How does Google Maps work?

Few Insights about Google Maps API - Beyond the Road

On 21st september 2016, Google Maps API team hosted the event "Google Maps - Beyond the Road" at Leela Palace, Bangalore. The event was mainly to share the Google maps vision for the next wave of maps and location intelligence and to demonstrate how it impacts businesses of all sizes and verticals.

People from all over the world had attended the event for growing their business using Google maps for work and also to get to know about the location intelligence and other disrupting market strategies using the intelligence algorithms, Road matrix API, Predictive analysis etc.The idea is to improve overall efficiency by location intelligence using machine learning that enhance experience. Imagine a coffee shop automatically fulfilling your order when you’re five minutes away or a transport company adjusting their route to avoid congestion to deliver your goods on time. Two of the many use-cases powered by location intelligence that enhance experience and improve overall efficiency. Google maps is helping businesses in changing the way they locate their business opportunities and track insights related to it. For example, getting directions and finding restaurants, hotels, hospitals, government buildings and just about anything else you might need to find in a particular geographic area. Businesses can use location intelligence of "Google maps for work" to increase their sales and decrease costs, ultimately boosting the revenue of the company. For customer analysis, it is important to understand the customer for any organization and Google map's location intelligence plays a big role by enriching customer data with demographic or lifestyle data based on where people live or by adding spatial data metrics -- drive times to stores, for example -- for use in sales forecasting models. Location data can also aid in customer profiling, segmentation and prospecting efforts, and in trade area and competitive analysis applications.

The event started with Didier Goibert - (Director/EMEA and Japac) Google Maps for work and followed by Richard Coombes - Google Maps Solution Architect, APAC, Gwladys Cabaille - Partner Sales Manager, Google Maps on addressing key factors and strategies which Google Maps for work - locations intelligence offers for growing business and disrupting market using the location services and various use-cases for business insights.

The chief guests who were invited for this event are Pramod Jajoo - Chief Technology Officer - Big Basket, Deepesh Agarwal - Co-founder - MoveInSync and Gaurav Verma - Vice President -RIL- LBS & Spatial Analytics. Gaurav Verma emphasized the importance of the Heat map analysis with customer base versus competitors and how they have benefited using it for their company Reliance for logistics and supply chain management. He also told the importance of getting data plotted into maps for further analysis of understanding the potential aspects for growth.

Movement optimization using Google Maps will not only reduce the huge costs for businesses but also increase the efficiency for the growth of any company. Few use-cases such as time taken to travel in traffic at various point to point locations for any given driver at any particular time in average and routing alternative paths in predicting traffic and providing various options of navigation. Even though traffic is highly unpredictable, Google Maps helps businesses to analyse and get the insights of their customer base with various predictive analysis and movement optimization. These specific aspects are crucial for businesses such as Taxi, Logistics and supply chain management etc., which is dependent on Google Maps.

Even the companies such as Reliance, Big Basket, Sendit, MoveInSync, Rivigo, Mahendra Smart Shift, Black Buck etc uses "Google Maps for Works" for enhancing their business using predictive analysis, location services, heat map analysis, location intelligence using machine learning algorithms with location matrix API, duration matrix API and road matrix API. Sendit, technology based logistics company is helping businesses with their logistics needs by creating an awareness to use "Google maps for work". Sendit is also educating truck drivers in using Google maps to trace customer locations such as warehouses, factories, stores and retail facilities etc. Ultimately by using "Google maps for work" by the truck drivers and businesses, it immensely helps the transporters and logistics companies to save their cost and time.

With the Google Maps - location intelligence, the predictive analysis allows better routing and data projections for insights. Prateesh from Google Maps API Team had explained about the predictive calculation of traffic, Road Matrix API which provides alternate path, Lat/long details and other heat map analysis which is critical for business to accomplish and execute the orders, distribution and procurement and so on.

Location intelligence is nothing but a business intelligence tool which is capable of relating geographic contexts to business data and Google Maps uses these tools which are designed to turn data into insight for a host of business applications. According to Google Maps, these are the trends for driving disruption : Location services, Movement optimization and Location intelligence. Advanced Geo-fencing will help in automating, intimating and connecting people's activities. It has wide variety of applications in fleet management, human resource management, compliance management, marketing, asset management and law enforcement.

Currently the partners for "Google Maps for Work" are : Lepton, Media agility and Sky map Global. All these Google maps partners help businesses in getting their requirements and selling the Google maps for work software according to their business needs. Leption focuses on Telecommunication, logistics and transportation, Media agility works on Food delivery, E-commerce, retail and manufacturing. Overall the event " Google Maps - Beyond the Road" was a great step by Google in bringing various business people, technologists and companies across the world at one place emphasizing the key factors important about Google maps with various application and changing the future with location intelligence for your business.

The most important step to understand the working of Google Maps is to understand its process of collecting data.

• Map Partners
• Google started a Base Map Partner Program in which many agencies partner with Google and submit detailed vector data. These agencies include the USDA Forest Service, US National Park Service, the US Geological Survey, various city and county councils, and so on.
• This data is used to demarcate changing boundaries and waterways, display new bike paths, among other things, and this helps to keep the “base map” as up-to-date as possible.
• Street View
• Many people do not know about the working of the Street View option of the Google Maps. The aim of the Street View is giving a 360 degree view of almost all places on the earth.
• Google deploy vehicles all around the world for getting Street images which on overlapping with the GPS coordinates of the vehicle makes the Street View feature possible on Google Maps.
• With much better Optical Character Techniques (OCR), Google can read road signs, traffic signs and Business names.
• Google hires camel for desert Street View
• Satellites
• Another layer of justification for the correctness of these Google Maps, it collaborates with the Google Earth project, getting high resolution pictures of the earth from satellites above.
• Updated Location Services
• Your smartphone plays a large role in providing Google information about any new roads or new businesses. Information collected from your Google searches, help in the crowdsource operation which in turn help in improvement of maps. The whole ecosystem of Google helps a lot in this.
• Local Guides
• When you’re in Google Maps, go to My Contributions and you can search for different places in your area. By leaving a review, answering a few questions, and submitting a photo, you can contribute to this additional layer of data.
• This local knowledge helps Maps to know things like the vibe of a cafe, whether a hotel has parking, or whether a restaurant has vegan options. In return for contributions, users can earn rewards like increased storage on Google Drive.
• Great Engineering
• After collecting all this data, the working of Google Maps boils down to the great engineers that Google have that make this happen. With complex and secretive algorithms, Google is able to make sense out of all this data. For Example : While reading road signs, Google try to make out the purpose and the reason of popularity for that road.