The Official Google Blog last Friday contained a very interesting piece from the product manager for Google Maps all about a service called Google Transit. The article was about Washington but when you click through there are many cities covered internationally as well as in North America.
So what does it do? It adds the ability to plan your commute or shopping trip in some detail by including public transport route information such as bus route numbers, connections and stops, telling you where to change and where to walk and so on. The information is added in conjunction with the local transport authority.
The product can also add in live traffic updates.
My view is that the next step from this point could be to add in the ability buy tickets for the journey you’ve just planned out on your mobile. Juniper’s latest forecasts reveal that there is a large market out there worldwide for transport mobile ticketing.
It’s quite an obvious next step in many ways. If you look at Google’s activities in the NFC space then adding in ticket purchase functionality would add to the “making life easier” objective.
Tags: Google, mobile ticketing, NFC
They have been advertising Google Transit on the back of a few of the buses I’ve seen around Pinellas County for quite some time. I think it ties in more with Google Maps and Google Navigation for Android Smartphones and Tablets.
Although I am not ruling out the ticketing aspect I don’t think it’s specific to Google Transit. Google has it’s sights set a lot higher on ticketing and other travel arrangements.
On July 1, 2010, Google announced an agreement to acquire ITA Software, a Cambridge, Massachusetts flight information software company, for $700 million, subject to adjustments.
Google’s acquisition of ITA Software will create a new, easier way for users to find better flight information online, which should encourage more users to make their flight purchases online.
You can find more information about the Google / ITA Merger here:
http://www.google.com/press/ita/
I think ultimately Google has its sights set on being involved in every aspect of our lives. They promised to catalog the world’s information and I think they are doing that little by little.
I’m just waiting for the day when a Google Trike passes me in my hallway in my house taking pictures of the interior of my home to post on Google World (Earth).
If you really want to get the long view as to what I think Google is up to read these two articles I wrote several years ago.
Open Source: http://www.prepaid-press.com/wordpress/?page_id=2036
Beachfront Property: http://www.prepaid-press.com/wordpress/?page_id=2054
Google would like us all to be nodes in the Google Mesh network. The information that is gleaned from understanding where people go, what they do and who they do it with around the world is worth more than billions or trillions of dollars.
Computing Dictionary
Google definition
World-Wide Web
The World-Wide Web search engine that indexes the greatest number of web pages – over two billion by December 2001 and provides a free service that searches this index in less than a second.
The site’s name is apparently derived from ” googol”, but note the difference in spelling.
goo·gol
[goo-gawl, -gol, -guhl] Show IPA
–noun
a number that is equal to 1 followed by 100 zeros and expressed as 10 100 .
Origin:
1935–40; introduced by U.S. mathematician Edward Kasner (1878–1955), whose nine-year-old nephew allegedly invented it.
The “Google” spelling is also used in “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” by Douglas Adams, in which one of Deep Thought’s designers asks, “And are you not,” said Fook, leaning anxiously foward, “a greater analyst than the Googleplex Star Thinker in the Seventh Galaxy of Light and Ingenuity which can calculate the trajectory of every single dust particle throughout a five-week Dangrabad Beta sand blizzard?”
Do a search for something on Google – how many “O’s” are there in Google at the bottom of the page? Or are they Zeros?