Google I/O starts tomorrow, and as always, Google Maps is a big part of the show. The team has been working hard to give developers a great experience. We’re looking forward to seeing you there, or your comments online on our videos. 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!
We’ve already released one video (embedded below). Watch the I/O Bytes 2014 channel for more to come. Also in this post is a tantalizing glimpse into four of our I/O sessions.
Video
Map Up your Apps!
with Megan Boundey
Interested in adding Google Maps to your mobile apps but needing inspiration? Did you know that you can now add Street View to your apps too? See how incorporating maps into your app can delight your users! We'll show you some exciting uses of the Google Maps Mobile APIs and describe the functionality available in the APIs as we go.
Sessions
The first three sessions are available by livestream, and all sessions will be available on YouTube in the Google Developers Channel after I/O.
Google Maps is creating the world's most comprehensive geolocated photo library through Street View. 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. 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.
with Rebecca Moore
Satellites have been systematically collecting imagery of our changing planet for more than 40 years, yet until recently this treasure trove of “big data” has not been online and available for high-performance data mining. This session will cover the new Google Earth Engine technology and experimental API for massively-parallel geospatial analysis on daily-updating global datasets such as Landsat satellite imagery. 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. Applications 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 such as the 2014 Webby award-winning “Timelapse” - a zoomable, browsable HTML5 video animation of the entire Earth from 1984-2012, built from nearly a petabyte of Landsat data. These early results merely hint at what’s now possible.
How do you redesign a product used by a billion people? The Google Maps team recently launched their biggest redesign since the product was introduced 8 years ago. The lead designers will take you through the journey, illustrating three lessons learned that can apply to any design and product development process.
Built on Google’s developer platform, Santa Tracker lets millions of children and adults track Santa in 34 languages as he delivers presents across the world. 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.