Bing Maps now using Nokia Backend services for Traffic and Geocoding

Last year, Microsoft announced a strategic partnership with Nokia in Mapping. Our two companies have spent a lot of time working together, sharing information and investigating better ways provide relevant mapping information to help you find and get to where you’re going more quickly. Today, we’re excited to announce another important phase in that partnership with the launch of Nokia powered traffic results, which are rolling out today in 24 countries on Bing Maps.

The following countries will see improvements through Bing Maps as a result of our use of Nokia services:

· Austria

· Belgium

· Brazil

· Canada

· Finland

· France

· Germany

· Greece

· India

· Indonesia

· Ireland

· Italy

· Luxembourg

· Mexico

· Netherlands

· Poland

· Portugal

· Russia

· Saudi Arabia

· South Africa

· Spain

· Sweden

· Switzerland

· UAE

· United Kingdom

· US

New countries with Traffic

São Paulo, Brazil

Johannesburg, South Africa

Moscow, Russia

Mumbai, India

Improved Traffic

We’re also improving our existing traffic coverage in the US to include traffic information for side streets in addition to freeway traffic information. See below for enhanced coverage in Seattle.

Seattle, Washington

In addition to these traffic improvements, Bing Maps will also start to use Nokia’s geocoding services in a number of countries offering improved directions. This update, while not always visible to users, is another important milestone in our partnership to build the world’s best mapping platform using Nokia and Microsoft’s assets.

Thanks to our friends at Nokia for their dedication along the way. Together we have enabled a stronger Bing Maps experience and we hope Bing users in these respective countries reap the benefits of our partnership, notice an increase in address search relevance, and enjoy the addition of traffic information – especially those of you in the US who are adventurous enough to travel during the Memorial Day holiday!

Garmin Winter Training 2012 – Christophe Le Mével

Today’s record is tomorrow’s motivation Virtual Partner™ can turn any training session into a virtual matchup. Letting you race your previous bests or challenge any activities uploaded to Garmin Connect™. Train with Christophe Le Mevel this winter with pre-planned training activities available for download at garmin.com/wintertraining.

The Google Maps API is truly an international product

The Google Maps API is truly an international product with coverage from Hanoi, Vietnam to Lahore, Pakistan and everywhere in between. Like the extensive coverage of Google Maps (thanks in part to user generated edits via Google Map Maker), our developer community is internationally extensive as well! Google developers exist in just about every country and our Google Technology User Groups (GTUGs) have over 253 chapters around the world! To celebrate the global nature of Google Geo APIs and its developers, this month we’ve decided to highlight five great Geo API implementations from developers aus Deutschland! (that’s ‘from Germany’ for non-German speakers

Street View Live from Lufthansa

Lufthansa, Germany’s national airline, flies to many destinations in Europe. To help travelers discover Europe and encourage them to plan a vacation, Lufthansa has plotted all their destinations out on a map and linked them to famous spots via the Street View API. For example, by clicking on the Paris icon, users will be taken to Street View imagery of the Eiffel Tower to entice them to travel to the City of Lights.

Bikemap.net

Bikemap.net, built by Toursprung from Austria and Germany, allows cyclist to view and share bicycling routes from all over the world. Users can rate routes, mark their favorites, send the GPS coordinates to a mobile device, suggest changes to routes, and even share the routes on social media sites. Each route includes details about the distance, surfaces, and difficulty. To help cyclists better understand the terrain the site has an interactive elevation bar. A similar effect can be achieved using the Google Elevation API.

McDonalds Store Locator

The German online destination for McDonald’s features a very nice store locator built on the Google Maps API. Very similar to another store locator built by German company, Hugo Boss, this store locator uses the map as both its background and focal point. The store locator also features custom icons, category filtering (24hr, wifi, drive through, etc), and custom controls.

Mare Verlag – Interactive World Map

Maps become very powerful when they are used to add geo context to information. German magazine, Mare, is using the Google Maps API to geotagged their stories and display them on a map. You can use the map to focus in on a particular part of the world and the application will populate the map with the stories that occurred in that region.

Munich S-Bahn Live Tracking on Google Maps

What’s great about this map is that it shows Munich S-Bahn transit system in real time as the trains travel through the city. There are clickable custom icons for each train, representing their line and when clicked on display stop information in an infowindow. The Google Maps API is a great solution for real-time asset tracking for both transit and business applications. To find out more about using asset tracking for business applications, visit the Google Geo Enterprise website.