Changing numbers again

Today we made a big announcement to provide a new version of Ovi Maps, which not only include major improvements but even something bigger: with this release Ovi Maps including high-end, car grade and pedestrian navigation features come at no extra cost and can be kept for the life of the smartphone. No additional licenses needed for extra countries, regions or services like traffic information or city guides. I can assure you this is the best offer you will get from any company for a while.

Today we made a big announcement to provide a new version of Ovi Maps, which not only include major improvements but even something bigger: with this release Ovi Maps including high-end, car grade and pedestrian navigation features come at no extra cost and can be kept for the life of the smartphone.  No additional licenses needed for extra countries, regions or services like traffic information or city guides. I can assure you this is the best offer you will get from any company for a while.

Last time I wrote in this blog, I told how Nokia started a revolution by connecting the telephone number to a person. Instead of dialing a number, you started to call a person. Today, 15 years later, we are now making a similar move with Ovi Maps.

Location on a map is simply a combination of two numbers: latitude and longitude. For example, the location of my office is 41°1’7’’N 73°43’28’’W. As plain numbers this does not mean much to anyone. Even on a map, this location is without any meaning unless you associate the location to Nokia or me. Actually, think how irrelevant a map full of roads and buildings really is, without knowing what or who is in the building or who is driving the roads? It is as irrelevant as those phone numbers back in the 90s, if they do not belong to anyone.

With our new Ovi Maps we really want to change the world and the way you can discover it. Firstly, we wanted to make maps and navigation available for everyone, secondly we wanted to make it available in any situation. In order to do both of above mentioned we have built our maps using advanced hybrid vector technology. This makes the maps scale in practice infinitely and it makes them available both of online and offline use. The technology consumes hugely less bandwidth than the other technologies and and really enables everyone to use it everyday.

We are happy about giving new meaning to numbers. With this release of Ovi Maps we cover almost all the countries of the world, you can navigate in 74 countries in 46 languages, navigate in pedestrian-only zones for over 80 cities around the world as well as 6000 3D landmarks in over 200 cities. “In other numbers”,  this means that currently roughly 3.7 billion people could use Ovi Maps for navigation in their home country on their Nokia. You can also be pretty sure you could use Ovi Maps in your holiday location with navigation, as it works in 45 of the 50 most popular destination countries for tourists. This is equals about 700 million visits each year to these 45 countries (source Euromonitor International ).  When you’ve done these 45 countries, you’ll still have 29 more to go. And this is enough about numbers…

By making it as easy as possible to use to as many people as possible, using maps will become as common as sending text or snapping a photo. Connecting to places in a new way makes you to feel closer to who and what matters (instead of numbers).

Go to www.nokia.com/maps, download the new application and get going!

-S

Source : http://blog.ovi.com/2010/01/21/changing-numbers-ag...