[MUSIC PLAYING]
LAURENCE MORONEY: Hi, everybody, and welcome to Coffee
With a Googler.
Today, I'm in Sydney, Australia, in a music room in the Google
office to chat with Casey Whitelaw, who is an engineering
director for Google Maps.
Welcome, Casey.
Thanks for being on the show.
CASEY WHITELAW: Thanks a lot.
It's a pleasure to be here.
LAURENCE MORONEY: So tell us what
is it that you do as an engineering director.
CASEY WHITELAW: The teams that I work
with build Google Maps APIs.
So this means, basically, if you see a Google map that's
not inside the Google Maps app, then
that's probably served through one of the APIs that we build.
LAURENCE MORONEY: So there's, like, lots of geo-type data
that gets fed into lots of different sources.
And that's what you're building.
CASEY WHITELAW: Yeah, that's right.
So the most obvious examples that you'll see, on the web
we have the web Maps API.
So you can put a map in your web page.
And it's not just a map, of course,
but it's drawing lines on that map, and directions,
and Street View.
And basically, almost everything that's in Google Maps itself,
you can put inside your own web pages
and use to present your own information.
LAURENCE MORONEY: OK, cool.
CASEY WHITELAW: And you can take all of that, the same things
that you can do with web Maps API, and do that on Android
through Android MapView.
And also in iOS, through iOS Maps SDK.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Cool.
Now, in working all this, you must have some favorites.
CASEY WHITELAW: There's so many APIs.
Right?
I mean, we haven't even mentioned all of them yet.
Like, I mentioned web and Android and iOS.
Everything that you get through all of those, and even
some more things again, you can get through web services.
And so this means that you can use them directly with your web
server, or on a client that you need to customize more.
LAURENCE MORONEY: OK.
CASEY WHITELAW: So the range is really huge.
I think it's something you'll see if you go to the dev site,
as well.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Right.
CASEY WHITELAW: Something which often strikes people
as being very simple, that is actually, I think,
fascinatingly complex is the Directions API.
LAURENCE MORONEY: OK.
CASEY WHITELAW: So on the surface of it,
you're just moving.
You want to know how long it's going to take you,
or how you should get from point A to point B.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Right.
CASEY WHITELAW: And so that seems like a pretty simple API.
Right?
I'm going to give you a source, I'm
going to give you a destination.
You tell me how it is that I'm going
to go from one to the other.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Right.
CASEY WHITELAW: But just like in Google Maps,
this gets quite complicated.
The things that you can do with this are quite complex, too.
So something that most people don't realize
is that we use live traffic data.
So that the ETAs that you're getting
and the directions that we're giving you
aren't the same, depending on exactly when
it is that you request for.
So you can request a specific time of day,
for example, and get a travel time
that actually reflects that.
LAURENCE MORONEY: I love planning ahead.
Like, when I have to go to the airport tomorrow,
I need to know now when I would be leaving,
and that kind of stuff.
So I can actually feed in, I'm going to the airport tomorrow
at this time.
What's the traffic going to be like?
CASEY WHITELAW: And if you're a developer,
and you're developing an application for people
to get to an airport, you can actually do that.
Right?
You can give them directions if you know when they're
going to need to be traveling.
You can actually give them directions and travel time,
together with showing that on the Google Map.
That's for the time that you know that they have to travel.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Exactly.
CASEY WHITELAW: And then that's going to be synced to it.
So I think that's really cool.
LAURENCE MORONEY: And it's not just driving, right?
There's also things like public transport and walking.
CASEY WHITELAW: Public transport, and walking,
and cycling.
So most of what you can do on Google Maps,
you can do through the API as well.
So that's one aspect of it being richer than just
saying from here to there.
The multiple modes, and the using traffic.
Including predicted traffic, by the way.
So if you said, for sometime in the future,
we'll use our models to try and work out our best
estimate of the traffic.
And you can also do things like multi-waypoint optimization.
So you can, if you know that you have
to visit many different locations, like maybe--
LAURENCE MORONEY: Stop for a coffee on the way?
CASEY WHITELAW: Exactly.
It's like, come to Google, have a coffee with me.
Then head out into the city, and so forth, but you're
not sure exactly what the best order is
in which to do those things.
You can actually just send a set of waypoints,
and say, optimize.
And then we're going to do the traveling salesman
problem for you.
Because we're Google, and that's the kind of problem
we like solving.
And we'll do a traveling salesman problem for you,
and actually optimize your route,
so that you've got the most efficient path through those.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Pretty cool.
CASEY WHITELAW: Yeah, really cool.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Right.
So that efficient path is based on traffic conditions,
and those type of--
CASEY WHITELAW: Yeah, exactly.
And optimizes for travel time, not just time, not just
distance, for example.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Now, not that long ago, apps for geo and apps
for maps on your phone used to be like a map.
Here's A, and here's B, and here's how you get there,
but without all that kind of location intelligence.
But now we're just seeing more and more innovation, more
and more cool things happening.
What cool apps have you seen that have excited you,
or inspired you?
CASEY WHITELAW: Yeah, in the location space.
So I saw one recently, which was a great, kind of cute use
of location information, which isn't
in itself very sophisticated.
But I think it's a great example of, I think,
the democratization, really, of location information.
So the app that I saw is called platypusSPOT.
LAURENCE MORONEY: platypusSPOT?
CASEY WHITELAW: platypusSPOT.
LAURENCE MORONEY: OK.
CASEY WHITELAW: And so, it's pretty Australian-focused.
You know, so the international readers out there, viewers
out there--
so platypuses are a relatively rare creature here
in Australia, and there's plenty of people
who are interested in finding them,
and then sharing when they do.
So it's basically Instagram for--
LAURENCE MORONEY: For platypuses.
CASEY WHITELAW: And so what you do is,
you're out on a bushwalk.
Or maybe you're even in the city or something,
at the Yarra River in Melbourne, and you see a platypus.
And you can tag it.
You say, this is where I am.
Here's my photo of the platypus, if you're lucky enough
to take a photo of one.
And that all gets logged.
So if you then want to see a platypus,
you can see where have platypuses
been sighted recently, so I can go and find one.
But also, it's building this database
behind the scenes, which scientists can
use for other things as well.
So I've heard-- I'm no expert in this--
that platypus is related to water quality.
So platypus presence is related to water quality in rivers.
So imagine--
LAURENCE MORONEY: OK.
CASEY WHITELAW: You can build up some kind of location
intelligence information from--
LAURENCE MORONEY: Interesting.
CASEY WHITELAW: --from these sightings.
LAURENCE MORONEY: So they like clean water.
So if you see them, you know that's where
this-- that's cool.
CASEY WHITELAW: Yeah.
LAURENCE MORONEY: So, platypus metadata.
CASEY WHITELAW: And the thing is, they would never--
if you didn't have a map that you could use easily--
and if you wind back 10 years, pre-Google Maps,
because the Maps API happened really early
on in the development of Google Maps, too--
if you wind back the clock, and there is no easy way
to show things on a map on your own site,
you have no option for how to do this.
So like, you can get people to enter an address.
Where were you standing when this happened?
And so the fact that--
LAURENCE MORONEY: On a tiny keyboard.
CASEY WHITELAW: Exactly.
Well, I guess in those days, you probably
would have had to carry your computer around with you,
or wait 'till you got back.
LAURENCE MORONEY: I had one of those 10-pound laptops.
CASEY WHITELAW: Yeah.
And so, now you have a map that you can use
very easily inside your app.
Location information from your phone,
which is pretty accurate basically
everywhere in the world, a camera, and some web
service that's collating all of this for you.
It's just amazing.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Isn't it incredible?
The amount of intelligence and data that's there, that--
but then, how people are turning that into innovation,
and building really cool apps.
Like the platypusSPOT.
CASEY WHITELAW: Yeah.
And the other thing I'm seeing, everyone's
seeing a lot at the moment, is location-based games.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Yes.
CASEY WHITELAW: Obviously, there's
Pokemon GO, which has been a huge hit everywhere.
And you can see that building on top
of a model of the real world.
So there's a lot more that I expect we'll see in the future.
We had a play-around with this--
I'm sure that you know about this-- in Santa Tracker
last year.
So we had our own location-based game
in there, which was a lot of fun to put together
on top of Google Maps.
So that was a really great first test for us, building that.
LAURENCE MORONEY: And that whole concept
blew my mind, because to me all of the innovation in gaming
was going into power.
You know, better and better GPUs, higher frame
rate, higher resolution.
And then suddenly, out of the blue,
some games came out that changed the paradigm completely.
And it was getting you off the sofa,
and going out and running around in the real world.
And that's incredible.
CASEY WHITELAW: Yeah.
I think it just shows you what you can do when you have access
to different kinds of data.
You can build different experiences around it
than you could otherwise.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Right.
So, good APIs enable innovation.
CASEY WHITELAW: Yeah, and things--
if we go back to the platypusSPOT example,
this is never something-- as much as I love platypuses,
it's never something that we're going to build in Google Maps,
right?
Because we'd have to build a platypus tracker,
and then we'd probably turn it into a all things in the world
tracker by the time it became something
that was in Google Maps.
And so it's just not going to happen.
And so, if we were the only ones building on top of Google Maps,
then platypusSPOT wouldn't exist in the form that it is.
So it's great to have a platform that other people can
build on top of and make it part of their businesses.
LAURENCE MORONEY: I mean, who would
have thought that we would think of a platypus spotter, even?
Right?
But if there's somebody who's really passionate about them,
or somebody who's researching about them.
And this having an API allows them to build a tool
that they could share with us.
CASEY WHITELAW: And we don't need to think about it, either.
It doesn't need to be important to us
for it to exist in the world.
I think it's something, which is that there's a balance there.
We see a lot of people solving the same kinds of problems
over and over again, and using Maps.
To pick a very common online example, if you've got a store,
you probably want to point out to people where that store is.
And so that's something that, yes,
we don't need to know about your particular store
in order to make our Maps API.
But it's important for us to understand
that this is a use case that's important to people.
That many people are going to use Maps to build a store
finder, and so we should make that something
that's really easy to do.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Yup.
So if I'm a developer, and I want
to build a store finder for my store,
or I want to build the next platypusSPOT
or whatever it is type spotting app,
where should I get started?
What advice would you give me?
CASEY WHITELAW: So go to the dev site.
There's lots of documentation.
There's sample code.
There's even some complete applications that are on there.
You can get started really quickly.
I would just say, go check it out.
LAURENCE MORONEY: OK.
Download some source code and start hacking.
CASEY WHITELAW: Yeah that's it.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Sounds good.
And that's developers.google.com/maps,
right?
CASEY WHITELAW: You're the expert.
LAURENCE MORONEY: It's a beautiful thing.
Well, thank you so much, Casey.
It's been a lot of fun, and I'm going to go check
out that platypus app.
CASEY WHITELAW: Thank you, Laurence.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Thanks, everybody,
for watching Coffee With a Googler.
If you've got any questions for me,
or if you have any questions for Casey,
just please leave them in the comments below.
And don't forget to hit that subscribe button.
Thank you.
So visit developers.google.com/maps
to learn more about all the things you can do to build
location intelligence, geo apps, Maps apps,
and all the great stuff that we've spoken about.
To learn more, you can also watch this series
called Geocasts, where we're walking through building better
maps and building better apps.
And if you want to learn more about Coffee With a Googler
and see more episodes, take a look at our playlist here.