Are you prepared to develop an App that makes use of the geographical information of more than 100 million places?

In our post about the renewed Google Maps Platform, we explained that Google’s new APIs were grouped into three large datasets (Maps, Routes and Places), and today we would like to focus on the third (Places), probably the largest collection of maps containing sites and places of interest.

Here are some figures that are revealing indeed:

• It offers information on more than 100 million places for use by individuals and businesses.
• The database includes about 25 million updates a day.
• It supports a thousand million active users a month, making it an unparalleled repository that is always available.

A few months ago, in another post, we mentioned the advantages of Google Places Autocomplete for the retail sector and its influence on the rate of conversion of online sales operations. Certainly an interesting subject, but Google Places is much more.

It not only provides information on accurate locations, it also includes contact information, reviews, types of places (museum, restaurant, bar, café, supermarket…), ratings and it even scores the atmosphere in these places. The best of all is that these details are not only taken from Google’s “Local Guides”, they are also contributed by users.

Functions that make the most of the available data

Geolocation makes it possible to locate a given mobile device by triangulation based on Wi-Fi networks/nodes or nearby mobile phone antennas without having to depend on GPS. If customers who are using your App are physically inside one of your establishments or very close, wouldn’t you like to make them a customised offer?

Thus, Places SDK for Android allows businesses to create applications that recognise the location of the devices using them and, consequently, to respond taking into account local businesses and other places nearby. Google’s Place Report is a function that will help you physically locate them.

These capabilities of the API make it possible to design applications based on the geographical context, providing details of places that may be of interest to users, to add to the information that Android location services already provide.

The best of all is the possibility of locating places based on a telephone number, an address, or the name of a point of interest. With Geocoding, you can transform addresses into geographic coordinates and vice-versa. And with Place Photos, your application can recover the photographs published by the owners of the business, as well as those uploaded by other users disinterestedly.

Information adapted to your business

Preparing a prototype might be easy if you know how to use Google’s APIs. If you lack that technical and commercial information or practical experience in this field, then you have come to the right provider.

As a Premier Google Partner, we can help you prepare a test environment fully adapted to your business strategy through our consulting and development services. And if you like it, which you will, it can be implemented immediately. Furthermore, you will have a stunning platform that will grow in line with your business. Shall we start? Whenever you’re ready!