Google reportedly kills plan to let retailers send notifications in Maps
Google's already got a plan in motion for taking on Apple's iBeacon technology, which helps developers offer notifications and other alerts specific to your precise location — beyond what Wi-Fi or GPS can do alone. But according to Fortune, at one point Google had an even more ambitious program in the works.
The feature, designed to work inside Google Maps, would've been called Google Here and was slated to launch with some big-name partners including Starbucks. Fortune says that Here would serve up a notification "within five seconds" of a user entering any partner location; you can imagine many of those would be retail stores.
