Google Shows New Maps Technology

Google has demonstrated new mapping technologies in an bid to reassert its location as a marketplace leader.

While it boasts a billion users, Google Maps has not long ago seen defections by a few key developers and partners.

Reports indicate Apple might desert Google Maps next week at its annual developer conference.

They indicate Apple might publicize its own mapping focus to reinstate Google Maps on its smartphones and tablets.

To negate any disastrous publicity, Google management team hold a media eventuality on Wednesday in San Francisco to preview new mapping features and wail a decade of achievements in digital mapping, inclusive its use of satellite, aerial and street-level views.

Among the stand-out features were 3D enhancements to Google Earth, a unstable device for receiving "street view" breathtaking photos and offline access to Google Maps on Android phones.

"It's ample more than anticipating a way home," mentioned Brian McClendon, clamp boss of engineering for Google Maps.

Google Imagery, the company's many complex 3D digest to date, creates use of an programmed routine to produce really minute models from 45-degree aerial photos. Google has obviously consecrated a navy of planes to do the job. The finish outcome is zoomable, three-dimensional cityscapes, total with tip and side turn views of buildings, streets and landscaping.

Fly-over views of San Francisco's Civic Center, City Hall, ATT Ballpark and on the water were shown during Wednesday's protest .

"We are perplexing to emanate illusion here," mentioned Peter Birch, module executive for Google Maps, who compared the gift to "Superman wings."

"It's roughly as if you are in a personal helicopter hovering over the city," he said.

The underline will be existing on both Android and iOs gadgets in a matter of weeks, Mr Birch told the BBC.

He would not be drawn on the probability of a obstacle with Apple if Google Maps is de-bundled from Apple's smartphones and tablets: "I can't really think on what the rumours might be... Apple is a great associate of ours.

"We have a lot wonderful applications already on the platform. Google Earth is a of the tip applications, and we've been on Apple gadgets given 2008," he said.

"It's a really wonderful showcase is to stage and we're really vehement to be gift new features."

Google aims to bring the new 3D imagery to desktops after that this year.

By the finish of the year, the California-based firm anticipates 300 million people will be able to look at their communities using this technology. The primary civil areas were not specified, but Mr Birch indicated both American and general cities would be segment of the primary rollout.

Should Apple obviously deprive Google Maps from its mobile screens after that this year, as the Wall Street Journal first reported, experts say it would be a set upon against the search giant.

"It's a disastrous for Google, but it's not going to have a large income impact, and it might in fact be the cause of them the emanate a more absolute mapping focus that people can download from the iTunes store if Apple doesn't try to inhibit it," mentioned Greg Sterling, a long-time Google viewer and contributing editor at Search Engine Land.

"It's a stage battle," according to Di-Ann Eisnor, a amicable mapping consultant and clamp boss of Waze, a commuter apparatus that relies on real-time crowdsourced information from its 18.5 million users to surprise its mobile mapping application.

But the fight goes over Android contra iOs.

Google combined a recoil of sorts when it began charging for blurb use of its API final autumn. Developers and publishers similar to Foursquare, the location-based, mobile check-in app with 20 million users, opted to go with the giveaway and volunteer-driven OpenStreetMap, the world's largest crowdsourced atlas, as its baseline mapping technology, instead of Google Maps. So did the mobile chronicle of Wikipedia.

With 600,000 purebred users, OpenStreetMap moreover has the encouragement of Microsoft. As more large players beginning working on OpenStreetMap, Ms Eisnor and others say it could be other "viable alternative" to Android and iOs.

John Jackson, a technology researcher with CCS Insight in Boston agrees with the belief of stage wars, mission it "an epic fighting is to future of mobile computing".

Between Apple, Google and Microsoft, "we might finish up with 3 centres of gravity", he told the BBC.