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News

• Google Maps enabling companies to promote themselves as led by women

  Businesses can now describe themselves in Google Maps listings as being owned, led or founded by women, the Alphabet unit announced Wednesday.

• Google Maps will now tell you how busy a place is in real time

  Other data-driven tricks include projections about how long people stay at a place and more detailed hours from certain venues.

• Is Google trying to swipe Waze from under Facebook's nose?

  Google may be attempting to snap up social mapping and traffic service Waze, despite long-standing rumors that Facebook is already in talks to buy the company for as much as $1 billion, according to a report from Bloomberg.

• Google Maps launches indoor functions

  Google Maps has launched 200 indoor maps for Androids in Australia for shopping centres, train stations and airports.

• Report: Australian law enforcement issues warning about Google Maps

  Police officers in Colac, Australia are warning that relying on Google Maps may be endangering motorists in their jurisdiction, according to a report from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

• Google takes Maps indoors, but challenges remain

  Low adoption and insufficient research has slowed the movement of Google Maps indoors, a Google software engineer said today at the Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation conference held at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

• Yelp launches community website in Australia

  Community based local search website, Yelp, has launched in Australia, partnering with Sensis to have localised content in both Melbourne and Sydney.

• RMIT builds on Twitter, Google Maps, geolocation to entice online poets

  The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) is using social media and geolocation to entice aspiring writers to use its mobile website.

• Google Maps for Android gets improved user interface

  Google has released version 4.1 of Google Maps for Android, adding a constantly-updated map wallpaper, tweaking the way search results are displayed and adding a new Latitude widget for tracking your friends.

• Google promotes Place Pages in shop windows

  Google is introducing a mobile marketing campaign for Place Pages, a service for businesses that faced some early criticism when it launched in September.

• Microsoft's Bing tries to leapfrog Google Maps

  Microsoft is taking aim at one of Google's most popular services, Google Maps, with a richer version of its own online mapping service that was released in beta on Wednesday.

• Google seeks to boost geo apps with new Maps API

  Google has released a new API for Google Maps designed to relieve developers of the burden of maintaining their own repositories for geographical data.