Mapping the future on maps.nokia.com

Published by Sylvain Grande on August 6, 2012

Mapping the future on maps.nokia.com

Maps have always provided us with more information than just how to get from A to B. Maps record the whole of human history, charting how our global society has grown and the challenges it has faced. From the exploration of new territories to the ever-shifting boundaries in areas of conflict, maps allow us to understand not just where we are, but also how we got there.

Of course, technology has moved on significantly since the times of explorers such as Magellan, Columbus and Cook, and satellites have allowed us to refine cartography to a precise science.

However, our relationship with maps is changing. Maps are becoming increasingly interactive and key elements in our social lives, allowing us to meet up with friends, plan our holidays and discover new and exciting experiences. As we’ve seen recently, people are beginning to map the landscapes of our imaginations – even including Gotham City. At Nokia, we believe that the map is a user interface through which we live and organise our lives.

Bringing maps alive

Maps should be more than just a collection of locations or a close-to-perfect geographical representation of the world. They should come alive with people and places, stories and activities. They should provide a reflection of how we live our lives today, documenting experiences, conversations, relationships and events.

[ hana-code-insert ] 'promo900' is not found

At Nokia we believe that location is a crucial provider of context for people. We believe maps, in the broadest sense, are a platform to surface, produce and consume information, enabling us to make the most of our lives, from optimizing a journey (with Nokia Transport and Nokia Drive) to discovering our local environment (with Nokia Maps and Nokia City Lens) to sharing experiences.

We believe in experiences that are fluid across contexts and situations so that we don’t have to care about what device we are using but instead concentrate on what we want to achieve.

A hub for everything

This is why we are busy developing maps.nokia.com: to provide a hub for everything relating to when, where and how people live their lives, and allows you to feel like a local wherever you may be.

Already maps.nokia.com helps us to understand where we are, find any place, and the best way to get there through multi-modal directions. It’s enabling richer experiences: we can discover the world in 3D or get the feeling for what’s going on in a particular neighborhood with heat maps. And this is only the beginning of the journey.

Maps throughout history have provided us with an anthropological insight into the world. And now, as technology increasingly shapes how we interact with our environments, we have the opportunity like never before to make maps reflect how we live our lives.

Las Vegas City Page on maps.nokia.com

Always local

The mission behind Nokia Maps is to help people understand, navigate and discover the world around them and feel like a local wherever they are. Whether you are traveling or staying in your city, you want to discover things; it is only the dimension of discovery which differs. We all meet friends and then need to agree on a place to go. We all learn things about the city we live in from people visiting and reading guides and articles. We all discuss what is the coolest neighbourhood or place. The city and place pages (London, New York, Beijing and Melbourne, for example) show the first steps in how we want to help people explore and discover their worlds.

Another key area of progress is 3D maps that look beautiful; but are they useful? We launched 3D maps at Where 2.0 last April and received amazing feedback from the industry. Using 3D is one way to represent the world in a more realistic manner and we have focused on leveraging photorealistic 3D to help people explore and navigate their worlds.

Golden Gate Bridge with Maps 3D WebGL

We need to think more about how different people relate to maps as well as the types of experiences maps support. Exploring a neighbourhood, discovering places, getting a view of the public transit lines or getting directions all require different views of the map and different people might feel more comfortable with different views for similar usage cases. We will bring new innovations to 3D maps in the future.

Nokia is known for mobile products so, you might ask, why create maps.nokia.com for a desktop browser? The answer is that Nokia Maps has long been synonymous with Nokia Symbian phones and we have years of experience in building a great mapping and navigation experience.

A different experience

We understand that people expect experiences that transcend platforms and screens and can serve their needs irrespective of underlying technology platforms. At home and with larger screens at their disposal, people can experience things differently, while on mobile most usage cases are driven by immediate needs and questions.

We believe there are many ways to explore, navigate and discover the world around you. It’s not only about putting a term in a search box, it is about getting recommendations, about understanding how neighborhoods are alive, and many more things we are working on.

We also believe maps are deeply emotional and we need to revive the personal attachment people have always had with paper maps.

Comments

  • cbc800

    I love Nokia maps. It is so useful but there would be just one thing that I miss. I’d love to be able to make check in into the app, not with an a social aproach but for a more personal use. It would be usefull to record places and being able to group them.

    • http://twitter.com/haikus Pino

      What about adding places to your favorites?

  • http://UnleashThePhones.com/ Clinton Jeff

    I *love* the new hub pages. Thought the one for Delhi is a little barren haha.

    • http://twitter.com/haikus Pino

      Hi @clintonjeff:disqus, you know you can upload your own photos to Nokia Maps to help other users getting a better feeling for the place, right? ;-)

      • http://UnleashThePhones.com/ Clinton Jeff

         I didnt know that! NICE i’ll fill up the Delhi page with lotsa pureview shots then haha

        • http://conversations.nokia.com/ Adam Fraser

          I can just see you now, CJ. Wandering around Delhi populating the Nokia Maps pages with your photos. Go for it!

          • http://UnleashThePhones.com/ Clinton Jeff

             Haha you know it :D

          • http://conversations.nokia.com/ Adam Fraser

            You know what, I’m going to do that with my local area, too. I want every POI near where I live to have an image :-D

  • Alex Neko1302

    My wife is Japanese, and we often go in Japan. I have still an old N86, with the new phone Lumia with WP8 can we use the maps to travel in Japan? Will you sell Lumia in Japan? My wife bought a Lumia 610 she can write and read japanese (and this is good because old Nokia phone could use japanese only with hack or slow and expensive programs) but menu are in european language, could she have a full Japanese lumia to use in Italy?

    • http://twitter.com/haikus Pino

      こんにちは @google-eeb2ee5053d9dabbdee66eb114e99c6d:disqus, all the questions regarding languages supported by Windows Phone should be redirected to Microsoft. In my opinion Windows Phone supports Japanese, your wife might find more information here: http://www.microsoft.com/ja-jp/windowsphone/
      Nokia Maps, however, is not exactly available in Japan: the data quality we have there is currently too poor.

  • mikelo90

    this is all very nice, but in Serbia, we still don’t have any use for Nokia maps. Why? Well, go ahead, use Nokia Maps and take a look at Serbia. What do you see? Nothing! Not even the Capital city of Belgrade… It’s probably the only country in Europe that isn’t covered. Nokia, when are we getting your maps?? You can’t expect people to buy your smartphones if they have to buy a separate GPS device because your maps simply offer nothing!

    • http://twitter.com/haikus Pino

      Hi @mikelo90:disqus I feel your frustration but unfortunately Serbia is one of the few countries where we still don’t have coverage yet. But we are working on it!

  • Björn

    Shouldn’t “mobile” be the highest priority? It’s nice that you offer the free maps service (browser) to everybody but to me as a Lumia customer, I only get a tiny subset of the features.

    You had a genuine chance to launch 3d maps on a smartphone but Apple did it first.

    I am long time Nokia customer and I would wish for Nokia to once again focus on mobile.

    • http://twitter.com/haikus Pino

      Hi @disqus_9r96JZaFCU:disqus
      mobile is in our DNA, much more than for other players. However, as you can read in this blog post, the desktop version of maps.nokia.com is also very important. For instance when you are planning a route in advance or when you want to synchronize your favorite places.

      We also believe that 3d maps can be much more useful on mobile if used in a more clever way thank pretty flyovers. You can read more here: http://conversations.nokia.com/2012/10/25/fueling-the-future-of-digital-maps/

  • http://twitter.com/ykasoulides Yiannis Kasoulides

    Hi Pino

  • http://twitter.com/ykasoulides Yiannis Kasoulides

    Are you going to include Cyprus maps in your fantastic application or not? Please explain how you decided not to inlcude my coyntry since other competitors (google android, apple ios) DO

    • http://twitter.com/haikus Pino

      Hi @twitter-920816862:disqus this is not the result of a decision, we are simply working on getting the maps data for Cyprus.

      • Yiannis Kasoulides

        not happy with your answer but thanks for replying anyway!

  • http://twitter.com/ykasoulides Yiannis Kasoulides

    Hey, Sylvain… still haven’t got a straightforworth answer from you regarding Cyprus’s exclusion from Nokia Maps. Guess your maps do not allow us to understand neither where we are, nor how we got there!!! It’s a pity!!!

  • Mario Maqueo V

    Still waiting for maps from Japan … Nokia maps is awesome in other countries, I love being able to use it offline. But why do you neglect Japan? Nokia makes phones compatible with networks around the world, and still…. (same goes for Japanese language input… which can be solved with commercial apps like PlusJ (A.K.A. +J )). I got an N8 2 years ago, and discovered the Japan maps were horrible then… Now I got an 808, because of the awesome camera, but the maps for Japan are still useless and this is frustrating.