Articles about Maps

Microsoft’s Bing Maps team has made a major update to its service, adding Streetside views (its version of Google’s Street View) to 64 new cities, and 3D maps to 29 new cities.

Among the new cities gaining Streetside views are Atlanta, Boston, Denver, Las Vegas, and Chicago. All of the Streetside additions are in the US. The new list of 3D cities also focuses on American locations, including Atlanta, Denver, and New Orleans, but Copenhagen in Denmark and Toronto, Vancouver and Victoria in Canada are also included.

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Yahoo has developed a GPS algorithm that allows users to select a route based on how beautiful it is, instead of time or distance.

Yahoo Labs and the University of Torino conducted the Shortest Path to Happiness study in order to offer "emotionally pleasant" routes to users.

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My knowledge of Australia is rather limited. I know of Crocodile Dundee, Outback Steakhouse and Rocko from Rocko's Modern Life. I'll admit, I need to learn more about the world. Luckily, the internet allows me to learn from the comfort of my computer chair.

Google is one of the great resources from which to learn, especially Google Maps. From my web browser, I can navigate to anywhere in the world. Even better, Street View allows me to experience the locations as if I was really there. Today, Google announces that it is bringing Street View down under, to Sydney, Australia. Well, the search-giant is going even further down under than that, into the sea!

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That's not a bad deal -- far from it, in fact. Nokia is leading the pack on Windows Phone sales, has a broad patent portfolio and a former Microsoft executive -- Stephen Elop -- as CEO. The software giant is buying the Finnish company's Devices & Services business -- its phone arm -- and the right to use its patents for just €5.44 billion. Yes, that's right -- just €5.44 billion.

That is considerably less than what Microsoft paid for Skype -- $8.5 billion -- in 2010. Both deals involve trading cash, but whereas the latter has yet to bear fruit across all of Microsoft's services, the former is actually at the forefront of turning Windows Phone -- the software giant's smartphone operating system -- into a solid mobile proposition and competitor to Android and iOS. Not a bad deal.

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On Friday, Finnish mobile maker Nokia announced HERE Connected Driving, a cloud-connected in-car navigation solution with offline mapping, real-time traffic information and mobile device app support. Labeled by the company as "the only end-to-end driving solution on the market", it will be officially demoed during the International Motor Show in Frankfurt, Germany.

Nokia's in-car navigation solution is comprised of four parts -- HERE Auto, HERE Auto Cloud, HERE Auto Companion and HERE Traffic. HERE Auto takes care of navigation instructions, with or without a data connection, similar to the company's HERE Drive+ Windows Phone 8 app. It provides turn-by-turn voice-guided navigation in 95 countries, while supporting 2D, 3D and satellite map views (street imagery is also included). According to Nokia, Continental's Open Infotainment Platform already integrates HERE Auto and it is expected to arrive in cars in upcoming months.

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Google Maps has become adventurous -- what began as mapping, turned into street view of roads around the world and then morphed to bigger things, like underwater dives and hikes down amazing trails. All of this could be found, though it needed to be searched, but now the company wishes to unify all of this data in one location.

From the oceans to the lowest depths of the Grand Canyon, the search giant's team has traversed many of the coolest and most remote locations around the globe. And, a new website, appropriately named "Views" collates this data into a single location, including such far-flung locals as the Great Barrier Reef and Mount Everest.

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Work on the Eiffel Tower began in 1887 and was completed two years later. It was originally intended to stand for just 20 years, but the iron lattice construction has remained as a symbol of the country ever since. The monument stands 324.00 meters in height overlooking the European city.

Now Google, as it is wont to do, has decided that the massive structure needs a digital home. "The Google Cultural Institute and the Eiffel Tower Operating Company have teamed up to create three immersive online exhibitions which blend fascinating historical material with a sprinkling of technological magic. In order to capture the imagery, the Street View team followed", says Mark Yoshitake, Head of Product and User Experience for Google Cultural Institute.

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Finnish maker Nokia announced, on Tuesday, that its HERE Drive, Drive+ and Transit Windows Phone 8 apps will receive an update later this week, which adds new navigation tools and improves the user interface.

HERE Drive and Drive+ get the most noteworthy enhancements, with the latest versions introducing an overview of traffic conditions in surrounding user areas and My Commute, a new feature which allows folks to view the estimated time of arrival to a set destination on the adjacent live tile.

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Finnish manufacturer Nokia announced, on Thursday, that improved aerial imagery is now available for its here.com online maps service. The latest update, which arrives a week after the company refreshed the streets maps, will also make its way, "later this year", to smartphone apps.

The first regions that receive improved aerial imagery on here.com are United States, Europe and South Africa, covering a land area of 14 million square kilometers. "We’re providing clear, disruption free views on zoomed in levels with better resolution so that you can see more details and fresh maps with more recent images", says Nokia.

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Though personal data has been a big news item recently, mapping is still a business and getting a satellite view of locations is, after all, rather a cool thing. With that in mind, Bing continues to go head-to-head against Google in this market, and today announces a new round of updates.

"We are excited to announce a number of updates to Bing Maps, including the largest shipment of Bird’s Eye imagery yet, nearly 270 terabytes of data or the equivalent of 100,000 DVD’s, along with expanded venue maps and our new 'Report a problem' feature", Bing announces.

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Google gets a lot of attention for its Street View adventures -- it's travelled from the Great Barrier Reef to the Grand Canyon -- but Microsoft is not taking this lying down. The software giant has teamed up with David Breashears and his non-profit, GlacierWorks, to scale the heights of the Himalayas.

The IE10 team, Microsoft Research, and the developers at Pixel Lab have come together to create a multi-touch experience that allows users to explore the work of David Breashears, who has spent considerable time exploring and photographing the world's tallest mountain chain.

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Twenty-fifth in a series. The increase of new apps slowed down a little bit, falling under the 2,000 apps per week mark that was passed in the last three weeks. A total of 1,928 new apps found their way into the store this week. The total number of apps in the U.S. store is now 42,478, made up of 33,430 free apps and 9,048 paid ones. Free apps increased by 1,447 this week and paid ones by 481.

The core Bing apps received updates a couple of days ago. I won't rehash all that we previously reporting, only this much: Bing News supports custom RSS feeds now that you can add to the app so that you can add your own news sources to it. News also supports keyword-based news that you can add easily to the application.

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Microsoft announced GeoFlow at the SharePoint conference in November 2012 and today rolled out a public preview of the 3-D mashup that combines the Office spreadsheet app Excel with Bing maps to allow you to plot geographic and temporal data visually.

Microsoft Research claims that GeoFlow "enables information workers to discover and share new insights from data through rich, 3-D data on a globe and fluid, cinematic guided tours—virtual cinematography moving through data". The app evolved out of the WorldWide Telescope project. "We built a gigantic virtual telescope, but to do so, we had to build an engine that could visualize the universe. If we can visualize the universe, we can visualize almost anything else", Microsoft Research principal researcher Curtis Wong explains.

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Late last week, HERE Drive Beta disappeared from Nokia's exclusive app collection for Lumia smartphones, leaving many users stranded in the process. The issue affected new devices, as well as older phones which had been factory reset, with the Store returning a 805a0194 error when users tried to update from Nokia Drive or install HERE Drive Beta.

But lo and behold, Nokia's navigation app for Windows Phone is available to download and install from the Store once more. Users will get an updated counter in the app store tile informing them of an upgrade to HERE Drive Beta from Nokia Drive, a service which comes preinstalled on compatible Lumia devices.

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HERE Drive Beta, Nokia's navigation app for Windows Phone, is currently nowhere to be found inside the company's exclusive app collection for Lumia devices. A number of users report that the problem occurs both for new smartphones or after factory resetting another. HERE Drive Beta is missing, despite the app being previously available.

I can attest to that latter scenario after performing a factory reset yesterday on my Lumia 920. Heading to the Store to install the app (practically to update Nokia Drive to HERE Drive Beta) now results in very-cryptic error code, 805a0194, whereas performing a manual search lists HERE Maps instead, among other results.

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