Driving directions google maps professional#
Driving directions google maps windows#

“It’s all about the fight to keep the map accurate and to give it context. “The mapping war isn’t over, and it won’t ever be,” said Gale.

Driving directions google maps professional#

Nokia also acquired the largest maker of automotive-grade map data, Navteq, in 2007 and has been using it to build highly accurate maps which it sells to other companies, including Garmin, BMW and Amazon.īeyond the professional maps, there are also collaborative projects such Open Street Map creating free, editable maps of the world and relying on users to correct things that are wrong in much the same way as Wikipedia. Microsoft’s Bing Maps was one of the first to improve upon top-down aerial images, introducing a birds-eye view that allows browsers to see streets and buildings from a 45-degree angle.

Driving directions google maps windows#

It was a learning process for us, the whole idea of photography in a public space and what it means it was a big cultural shock and we were part of it.” And the competition?īing Maps is the default mapping app on Windows Phone. “People had put up with surveyors going out with range finders and survey equipment, but now cars with cameras were doing the work. “We were doing something that hadn’t been done before,” said Hanke. The service’s expansion into Europe, especially in Germany, also caused home owners to take issue with their property being captured and placed online for the world to see without their permission. In 2010 it was revealed that Street View cars had also been capturing information about private Wi-Fi networks as they roamed the streets of US and Europe, prompting a $7m fine from US authorities. Google Maps has since added turn-by-turn satellite navigation, Zagat restaurant ratings, traffic updates and expanded Street View to include Venetian canals and the Grand Canyon - yet progress has not always been smooth. “That was their idea, but it took a partnership with Stanford and Sebastian Blune to make it work.” “Larry and Sergey had toured around the Stanford campus with Larry taking photos out the window of a car with a dSLR camera to experiment with stitching them together,” said Hanke. Launched for select US cities in 2006, and rolled out to Europe, Japan and Australia in 2008, the service relied on building up pictures of every street in the city using a specially equipped camera mounted on a car. Street View has proved to be one of Google Map’s most controversial but popular features. He looked and he just said, ‘why don’t we do all of it?’” Street View was Larry and Sergey’s idea I went to show Sergey on the map all the major cities we wanted to acquire. “At the time satellite imagery was quite expensive to acquire and scarce because there weren’t that many satellites available.

Google’s co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, he said, thought that geospatial – data and information related to maps and location services - was a key element of Google’s organising the world’s information. “Our aim was to create one seamless, browsable map of the entire world – an Earth that you could browse,” John Hanke, co-founder of Keyhole and vice president of Google’s geospatial division until 2011 told the Guardian. Later in 2005 Google launched driving and public transport directions, but it wasn’t until the launch of satellite imagery that Hanke saw how committed Google was to the project. “It wasn’t the first out there, but the role of Google Maps in transforming digital maps, making them popular and bringing them from a tech niche into the public consciousness cannot be underplayed.” “Yahoo beat Google to web maps and MapQuest beat it to turn-by-turn directions, but people didn’t stand up and take notice until Google Maps came along,” said Gary Gale, the Ordnance Survey’s head of APIs. Google Maps launched in the US on 8 February 2005 and in the UK two months later, though by that time it wasn’t the first digital map of its kind: Yahoo had beaten Google to it with a redevelopment of its long-standing Yahoo Maps in 2004.