Google Maps made some key announcements, including making ‘Searching for Indian addresses‘ on Google Maps simpler; announcing ‘Plus Codes‘ and added ‘Voice Navigation‘ in six additional Indian languages.

Introducing Plus Codes

Google Maps has developed an open sourced solution – Plus Codes – which represents a simple and consistent addressing system that works across India and globally. This system is based on dividing the geographical surface of the Earth into tiny ’tiled areas’, attributing a unique code to each of them. This code simply comprises a ‘six-character + City’ format that can be generated, shared and searched by anyone – all that’s needed is Google Maps on a smartphone. The open source nature of Plus Codes means that applications that uses location services can easily incorporate it on their platforms for free.

To use a Plus Code, users need to simply enter it into the Search field on Google or Google Maps, mobile or desktop, which will instantly show a location. Plus Codes can be used for a wide variety of reasons including communicating the venue of a temporary event, guiding emergency services to afflicted locations, and providing an identifiable location for complicated addresses.

For more information on Plus Codes, you can visit plus.codes

Easily add a missing address to Google Maps

In another step aimed at facilitating accurate and easy searching on Maps, Google is now introducing ‘Add an Address‘ – a feature that enables users to contribute to the Maps experience from the Google Maps app. Similar to adding businesses, users can submit new or missing addresses through this feature, and Google will make sure the address is searchable in due course after verification. Moreover, users will also get Local Guides points for each valid submission.

Understanding addresses, especially in the Indian context [being so unique and varied] has always been a relentless pursuit for Google. Google is now making it simpler to search for addresses in India, with Smart Address Search. This is an innovative approach to providing the best estimate of the location of an address: when people aren’t aware of an exact address, they just don’t give up but try to refer other information such as a nearby landmark, business or a locality to get closer to the final destination. Smart Address Search helps doing exactly that: if Google Maps doesn’t understand the address precisely, it will try to use all the pieces of information in the address and provide options of landmarks and points of interest that the user can best identify with – exactly like a person would have.

From finding to getting there – now in six additional languages

Google today is adding voice navigation in six additional Indian languages: Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, and Malayalam. The company had launched navigation in Hindi three years ago.

Suren Ruhela, Director, Google Maps Next Billion Users, said

At Google Maps, our objective has always been about organizing all location-related information, and making it more accessible and relevant for Indian users. Address search is critical for delivering on this mission.

In India, we know how challenging it can be to reach a given residential address. They are unique in format, and vary across regions, localities, and use cases. While some addresses are well-defined by street names and house numbers that are easy to find, others can be long-winded and hard to locate. The other reality is that millions of people and places in India are hard to locate, especially those in remote areas. We are deeply committed to helping find solutions to these challenges

Krish Vitaldevara, Product Lead, Google Maps Next Billion Users

India continues to inspire us, and pushes us to re-imagine what Maps can do for people. And we are just getting started as we continue to build features and expand our partnerships to make the Google Maps experience more comprehensive, accurate, and reliable for our users.

“Where are you now?” and “What’s your ETA?” Whether you are heading to a party or meeting up for dinner, you probably hear questions like this pretty often from family and friends. Soon Google Maps users worldwide will be able to answer those questions in just a few taps, without ever leaving the app.

Google Maps has announced a new real-time location sharing feature which will be available for both Android and iOS users. Users will be able to share their real-time location with anyone and the people they share with will be able to see the location on Android, iPhone, mobile web, and desktop.

Whenever you want to let someone know where you are, just open the side menu or tap the blue dot that represents where you are. Tap “Share location” and then select who to share with and how long to share-and you’re done! You can share your real-time location with your Google contacts, or even share with friends and family by sending a link on your favorite messenger apps. When you are sharing your location, the people you have chosen to share with will see you on their map.

And you will see an icon above the compass on your own map reminding you that you are actively sharing your location. You can change your mind and stop sharing at any time-it’s entirely up to you.

Next time you are on your way or running late, you can share your real-time location and trip progress from navigation as well. During your next trip, tap the “More” button on the bottom on the navigation screen, and then tap “Share trip.” When you share your trip with people, they will see your expected arrival time and can follow your journey as you head towards your destination. Sharing automatically ends when you arrive.

Sanket Gupta, Product Manager, Google Maps, said

Location sharing on Google Maps is rolling worldwide over the coming week, and you will be able to quickly let your friends and family know where you are and when you’ll get where you are going. The answer to ‘where are you?’ is only a tap away.

KeyPoint Technologies, a global linguistics innovator enabling intelligent human communication beyond mobile devices, today announced the launch of Xploree. Xploree is industry’s first search and discovery platform that connects mobile users to the most relevant brands and services across search, messenger and other platforms without exiting the current conversation app.

Leveraging KPT’s expertise in multi-lingual capabilities, Xploree which is now available in English for Android device users, will support nearly 140 languages [global & indic] by December 2015.

KPT

Completing an entire cycle of innovation, Xploree has emerged as the only intelligent, user-initiated and hyper-contextual Search & Discovery platform in the mobile eco-system. It predicts user needs during chat conversations and guides them through their mobile journey across apps through relevant content, deals and services discovery.

Speaking about Xploree, Sumit Goswami, CEO of KeyPoint Technologies said

Mobile users today are looking for convenient, relevant and on the fly information while they are in between conversations and e-mails with their friends, family and at work. With expertise & experience to provide contextual search & brand discovery solutions to mobile eco-system players from the current one to 140 languages by end of 2015, we are best positioned to help businesses connect with their customers in real-time.

Built on our patent pending cross-app search and discovery platform, we are thrilled to launch Xploree that offers brands an opportunity to provide innovative content & deals to mobile users’ in a single hop without quitting their ongoing app conversations. Currently we are actively looking at India, South-East Asia and Middle East as our growth markets.

With Xploree, mobile phone users, without exiting the current conversation app, can instantly explore options for movies, fine dining, shopping etc. Brands through Xploree can connect with users in real-time to provide relevant services such as discount coupons, deals, one-hop search and add greater value to the conversation, thus taking consumer engagement from a contextual to a hyper-contextual realm.

Key Features of Xploree

  • Hyper-Contextual – Location, environment, user intent, past actions and more – relevant information, always in context.
  • Immediacy – Information, services and product purchases in your mobile moment and time of need in real-time.
  • Simplicity – Mobile search made simple with one tap – easy to find what exactly you want.

To view Xploree in action, please visit http://bit.ly/1LQKJqo

For Xploree updates please visit http://www.xploree.com/

Sokrati, India’s leading Ad technology and Analytics Company, was felicitated at the Google “India Premier SMB Partner Awards”. Out of the eighteen Google partner contenders, Sokrati has been announced as the winner in the ‘Best Quality Accounts’ & ‘Largest increase in Absolute Revenue [Ad Spends]’.

The SMB Partner programme by Google, provides small businesses with the most effective AdWords advertising solutions. Sokrati won the award for ‘Best? Quality Accounts’ consecutively for the second time.

Sokrati

 

Delighted at the felicitation, Santosh Gannavarapu, SMB Head, Sokrati said

Winning two major awards from Google is a validation of our product as premium ad technology in India.

We are excited to extend our award winning platform to the SMB space and grow their business multi-fold by getting them qualified & exclusive leads through online traffic. We gear SMB’s to leave the worries of gaining more business to our proprietary platform & encourage them to focus on the nuts and bolts of their trade instead.

Also commenting on this, Ashish Mehta, CEO, Sokrati said

We are very excited to see our association with Google growing manifold with Sokrati as one their largest partners within 5 years of operations. These awards further validate our resolve to provide our clients with the best possible efficiencies from their marketing spends. Our investments in technology & analytics platform has been instrumental in delivering unparalleled value to our clients and we are eager to making 2015 our best year yet !!!

About Sokrati

The concept of Sokrati, India’s leading Ad technology and Analytics Company was founded in 2009 out of a desire to make digital marketing an intelligent exercise. Co-founded by three friends and former colleagues from Amazon.com, Ashish Mehta, Anubhav Sonthalia and Santosh Gannavarapu, Sokrati today, is Google’s largest preferred partner in India.

In 5 years’ time since its inception, Sokrati has fabricated proprietary algorithms to manage performance driven marketing spends on paid search, social and display networks. Sokrati services around 3,000 clients currently from various fields like E-Commerce, travel, finance, baking and technology to name a few among 280 categories.

About the Google AdWords Premier SMB Partner Program

The Google AdWords Premier SMB Partner Program [PSP] connects Google’s trusted & experienced AdWords partners with small- and medium-sized businesses that want expert help in creating, managing and optimizing their online advertising campaigns. In addition to in-depth AdWords expertise, PSP partners provide full-service campaign management, detailed reporting, one-on-one customer support & broad marketing guidance to help advertisers make the most of their campaigns.

For more information on PSP, pleas visit the PSP official page here

Image CreditSokrati.com

Last week, I was holidaying in my home place – Mumbai and we went out shopping for my marriage which is due on 23rd November, 2009. We were shopping at Bandra which is considered as a very posh place & there we can across a small chat [???] outlet. With the scare of swine flu, customers normally avoid from going to such places and this is where it becomes important for the shop owners to win back the customers confidence.

But what if, we use a household name to brand our small product. This is what MIGHT make the customer to purchase & use the product. And the chat outlet did exactly the same. The brand which was used was none other than Google and the product – Gola [????] was named Gogola, some interesting pictures below:

Considering that Internet explorer is the most widely used browser in India, using it effectively would be considered as “Another feather in their cap”. Just like the glass, the menu card was also shown in a very geeky manner in an IE window [picture below]:

I had a chat with the shop owner and he told that “They came out with this strategy mainly to get customer’s confidence” and as Google & Microsoft are household names[no matter you use them or not, but you definitely know them] using them ignites a spark in the customer’s mind. This trust indirectly builds the Gogola brand.

This is a lesson from a small time shop owner on “How a product can become a brand, sometimes by smartly re-modeling an existing brand“.

After Google announced the arrival of it’s open source Chrome OS, things are looking quite bright for the open source community. Though Chrome OS would be an excellent competitor not only for existing Linux distributions but also for the upcoming Windows 7, there are many reasons why Microsoft may not worry about the Chrome OS

However, it seems Microsoft is also trying to extend more support to the open source community. Recently, Microsoft released 20,000 lines of Linux code [LOC] to the Kernel community.Below are some of the highlights of the Microsoft release[received via an email from Microsoft’s PR group]

  • Microsoft has released 20,000 lines of Linux code to the Linux kernel community. The code, which includes three Linux device drivers will be available to the Linux Community and customers alike, and will enhance the performance of the Linux operating system when virtualized on Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008.
  • In addition to this significant code contribution, Microsoft is also highlighting the ongoing investment the company is making to optimize PHP on Windows Server and the Microsoft SQL Server database system. For additional context regarding Microsoft’s ongoing work with PHP and the Microsoft SQL Server driver for PHP available to support more native features in Microsoft SQL Server 2008, please see the IDC white paper–Microsoft, PHP & Open Source, a Pragmatic Alliance for more information.
  • These milestones and the motivation behind the work is simple – Microsoft is committed to ensuring interoperability between the Microsoft technology and open source technology to provide the choices our customers are asking for.

Though 20,000 LOC is not a very huge number [considering Microsoft’s size], it is good to see Microsoft embracing the open source technology smile You can read more about it here

All of us know about Larry Page and Sergey Brin but what if , after ten years of incorporation of Google ; a guy comes out and claims to be the third co-founder rolleyes A guy named Hubert Chang claims to be the third co-founder of Google. Thanks to Guy Kawasaki’s tweet for this information. Check out the shocking videos below where Chang explains how the Google journey began…




You can check out this article [which has an interesting tag:”If you liked this post please spread it“] for the shocking information.It would be interesting to keep a watch on Washington Post for updated information where they claim to have mailed Professor Rajeev Motwani of Stanford University for more details.

On the lighter side , this makes me wonder :
Q. What might be Google’s immediate move ???
A. Ban Hubert Chang from Google search lol, just like John Chow [check out here]

Last few days, I have been trying lot of things with the Chrome especially Blogging.For me, Firefox changes the entire blogging experience with it’s two addons – Web Developer Toolbar and Greasemonkey. Though Scribefire and other offline blogging tools namely Live Writer make life simpler but nothing matches the experience of blogging like the good old Firefox biggrin
As you might see , Smileys add a lot of visual effect to any article and hence, Greasemonkey was a must addon for Chrome !!! A Japanese company named Cybozu Labs has come up with version of Greasemonkey for Chome called Greasemetal. Though, still in it’s initial phase, Greasemetal still solves the purpose and since, I had some initial problems while setting up; hence thought it would be nice to list the steps here:
  1. Download Greasemetal from here and install it in your system.
  2. Once installed , copy the required Javascript file which you want to use for e.g Emoctions for Blogger in my case to ….Program FilesGreasemetaluserjs [i.e. Javascript folder of GreaseMetal].Make the required changes to your Blogger template as mentioned here
  3. Close Chrome and start Greasemetal [it is not loaded automatically like Greasemonkey] from the Start Menu and you would see a confirmation screen as shown below:
  4. Open your Blogger account and your Blogger Smileys are on their way !!!
You can also find an alternate solution to setting up Greasemetal here .Hope you have a nice Blogging experience with Chrome [& in the meanwhile let’s wait for some more Chrome addons smile]

Reader’s Contribution:
Rob – Use GreaseMonkey scripts with Chrome