Google Maps goes to Mexico

In a few days, Mex­ico will be the first Latin Amer­i­can coun­try to enjoy Street View

Google announced Fri­day after­noon that Mex­ico now has its own ver­sion of Google Maps, avail­able at maps.google.com.mx.

Besides being able to take advan­tage of the most basic use of Google Maps (as a nav­i­ga­tional tool), Mex­i­cans will also be able to enjoy an incred­i­bly con­ve­nient fea­ture that has been offered in the U.S. for some time now, called the Local Busi­ness Cen­ter. Now, once a large enough quan­tity of busi­nesses have incor­po­rated their geo­graph­i­cal loca­tion and busi­ness infor­ma­tion into the data cen­ter, Google Maps users should have zero prob­lem locat­ing ser­vices and stores for all their var­i­ous needs.

Run­ning a search on “restau­rants” in a city you don’t know turns out to be quite the handy tool.

Also excit­ing for Mex­i­can res­i­dents and tourists is the launch of Street View, which, when it goes live on Mon­day, Novem­ber 9, will mark the first time a Latin Amer­i­can coun­try will be able to enjoy this fea­ture. Street View will ini­tially be avail­able in seven cities–Monterrey, Guadala­jara, Ciu­dad de Méx­ico, Puerto Val­larta, Playa del Car­men, Cozumel, and Cancún–though, know­ing Google, we can expect that list to expand very soon.

Finally, as expected with the launch of any Google Maps plat­form, Google is offer­ing a full Google Maps API to devel­op­ers and web­mas­ters who have inter­est­ing and cre­ative ideas for incor­po­rat­ing the maps into their own ser­vices, Web pages, and applications.

All in all, get­ting around in Mex­ico may have just got­ten a whole lot easier.

For those who would like to learn more, Google has cre­ated a YouTube chan­nel con­tain­ing all the infor­ma­tion about Google Maps Mex­ico here.

http://vator.tv/news/show/2009–11-06-google-maps-goes-to-mexico