Called Google Earth Builder, the new cloud service is expected to be commercially available in this year's third quarter. Google will provide pricing information later on.
After putting their mapping data on the Google cloud, enterprises can make it available to their employees, partners or customers through end-user tools like Google Maps online service and API or the Google Earth desktop application.
"Google Earth Builder is Google's mapping platform in the cloud, for organizations that deal with mapping data, whether it's hundreds of terabytes or a few base maps layers," said Dylan Lorimer, Google's enterprise Earth and Maps product manager.
Get the full story at PC World
Google to launch cloud service for digital maps
Apr 21, 2011
Google will open up to third parties its digital maps infrastructure so that enterprise organizations can use it to store and serve up geospatial data to their end users.