Presented by Russell Middleton from Google

Few things to talk about

Location detection 

• Until user had to center map to location desired, bit of a pain, even with cookies
• Now built into the AJAX API. When an application uses the AJAX API loader, the laoder attempts to geo locate the client based on its IP address. (Flawed, but 2/3′s of the cases it is right …. )

On the mobile

•  Google Gears is now available on Android
•  obtain the users current position, address and altitude
•  watch the users poition as it changes over time
•  quickly and cheaply obtain the users last known position
•  open’s a can of worms around permissions
•  location is found using onboard gps, or triangulation and reverse geocoding

Google Web Toolkit - allows developers to build and maintain rovust JavaScript front-end applications in Java. The GWT compiler translates your Java code into JAvaScript for the browser.

Geocoding has been available for a long time. But Google now also Reverse Geocoding available on the web and also on the mobile (iPhone works somewhat).

What’s really relevant to mobile tho is the static maps API. The API reduces load time by displaing a static image, rather than the full JS Maps interface.

[This is turning into a sales pitch ...]

Google Earth API

API allows developers to embed Earth into the website. It is a plugin, but it only needs download once, much like the Flash plugin or Silverlight etc. Graceful download is also available via the API.

[Yup, sales pitch ...]

AJAX API Playground is now getting a mention.