Google Building Out Non-US Maps Data With Users

Brady Forrest at O’Reilly Radar reports on Google’s GPS-based “crowdsourcing” strategy to get local data on Maps outside the US (specifically in India). While Google has enormous amounts of data for the US and EU, in selected countries there’s much less data to plot on Maps. Accordingly Google is relying on users (e.g., My Maps) to create the data that forms the bulk of the content in certain countries.

While Google didn’t share specific numbers, they told me they’ve been surprised by the volume and quality of user-created maps and data being uploaded.