Your favorite Marks Mirchandani and Mandel are back hosting this week to touch base with Angela Yu about recent updates in Google Maps. As Angela describes Google Maps at a high level, it is your window into the real world, with coverage of Earth’s land and oceans. Google works hard to keep that information updated with satellite pictures, street view Google vehicles, and even backpacks for hikers to record hard to reach areas.

The Google Maps API makes it easy for developers to use Maps data in their own projects. It can be used for something as simple as showing location to something more complicated, for example showing the user specific things around them to help them make decisions. Game developers can create rich experiences by building real-world gaming situations with Maps and augmented reality. Using the Places API can display parks, government buildings, and other interesting places beyond streets. And the Routes API can expand the user experience by providing directions, tracking drivers in real time, etc. Maps and Google Cloud together work well with BigQuery to search huge amounts of data and visualize them on a map.

In the future, Angela is particularly excited about how ridesharing apps will continue to use Maps and Routes to optimize their businesses. She also looks forward to more augmented reality projects beyond gaming, where data, directions, and more are overlaid on the physical world.

Angela Yu

Angela Yu is a developer advocate for Google Maps Platform. Throughout her career, she has geeked out on voice recognition, mobile app development, and IoT. You can find her trapped in escape rooms or on Twitter.

Cool things of the week

• Google to acquire Looker blog
• New Translate API capabilities can help localization experts and global enterprises blog
• Google Cloud networking in depth: Cloud CDN blog
• Save money by stopping and starting Compute Engine instances on schedule blog
• An update on Sunday’s service disruption blog

Interview

• Google Maps Platform site blog docs
• Google Maps Places site
• Google Maps Routes site
• Google Maps Treks site
• Visualizing data from Firebase on a Google Map site
• Google Maps Platform Codelabs site
• BigQuery site
• BigQuery Public Datasets docs
• Deck.GL site
• Google Maps SDK for Android Beta site
• Popular Antipodes on Google Maps site
• The True Size of countries site
• Google Maps on Github site
• Google Maps Client Libraries site
• StreetView Gallery site
• Earth Engine site
• xkcd: Map Projections site
• Beautiful data visualizations using deck.gl on Google Maps demo and docs

Question of the week

What is helm, and how do I use it?

• GCP Podcast Episode 50: Helm with Michelle Noorali and Matthew Butcher podcast

  • Kubernetes Podcast podcast and twitter
  • Kuberenetes twitter

Where can you find us next?

Angela will be at the Chrome Dev Summit.

Mark Man will be at Tokyo Next.

Mark Mirch will be customer filming for Stack Chat in NYC.

Sound Effect Attribution

• “Striking a Match” by Nebulousflynn of Freesound.org
• “Bad Beep” by RICHERIandTV of Freesound.org
• “Correct” by Tristan_Lohengrin of Freesound.org
• “Spaceship Atmosphere 02” by RICHERIandTV of Freesound.org
• “At the jazz concert Crowd laugh.wav” by Ftom_woysky of Freesound.org