The NGIS Google Maps team recently visited the Google offices in Sydney to find out about all the latest improvements and changes to the Google for Work suite.

The NGIS team met with other Premier Partners and a delegation from Mountain View, California to discuss possible new features and ways of going to market in Australia.

Google’s Managing Director of Partner Strategy & Global Alliances for Google for Work Murali Sitaram chaired the two-day session and ran a series of workshops aimed at improving the customer experience, looking for local Australian input.

Australian business applications of existing and soon-to-be-released products were brainstormed by the partners and Google took away some of the best ideas to test internally.

From a mapping point of view Graeme Merrall, Enterprise Geospatial Deployment Manager at Google, illustrated the benefits of Google’s new Beacon API, which works using Bluetooth beacons placed in strategic areas.

Obvious applications for the Beacons API were in retail, public transport customer service improvement and asset tracking where GPS can’t be used, such as in building or underground.

The Beacons API is yet another innovative API to be added to the Google for Work Geo suite of APIs.

Some very exciting new cloud platform applications were shown off for the Partners in demonstrations that left some participants lost for words. The computing power previously only available to Google internally has now been released for public use.

Contact NGIS to find out more about Google Maps and how it can help your business.