DANIEL SIEBERG: Hi there, I'm Daniel Sieberg, as we continue
with day two of I/O Live.
We find ourselves in the Google Maps sandbox.
And I am joined right now by Mike from Envista.
How are you, Mike?
Good to see you.
So talk to me a little bit about how you tapped into the
Google Maps API.
Your overlaying a lot of really civic information with
regards to, say, city planning, or construction.
Give me an overview of what Envista's all
about first of all.
MIKE WALSH: Sure.
Envista is about putting business data for both our
municipalities and utilities onto a geolocated map.
In this case, we've use Maps Engine underneath to take some
of their static data, including pipeline
information, and things like that, and overlay dynamic
information.
As you can see, our project we actually highlighted brings up
both the project information and the contractors that are
working on it.
So the unified collection of business data and geolocated
data allows us to share it between utilities,
municipalities, different departments, different
audiences, including the public, eventually.
DANIEL SIEBERG: And what is this hoping
to solve, in a sense?
I mean, previous to this, or if a city planner didn't have
access to this information, what might happen?
Confusion between different groups?
MIKE WALSH: Yeah, the biggest thing we find is that data's
spread out across different organizations
and different systems.
This platform, the combination of Maps Engine and our own
tool set allows us to provide the services to bring that
information together.
We talk about collaboration around geolocated assets.
But it really comes down to being able to share the
information between the people who need it, and in the end,
try and solve some problems, like who's working on which
project where?
When's it going on?
And what's it going to impact?
DANIEL SIEBERG: Can you give us a little bit of a closer
view of what we're looking at on the screen here?
MIKE WALSH: Sure.
If we look at here, we have the straight, solid lines here
represents different projects, by a particular gas
company in this case.
DANIEL SIEBERG: OK, right in here?
MIKE WALSH: Over here?
The big area here is actually transmission lines.
And that buffer zone is places where they have to be aware
that if there's a facility, like a hospital or a school,
that needs to be evacuated, they need to have coordination
with the first responders in a plan to get people out of
there during an evacuation.
So that information together allows them to do some
planning when they have a project.
You know, what are we going to impact when
we go into the ground?
So that type of information is what's on the map.
But they also have a lot of information in this case.
Project information coming from the work management
system is represented down here, as well
as the contact list.
As I said, which subcontractors are actually
working on this, and who needs access to see the information
for this particular project.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Walk me through what the development
process was like for you guys.
Any learnings you had along the way, something you want to
share with other developers?
Yeah, I think the big thing is we saw Maps Engine back this
time last year at I/O, and discovered that because it
does such a good job of getting the base map and our
custom data represented in the map and with great
performance, regardless of scale, it was a great starting
point for us.
So we started there.
And then on the browser side, we actually used the Maps API
to do some-- as I said, the dynamic drawing on top gets us
access to the information to do the coordination.
So when we click on a feature here, for instance, we can get
to the same information on the business side.
So the ability to use both the backend server services by
Maps Engine, and on the client side and the browser allows us
to put together some pretty powerful tools for our
application.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Where has been adopted so far?
I know you've got some use cases listed on your website.
But--
MIKE WALSH: Yeah, we just started.
We have a handful of utilities that have agreed to start
working with the platform for us.
We also have a number of cities that
started working it.
And because it's relatively new, we've had a lot of
encouraging feedback about the ability to bring different
parts together.
So we expect to have a lot of good success in the second
half of it.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Cool.
Thank you so much for giving insight to this, Mike.
Really appreciate it.
All the best.
MIKE WALSH: Thank you.
DANIEL SIEBERG: We continue our tour in the Google Maps
sandbox with Ben from this little known school, Harvard,
I think you called it.
Harvard University.
And a fascinating project that you've been working on called
the Harvard WorldMap.
Tell me a little bit about it from some a high level
overview, first of all.
Explain to people what it's all about.
BEN LEWIS: Sure.
So the vision behind WorldMap is, what if everybody in the
world could upload big, geospatial data to the cloud,
analyze it, overlay it.
control access to it, and collaborate around it, such
that we can generate new knowledge?
So why would Harvard want to open something like this up to
the entire world to upload data to?
Well, it turns out that most of the best data in the world
isn't actually at Harvard.
So build a great platform, and people come and use it.
And everybody will win, is sort of basically the idea.
DANIEL SIEBERG: OK, fantastic.
Well, let's just see an example.
This is the actual WorldMap site, first of all.
So people can actually upload their own mapping data, if
they'd like, to their geospatial data?
BEN LEWIS: Right.
So anybody can come in here, create a map, and be brought
into a blank template, start adding data layers in about
five different ways, uploading data from the hard drive,
creating layers and digitizing online, uploading scanned
maps, and georeferencing them online using Map Warper.
This was developed by a company called Entropy Free.
It's an open source online georeferencing platform.
DANIEL SIEBERG: And then you've got an example, if you
can pull up the Africa map.
This is a researcher at Harvard who worked on this
particular project?
BEN LEWIS: Yes.
So this was developed by a Professor named Suzanne Blier.
And she uses this to gather together in one place all of
the valuable map data sets on Africa.
He's got hundreds of data layers here, from ethnicity to
social conflict, health, historic mapping,
transatlantic slave trade.
This is ethnographic mapping for the continent.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Using Google Maps API.
BEN LEWIS: Google Maps API is behind all of this.
So down at the bottom here, you'll see one has a choice of
lots of different Google Map bases.
DANIEL SIEBERG: And you can pick and choose which filters
you'd like two render on the map.
You can zoom in to different regions.
BEN LEWIS: Right.
So all of these can be styled.
There's a sophisticated styling interface here.
You can overlay one with another.
So this is ethnicities now overlaid
upon population density.
And we could zoom in and out.
And this goes down to a very fine level of detail.
DANIEL SIEBERG: That's fascinating stuff.
Now, let's just move on to maybe the Twitter health
trends that you were talking about earlier.
BEN LEWIS: So AfricaMap Map is sort of a typical mapping
application that somebody's built from scratch without
having to be a developer.
This is kind of the future direction of WorldMap.
This is a platform that's being called Geops.
It was developed by Todd Mostak--
who's a researcher at Harvard--
together with us.
This is about big data, big geospatial data on the web.
It uses a couple of GPUs to make possible on the fly
queries and heatmap generation for 125 million tweets.
So those are the tweets themselves.
DANIEL SIEBERG: So you can see them
represented on the map there.
BEN LEWIS: Do you mind if I do one query here?
DANIEL SIEBERG: Sure.
BEN LEWIS: So let's try, tornado.
DANIEL SIEBERG: So these are people tweeting about a
particular event.
BEN LEWIS: Exactly.
References, say, to tornadoes.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Well, that's really cool stuff.
So then if people want to check this out,
where can they go?
BEN LEWIS: This isn't live, yet.
DANIEL SIEBERG: But the original stuff we talked
about, worldmap.harvard.edu?
BEN LEWIS: Everything else is live.
Yeah, this will be live within a month.
DANIEL SIEBERG: So worldmap.harvard.edu, though,
is the original site?
BEN LEWIS: Worldmap.harvard.edu.
DANIEL SIEBERG: OK, great.
Thank you so much.
BEN LEWIS: Thank you.
DANIEL SIEBERG: All right, we're joined now by Steve, who
may be familiar to many folks.
Formerly with Reddit, now a co-founder and CTO within
Hipmunk, an increasingly popular travel app for folks,
and a travel site where you can book flights and hotels.
But today, we are, of course, going to focus on Google Maps,
and how you tie that in with people's hotel booking.
So walk me through what we're looking at here.
STEVE HUFFMAN: OK, sure.
So this is our main map display.
And so what we have here is a search that we did in San
Francisco for a weekend or two from now.
As you see, it's dominated by the map, because we felt that
knowing where you're saying is probably the most important
thing-- especially if you've never been to a city before--
just kind of intuitively seeing the geography, the lay
of the land.
So we represent the hotels as dots on this grid here.
And the reason we lay things out on the grid is if we had
showed every hotel in the city, it would just be a big
splotch of dots.
DANIEL SIEBERG: And you wouldn't get the relations to
where everything else is, right?
STEVE HUFFMAN: You know, what's beneficial about the
splotch of dots is that you can see kind of where big
streets are.
But on Hipmunk, we've kind of split the difference.
And you can see Lombard Street here is a popular
neighborhood, and Fisherman's Wharf.
And then here, the Tenderloin, or as we would describe it to
tourists, the hotel district.
And that gives us a nice feel.
And then we do is we basically take the top 10 hotels as
sorted by Ecstasy, and we highlight those.
So those are the hotels we think you should stay on,
basically based on the area you're looking at, the price
of those hotels, the quality and review scores.
DANIEL SIEBERG: And for people who know Hipmunk, that's a
reference to the Agony and Ecstasy rankings.
STEVE HUFFMAN: Right.
When you do a flight search, we sort by Agony.
And a hotel search is Ecstasy.
DANIEL SIEBERG: OK.
So then these dots here, the other ones are represented as
different colors.
That's all tied in to this ranking.
STEVE HUFFMAN: So we've basically
got three price buckets.
The green are the cheapest hotels, the red are the most
expensive, and the blue are the average ones.
Now, you can filter these down, if you just want to see
cheap hotels, for example.
By default, we just show everything.
And we let the Ecstasy sort do the rest.
Now, what's cool about these buckets is it varies by city.
What's cheap in San Francisco is
nonexistent in New York City.
And the town i grew in Virginia, you know, $140 is
probably the most expensive hotel you're going to find.
So we try to give you a sense, though, of what the value is.
Are you paying the market rate or not, effectively.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Cool.
Any offerings to other developers on the experience
you went through, using the Maps API?
STEVE HUFFMAN: Sure.
There's something about the Maps API that are really,
really nice.
I mean, obviously, the maps themselves work.
You get all this dragging and zooming and all
that stuff for free.
One of the cool features we added is heatmaps.
So we computed heatmaps of all the hot
places to be in a city.
Right now, I have the food heatmap turned on.
And it's actually really cool.
We just computed these tiles, name them
with a special format.
And then Google Maps does the rest, lays them out, loads
them, all the different zoom levels.
It's actually really neat.
And we got the most, like, bang out of that feature for
developer hours, ever.
It was actually really simple to do.
But it looks really, really awesome.
And that's really cool.
There's some other stuff we do.
Actually, I'll turn on my calendar here.
This integrates with my Google Calendar, which is another
Google API.
And then I can show, in the city, where I need to be.
So if you're a business traveler and you've got things
do, you can actually see.
DANIEL SIEBERG: So you could almost know if you need to
walk. or you could just walk somewhere.
STEVE HUFFMAN: Exactly.
And if I click the sort by distance here, I can choose
one of events.
And it'll show me just hotels near that event.
Or it'll take the hotels near that event, and then sort them
by Ecstasy.
DANIEL SIEBERG: That's fantastic.
All right.
Well, Steve, thank you so much.
Full disclosure, I used Hipmunk to find my way here
from New York.
So thank you so much for that demo.
Appreciate it.
And we finish up our tour in the Google Maps sandbox with
Peter, who is a Product Manager with Google Earth.
And in a sense, we are going to get our own personal
helicopter tour here, right?
PETER BIRCH: Absolutely.
So we're really excited.
Yesterday, here at I/O, we announced the launch of this
new 3D imagery technology in Google
Earth for Android devices.
And behind us, here, we have a demonstration showing what
some of this imagery actually looks like in what we call our
Liquid Galaxy, which is this great way to view this data.
But what's going on here is that Google Earth has been
around for a long time.
We've been doing 3D for years.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Right, people are already familiar with 3D
buildings, maybe the 3D Warehouse or something.
But now--
PETER BIRCH: Absolutely.
So now what we really realized was that we needed to step it
up a notch, right?
We really needed to increase the scale, the consistency,
and the coverage of the 3D buildings.
And we just really needed to figure out how to notch it up.
And so what we're doing is we have this new 3D imagery,
where we're actually using aerial imagery from planes,
where they shoot four different angles.
DANIEL SIEBERG: It's very specific patterns that they
have to fly to gather all of this?
PETER BIRCH: Exactly.
So we shoot, basically, forwards, back, left, right,
and then straight down.
So there's a fifth shot that's straight down.
And then from that, we're able to
automatically generate 3D data.
So the things you're looking at here is all auto generated
using something called stereophotogrammetry, where
we're actually using the different images to extract
the 3D data.
And then we actually take that and we texture it, or we sort
of color of the geometry with the actual photos.
DANIEL SIEBERG: I almost think of as like digital sculpting,
or something.
But it's pretty amazing looking.
PETER BIRCH: Yeah, I mean, it's phenomenal how far the
technology has gone, and being able to have the resources of
not only the talented engineers at Google, but also
the infrastructure that we have that allows us to build
3D models at this scale automatically.
DANIEL SIEBERG: All right.
Now, we're seeing this on bigger screens, thanks to
Liquid Galaxy.
But in your hand, you've got a tablet.
And so folks can check this out in a mobile way, both for
tablets and phones as well.
PETER BIRCH: Absolutely.
And what I have right here, this is a
Motorola XOOM tablet.
And I don't know if your viewers will get
the best view this.
So the best way for people to check this out is to download
it onto your Android device, whether it's
a phone or a tablet.
It's supported on multicore phones.
So for example, the great Galaxy Nexus, as well as a
Samsung Galaxy 2, and the new 3, and a bunch of other
devices, as well as, obviously, the new Nexus 7,
which we just released.
Works fantastic on that as well.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Coming soon to iOS, if people are curious.
PETER BIRCH: And it is coming soon to iOS as well.
So here you can see, I'm actually
going through San Francisco.
We've launched about a dozen or so cities and metro areas,
including San Francisco, LA, Portland, Rome, Tampa.
DANIEL SIEBERG: And many more to come, I assume.
PETER BIRCH: Many more to come.
We got Charlotte, we've got a bunch more.
And we've stated that we're going to have the communities
of over 300 million people covered by
the end of this year.
And we're going to just keep going from there.
So we're really excited about being able to bring this kind
of 3D technology to people around the world.
DANIEL SIEBERG: And I'm sure lots of folks will look
forward to a desktop version at some point.
PETER BIRCH: Coming soon as well.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Coming soon, sure.
PETER BIRCH: Later this year.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Peter, thank you so much for this tour.
We're going to land our helicopter now here in the
Google Maps sandbox.
Stay tuned for lots more here on I/O Live.