moment, certainly.
And in current maps, this is obviously not possible because
of the Mercado projection.
Physically, there's no way to display that 2D in that
projection.
Globe lets us do that.
It's not implemented at the moment.
MANO MARKS: This is actually a problem that we had in Google
Earth as well.
And part of the problem is that we're basically
implementing the imagery in these strips that end up
meeting at the poles.
And so then you would see this infinite fan
experience at the pole.
We don't have anything.
MIKE PERROW: You'll see that we don't really have the
infinite fan effect anymore.
We've changed the way that we do that, but the
code isn't there yet.
MANO MARKS: We're still in preview mode.
DAVE DAY: My understanding, part of it's the user
experience too, just to try and make it as difficult as
possible to confuse and get lost on the Globe.
So if you're actually keeping the earth always within a
certain range of rotation, you don't end up upside down and
all which ways.
But it's obviously fine tuning that, too.
MANO MARKS: Yeah.
That's something that does happen in Google
Earth a fair amount.
People get kind of lost, because they've gone over the
pole, and suddenly Australia's in the north, and that doesn't
make any sense.
AUDIENCE: There is a learning curve, I agree.
MIKE PERROW: It's also worth pointing out that the home of
Santa is actually quite
contentious, country to country.
When I was growing up in Scotland, I was always taught
it was in Lapland, rather than the North Pole.
So we try not to comment on
geopolitical concerns in general.
[LAUGHTER]
MANO MARKS: We have to be very sensitive around
these sort of things.
AUDIENCE: Thank you very much, and congratulations again.
MANO MARKS: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
I have two questions for you guys.
One is, do you have a way to get the longitude and latitude
from IP addresses on the server side, because I was
looking into that, but Google Maps didn't
have an API for that?
I was considering purchase third party company, like
MaxMind or something.
KEN HOETMER: Yeah.
So we have an API for that.
It's called the Geolocation API.
And it's an API that's not freely available but you can
purchase as part of our Enterprise Product Suite.
AUDIENCE: Oh, it's not free?
KEN HOETMER: It's not free.
Sorry.
AUDIENCE: With all these open source things, it's not free.
Maybe you guys can have a limit amount of requests, but
the basic version can be free.
Something to consider?
KEN HOETMER: It is something to consider, but I can't
comment on it further than that.
AUDIENCE: The second question I have is, are you guys
planning to include any social features to Google Maps, like
Foursquare, to check in and keep track of where your
friends are, and maybe [INAUDIBLE]
or implement something?
When I'm on the maps, I'm driving, it's nice to just
locate where I am with the local restaurants with reviews
and things like that.
KEN HOETMER: So I think this is a question about the new
Google Maps, which was announced yesterday.
And I guess I can't comment on the roadmap, but I do know
that one of their key visions is a personalized map, and
that the personalized map should have the relevant
information to you that is location-specific.
So I know that they're thinking about those kinds of
social features, but obviously, we don't
pre-announce anything.
So I guess you just have to wait and see what happens.
AUDIENCE: Thanks.
AUDIENCE: I have a question about the indoor mapping, the
app for walking through a building after you've uploaded
your floor plan.
So one of the things that was brought up in the talk that I
attended was that the presence of people messes with Wi-Fi,
and you're largely basing your location on Wi-Fi.
So if I were going to do a stadium-- let's
say a hockey arena--
would I be able to upload multiple
walk-throughs, basically?
Because the stadium is going to have a different number of
people in it depending on whether it's empty, there's a
concert, the game's on.
In between periods, people are getting their hot dogs and
messing with the Wi-Fi.
But most of the time, during the game,
they're in their seats.
Does that really affect it enough that I have
to worry about it?
Sorry.
That's about three questions.
MANO MARKS: So I think none of us is expert enough in this,
but I think Waleed will be probably in the Sandbox a fair
amount tomorrow, so you could try and catch up with him.
Waleed or Sarah, who was also in that talk.
And I will say, I think you can re-upload location
information.
So I know they take more than one sample.
I just don't know if that just replaces one or the other.
The more different Wi-Fi routers you have out there,
more Wi-Fi signals that are out there, the better, because
we can then triangulate off of strength, and then it reduces
the impact of people.
AUDIENCE: And you can re-upload
your data, can't you?
MANO MARKS: You can re-upload your data, and we encourage
that, especially when floor plans change.
So a department store, often, they'll rearrange things.
AUDIENCE: OK.
Thanks.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
I had a quick question about your lat/long.
I was wondering what datum you guys are using for that?
MANO MARKS: Sorry.
Which data we're using for where?
AUDIENCE: Which datum?
Was it WGS84 or NAT83 for your lat/long?
MIKE PERROW: I'm pretty sure it is WGS84, but I'm--
MANO MARKS: Yeah, WGS84 for Google Earth.
AUDIENCE: That's good.
Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Hi there.
I've got a question about, are you able to display only one
country on the Map, or do we have to display the whole
world on your Map?
I've got a website that's only specific to one country, so
obviously for me, only one country is of interest.
Thanks.
DAVE DAY: At the moment, we don't have any features which
let you individually turn things on and off.
And definitely, we've heard from developers asking for
other things, like maybe, not necessarily saying, I only
want to see this country, but maybe, can you emphasize this
state or this building or this road?
The only thing I could suggest right now is bounding what
your map looks at, so if the user tries to pan away, you
just sort of snap them back, but that won't
always fit the bill.
MANO MARKS: Another thing you could do is do something like
a Google Maps Engine layer using some open data, like
natural earth data, to put some polygons and highlight
the boundaries, and then mute all the other ones using a
styled map.
AUDIENCE: I'm near to Android, so I wanted to know what is
the equivalent of Find My Friends.
The app that Apple has, do you have anything equivalent, like
Find My Friends?
I mean, I know you can track people indoors, but you can
track yourself.
But can I track my husband or a friend?
[LAUGHTER]
MANO MARKS: Thor is nodding vigorously.
Thor, did you want to answer?
Former PM of the Google Maps API, now PM for Google+ APIs,
Thor Mitchell.
THOR MITCHELL: Wow, it was worth me coming.
You may remember that in the keynote yesterday, Vic
mentioned that there are 42 new Google+
features launched yesterday.
And obviously, he didn't talk about all of them.
One of the features that wasn't mentioned was that
Location Sharing has now been added to the Google+ app.
So if you open the Google+ app today, assuming you got an
update yesterday, you look at the menu of options on the
left hand side, one of them is Location.
You can now define circles that can see your current
location using the Google+ app, and that's available
across all platforms.
Thus ends the advert.
MANO MARKS: Thank you, Thor.
I think that's all the time that we had for the Fireside
Chat, but we will hang out probably out in the hallway
after this, if you want to ask us any more
individualized questions.
So thank you all very much for coming.
[APPLAUSE]