• Google Street View Adds Local Business Listings

    Monday, April 26th, 2010

    Erick Schonfeld is a technology journalist and the former Editor in Chief of TechCrunch. At TechCrunch, he oversaw the editorial content of the site, helped to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produced TCTV shows, and wrote daily for the blog. He joined TechCrunch as Co-Editor in 2007, and helped take it from a popular blog to a thriving... → Learn More

    Last week, the newly renamed Google Places added a ton of features to help local businesses create a directory page right on Google. Today, Google’s Street View is joining the party by showing links to local business listings right in Street View. As you turn around in Street View, names of local businesses and other “Google Places” will show up overlayed on top of buildings. As you hover over those names, a small pop-up window shows some of the listing details such as business name, phone number, and ratings.

    There have been links from business listings on Google Maps directly to Street View for almost a year, but now those business listings appear right within Street View itself. Google clearly wants to own local and is sprinkling these listings everywhere it can.

    The next step I’m waiting for is to see Street view in a mobile augmented reality app, so that you can just point your phone camera at a building and see the businesses listed inside. That would be so Tonchidot of Google. Our augmented reality future awaits.

    Product: Google Maps
    Website: maps.google.com
    Company Google

    Google Maps is Google’s free web-based mapping application. As of May 2008, Google Maps includes photos, videos, and user-created maps along with location searches. It uses Panoramio and YouTube for the content.

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    Company: Tonchidot
    Website: tonchidot.com
    Launch Date: August 2008
    Funding: $16M

    Social Augmented Reality Mobile Location-based Service “Sekai Camera” (World Camera) Their client-side software and web service enable camera-equipped mobile devices (such as iPhones, Android “Google Phones”, and other smart-phones) to access informational and entertainment services by creating a “Clickable World” via the use of Augmented Reality (AR) hyper-tags. These user-clickable tags, which they call “AirTags”, are location-based and mapped in the real world. These AirTags can be seen and accessed through the camera view of mobile devices with Sekai Camera software....

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