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Google Maps apps will be one of the many topics at this week’s Google I/O 2014 developers conference in San Francisco, and to prepare attendees and online participants, the Google Maps team put together a primer with a schedule of some intriguing Maps sessions being held at the event.
“The team has been working hard to give developers a great experience,” wrote Mano Marks of the Google developer relations team in a June 24 post on the Google Geo Developers Blog. “There will be lots of maps engineers, developer relations team members, product managers and more around I/O. So if you’re there, find us, say hi and show us your apps!”
The highlighted Maps sessions at this year’s Google I/O event include Views from Everywhere: Bringing developers the world’s largest geo photo library, which will look at how Google has been creating the world’s most comprehensive geo-located photo library through Street View, according to Marks. The session will held from 2 p.m. to 2:45 p.m. ET on Thursday and will be live-streamed for remote participants to view it. “We’re also empowering anyone to contribute photos and 360-degree panoramas to Google Maps via products like Trekker, Business View, Views, and Photo Sphere,” he wrote. “In this talk, we’ll show how developers can integrate billions of panoramas into their projects. We’ll also show how anyone can quickly publish imagery of places they care about, then easily access them via our APIs and viewers. This session is relevant to developers creating experiences that include location and imagery.”
Also scheduled is a Maps for good: Saving trees and saving lives with petapixel-scale computing session on Thursday from 6 p.m. to 6:45 p.m. ET, which will also be live-streamed. The session will cover the new Google Earth Engine technology and experimental API for massively-parallel geospatial analysis on daily-updating global data sets such as Landsat satellite imagery, wrote Marks. “Scientists and other domain experts are developing new EE-powered applications which map, measure and monitor our changing planet in unprecedented detail, for the benefit of people and the environment.” Uses for this technology include tracking and reducing global deforestation; mapping and mitigating the risks of earthquakes and extreme weather events such as floods and drought; and even creating new kinds of geo-visualizations of what is happening on Earth, he wrote.
Another live-streamed session, Redesigning Google Maps, will be held Thursday from 7 p.m. to 7:45 p.m., and will delve into the challenges of how Google works to redesign a product that is used regularly by 1 billion people. “The Google Maps team recently launched their biggest redesign since the product was introduced 8 years ago,” wrote Marks. “The lead designers will take you through the journey, illustrating three lessons learned that can apply to any design and product development process.”
Also on Thursday, Google will present a session about How 20% engineers built Santa Tracker, the fun seasonal app that lets children and adults track Santa in 34 languages as he delivers gifts for Christmas around the world. The session is scheduled from 5 p.m. to 5:45 p.m. ET, but will not be live-streamed. “The project’s technical leads go behind the scenes to provide insight into the challenges of building a cohesive Google developer platform experience across mobile/desktop Web, Android, Chromecast, Maps and Search, all powered by a Go AppEngine backend,” wrote Marks.
All of the sessions at Google I/O will be available after the conference on YouTube in the Google Developers Channel.
Google I/O 2014 Features Maps Sessions, Innovations
Google recently produced a video to show Maps developers how they can add Maps and Street View services to their mobile apps. The video shows how developers can incorporate features that can delight their users using the Google Maps Mobile APIs, along with their related features.
Kicking off today, the annual two-day Google I/O developers conference includes a full schedule of events, announcements, seminars, training sessions and much more to help Google developers add to their skills and product-building tool boxes.
The theme for this year’s I/O conference is all about helping developers design, develop and distribute their applications and innovations using Google tools and resources, through a deep list of intriguing sessions, many of which can be viewed remotely via live webcasts.
Notable speakers at this year’s I/O event include Ray Kurzweil, Regina Dugan, Peter Norvig and a panel of robotics experts hosted by Women Techmakers.
At the 2013 Google I/O event, Google unveiled its first-ever Google Play music subscription service that allows users to access all the music in Google’s collection on the fly and add it to their personal collections. Also announced were Google Play game saving and sharing services, new APIs for Android that allow developers to create apps that can be restricted to specific locations, and tools that will help developers improve the sales and marketing of their apps for Android.
In 2012, Google I/O was the stuff of legend, featuring the fanfare-filled introduction of Google Glass. Parachutists from an airship wore Google Glass headsets and landed on the Moscone West rooftop and rappelled, bicycled and ran into the conference to the cheers of thousands in order to give the wearable computers to Google co-founder Sergey Brin—who was already wearing one himself.