Discover places with Sylvain from the Maps team

In this blog post, we bring to you Sylvain Grande, who is behind maps.ovi.com, Places/Search and the local content services on S60 devices & Services. He will be talking to us about Places and Search today. Thank you for agreeing to the interview Sylvain. Can you tell us what are ...

In this blog post, we bring to you Sylvain Grande, who is behind maps.ovi.com, Places/Search and the local content services on S60 devices & Services. He will be talking to us about Places and Search today.

Thank you for agreeing to the interview Sylvain. Can you tell us what are you working on in Nokia? My team defines and develops the consumer experience which relates to local search / discovery and places on Maps, on mobile and on maps.ovi.com. We also work with partners like Lonely Planet, TripAdvisor, Michelin and many more to develop the local content services like you see on Maps as well as with yellow pages companies like Telegate, Al Wahda, Telelistas etc. across the globe to get more places and the ability to reach out to small businesses / merchants.

What excites you about working in the maps team? I have always been passionate about geography, history and geopolitics. Maps are a great way to represent reality and a beautiful instrument to share complex topics with many people. Location-based services have a broad appeal and can have a massive impact on societies so working at Nokia on parts of this immense topic, with a great team, is fulfilling.
Check out some of the places I love (zoom out to discover more): Namibia, Istanbul, Paris, Berlin. And this is where I spent my last year’s vacation.

What devices are you currently using? Do you remember your first phone? I am using a Nokia N97 mini and a Nokia N8… and excited to get hold of an Nokia E7, as I receive and send too many emails. My first phone was a Nokia, the Nokia 2110 if I recall correctly. In 1996.

Can you tell us about Places and Prime Place? Places is the name of our team. Fundamentally it embodies how people relate to their environment, what they are looking for, where they check-in, where they want to navigate to: it is about Places. For instance, this is a restaurant I would not mind trying La Tour d’Argent. I can read what different customers have to say about it, and mark it as my favorite. And when it comes to a restaurant that I love like Antica Osteria da Tonino , I can share it with friends and familiar strangers like I do now. People want, everywhere, to find the places they are looking for and discover new ones.
Prime Place is our offering to small businesses who want to be able to claim and enrich their places, so to make sure they are found on Maps and more importantly that the representation of their place in the digital world help them drive traffic to their businesses. We have a self-service interface available in 15 markets and we work actively with prime place resellers, mainly yellow pages companies, in order to reach out to businesses.

What can we expect in the future from Places? Better quality, increased richness and coverage of content, more interaction with the content (e.g. ability to check-in, post reviews, attach photos), enhanced find and discovery experiences, as well as engagement with the community of users.

Sounds like a lot of good things are on the way! Yes, they are! And the more people use our service the better it gets. Search gets better through collective intelligence, more and more people using places mean more and more content is shared and we all benefit from it.

The search function has greatly improved compared to the earlier versions. Could you tell us a bit more about it? We have made great improvements, both in terms of usability and in terms of algorithm. The feedback and the data we have received so far with regards to the latest version of Maps are very encouraging.
Search is a utility and finding places and addresses, nearby or anywhere in the world needs to work well, fast, reliably. It is also about helping people to discover new places. We have enabled, with the latest version of Maps, for people to discover recommended places directly from the place and address pages, on mobile and on maps.ovi.com.
The search algorithm team, which is based in Berlin and Boston – with the acquisition of MetaCarta’s geo-search technology team – has done great work to deliver more relevant results to users, as well as helping users while they search with suggestions, understanding spelling errors. We are now constantly measuring the search quality and working to bring many more improvements in the next quarters.

Any parting words for our readers? There is nothing like using our services (Maps for mobile, maps.ovi.com, primeplace.ovi.com in the 15 markets where it is available). We have lots of work to do, and we hope you guys add public places on maps.ovi.com, report issues about places thanks to report on the place pages, favorite, share, call, navigate to all the places you are looking for and discover new ones thanks to Maps.

I asked Sylvain to show me how to add a public place to maps.ovi.com. Here are his instructions, which are very simple to follow:

1. Log on to maps.ovi.com. Type in the address of the place that you want to add.
   
2. Click on create a public place, and fill in the details. Click on add the place and we are done!
   
3. If the public place is already added to the database, the following screenshot comes up:
   

So go ahead and add your favorite public places to maps.ovi.com! And come back and tell us about the public places you added.

-Surya (@suryasnair)

Source : http://blog.ovi.com/2011/02/09/discover-places-wit...