On May 20, we launched the first-ever Google Maps Platform Awards to celebrate 20 years of mapping innovation and highlight the creative, impactful experiences developers have built with our products. The response from the community has been incredible, with over 400+ submissions from around the world showcasing just how far developers can push what’s possible with maps and data. We’re grateful to everyone who participated, including the incredible number of participants, and the judges and fans who helped determine this year’s winners.

Grand Prize Winner

Innobrix: The 3D AEC configuration platform

See the rest of the winners for the other categories, including best of Travel, Sustainability, Retail, Real Estate, Immersive, Delivery and Ride Sharing, Finance, Developer Community, Art of Map, AI and the Honorable mentions. See full results.

The Geocoding Destinations API is officially available in our Experimental launch phase. This marks a significant milestone in our mission to eliminate the friction of finding and arriving at a destination. 

The Geocoding Destinations API is a foundational advancement that transforms how we define a destination. It moves away from providing just a single, often ambiguous, geocoded address. Instead, it delivers a rich, structured, and consistent package of hyperlocal data that gives the extra information to fulfill the last-mile journey. This new capability empowers both consumers to identify optimal locations and complete the last-mile journey with higher confidence, and developers to provide more engaging experiences for their drivers and users for rides and deliveries scenarios. Its unique capabilities include a destination hierarchy (understanding units within buildings within complexes), sub-destinations, specific building entrances, outlines, navigation points, and nearby landmarks.

Ready to get started? Check out the documentation for Destinations in Geocoding API. We would appreciate any feedback you have as you try out the API at geocoding-feedback-channel@google.com. We can't wait to see what you build. 

Property valuation is complex, influenced heavily by location and surrounding amenities. Places Insights is designed to enhance real estate analysis with rich, real-world context. It enables businesses to quantify how specific location characteristics, such as proximity to subway stations or supermarkets, directly impact land value. This data-driven approach moves beyond subjective judgments, providing a quantifiable and scalable method for forecasting pricing and understanding valuation trends.

We’re combining existing property data with point-of-interest (POI) information from Places Insights, providing you with an analysis-ready dataset available in Analytics Hub. Users can leverage Places Count functions to determine the density of relevant POIs within a defined radius of each property. This process enriches a base dataset with new columns for amenity counts (e.g., count_of_subway_stations), creating a comprehensive parcel_features table. This streamlined data preparation is a key technical advantage, simplifying the creation of a robust dataset for machine learning.

Learn more about this use case: Blog post

Unlock the full potential of your 3D map visualizations by mastering Altitude Modes. This new guide will walk you through the nuances of positioning features like markers, lines, and polygons, ensuring they interact seamlessly with both the "bare earth" Digital Terrain Model (DTM) and the "top surface" Digital Surface Model (DSM). Discover how to accurately place objects, avoid visual artifacts, and create truly immersive experiences.

With practical examples and visual comparisons, you'll gain a clear understanding of when and how to apply each mode for optimal results. Whether you're mapping flight paths, property boundaries, or dynamically adjusting features to the visible landscape, this 3D guide provides the essential knowledge to elevate your 3D mapping projects.

We’re so excited to continue to learn more about your users and hope you are enjoying getting to know your fellow Innovators. Thank you to those who have shown interest in participating in this section of our newsletter by submitting their stories.

Great news for those who still haven’t submitted their stories, there is still time to participate and be featured in an upcoming edition of our Google Maps Platform Innovator Spotlight.