SaaS Newswire via bizjournals.com – Search and advertising giant Google Inc. turned cab drivers into cartographers in the Indian city of Bangalore, and has been asking users of its maps to help with driving directions and other data in booming and sometimes poorly planned cities.
Frequent construction and sometimes Kafkaesque changes in major routes and one way streets make driving around many Indian cities much more difficult than in the United States. Online maps of U.S. cities don’t change that often, but Vinay Goel, Google’s head of products in India, told a news conference in Hyderabad that maps of India’s booming cities are often out of date the moment they’re finished.
So the company (NASDAQ: GOOG) seeks help from users on the roads for much more frequent updates and other services that alert travelers to changes in public transit or road access.
In Bangalore, for example, Google got help from taxi drivers to map the city. Google’s staff in the city have regular taxi drivers they rely on, and they recruited them to upgrade maps during their idle hours of the day, according to a report in the Times of India.
Google also compiled data from users to map the Pakistani city of Lahore in three days, according to local news reports.
Tags: cartographers, google maps, google uses cabbies, map india's cities
No comments:
Post a Comment