Google Maps for India got updated with much awaited free turn-by-turn voice instructions and traffic data features. Android users can download the updated Google Maps Navigation (Beta) for free and receive navigation and live traffic information. The live traffic data is available for major cities and comes from a variety of sources, including government agencies, private data providers, and users of Google Maps who send anonymous traffic data utilizing the crowdsourcing feature.

While navigation feature is only available to Android users now, live traffic data is accessible on desktop as well as iOS Google Maps application.

Google Earth is one of the successful projects from the company, and unlike numerous other Google Products is being continuously developed and upgraded with new features. After, textured 3D buildings Google Earth is soon going to offer 3D models of entire metropolitan areas on mobile devices.

Acknowledging the success to 45-degree aerial imagery, new rendering and computer vision techniques, Google says - creating 3D cityscapes, complete with buildings, terrain and landscaping is now easier and automated then earlier. Google plans to offer 3D coverage for metropolitan areas with a combined population of 300 million people by the end of this year. A video demonstration of new 3D cityscapes is posted after the jump.

Ongoing Australian forest fire which is suspected to be a work of Jungle Jihad has already claimed more then 181 confirmed casualties till now, the engineers at Google Maps Australia have now created a Google Map mashup detailing and tracking the forest-fires in real-time, the mashup data is being updated in real-time using RSS feeds from Victoria's Country Fire Authority.

The FireMaps contain color-coded markups displaying the current severity status, clicking on the markup displays detailed information regarding the fire-site, the mashup also makes use of latest available satellite imagery from the Modis Rapid Response project at NASA/GSFC.