Nokia leads the way with indoor mapping

Where do you go after you have mapped over 37 million kilometers of roadways worldwide? Easy. You go inside.
At last year’s spring CTIA show, we launched Destination Maps, our latest product. Destination Maps takes the highly accurate mapping coverage you have come to expect from Nokia, and moves it inside to continue the orientation, routing and guidance beyond the great outdoors.

Indoor venues are continuing to grow larger and more complex, making it difficult for all of us to find our way easily and quickly to our desired need. Imagine being in an unfamiliar city and needing a football. With Destination Maps, you can search for the football, find out the stores that carry it, know exactly where to park or which door to enter, and get the fastest walking route directly to that store. Incorporating Destination Maps into location apps or onto a specific device eliminates the stress and the unnecessary time spent reading floor plans or guessing which store carries the football.

And, it’s not just shopping malls we have mapped. Since the launch of Destination Maps, with 214 shopping malls in the US, we have steadily increased our coverage each month, both in venues and countries around the world. To date, we have mapped 4605 venues – shopping malls, retail stores, airports, and transit hubs – in 38 countries with more being added every month. This is over a 2000% increase in just 16 months. Wait until you see what happens in the next 16 months.

While other providers claim to have powerful indoor map offerings with a large number of venues mapped, Destination Maps are not just the average 2D floor plans that can be viewed on a device. Our indoor map content enables a full end-to-end experience, making the exploration and discovery of indoor places more realistic. Further, Destination Maps include a wealth of interior map attributes, like escalators, floor levels, ATMS and restrooms. Including these important points allows for more advanced and accurate guidance and routing.

Like most of our products, Destination Maps is optimized to work seamlessly with our other Nokia Location Content offerings. Dynamic content such as movie listings, flight times or transit schedules can all be added to these indoor maps, providing even further value to end-users.

As always, Nokia offers Destination Maps across many devices and PNDs. Already, Bing Maps has implemented this location content into their maps with the announcement of Bing Venue Maps last month. Nokia Maps will follow soon.

Given that people worldwide spend 87-90% of their time indoors, helping make routing and indoor discovery faster and easier is a natural next step. Drive navigation is fairly mature – indoor mapping is the next untapped frontier of mapping, and you can expect Nokia to continue to lead the way.