Take another step towards the integration of your business information with Google Maps
How would you like your customers to be able to locate an establishment where they can buy a product on the map and also know its availability in real time? And what about being able to control a fleet of moving assets in real time?
The developers of Google Maps services have surprised us once again with two ideas that bring business value to the leading geopositioning platform.
Firstly, a proposal that resolves the frequent need for the simultaneous display of a series of locations on a map, such as a franchise chain. Google calls it Store Locator.
If you would like to know where a particular product or brand is being sold, you visit its website and usually after a basic filtering process you get a list of addresses in text format on your screen. When you click on them, you get, in the best of cases, a window that displays the location of one of them on the map. That’s the past.
Now, you also get photographs, opening times, contact numbers, routes to arrive, and even the actual availability of a particular product you want.
And the second is even more attractive; it is Transport Tracker, a set of integrated technologies to track a series of moving assets in real time. For example, a fleet of cars or vans, buses, or delivery trucks, displaying them visually on an interactive map.
The solution is based on the shuttle bus tracker in Google I/O 2016 and 2017 and integrates a number of technologies including Android, Firebase, Google Maps and GTFS (General Transit Feed Specification).
More specifically, an Android application (which uses the location provider merged in the Google Play Location API) transmits the coordinates of each vehicle to the Firebase database in real-time.
The solution works as follows:
- An Android application transmits the coordinates of each vehicle to the Firebase database in real time.
- The back-end integrated into Node.js processes the locations from the Firebase real time database and predicts transit times with the help of the Google Maps Directions API.
- Finally, a web application that uses the Google Maps JavaScript API displays a map that represents the locations and bus routes.
And nothing beats seeing it for yourself. At this link, you will find a moving bus tracking demo based on an interface designed to be displayed in large format LCD screens.
To use this type of solution, you will need a Google Maps API Premium Plan licence. Intelligence Partner, as specialists in solutions based on Google Maps and its licensing, is at your disposal to help you prepare a pilot plan or to operate the system in production environments.
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