Slashgeo

The Cartography blog links to a Mercury News article where we learn MapQuest will stop printing paper maps and concentrated on digital presence. From the article: "MapQuest's core business is its online mapping Web site, which gives users driving directions. Though MapQuest is still the leader in the online mapping industry, it has faced growing competition recently from Yahoo and Google. MapQuest attracted more than 52 million unique visitors in August, more than double the number of visitors to No. 2 Google Maps, according to comScore Media Metrix."

The import cartography blog tells us about MapQuest adding aerial photography on their web mapping site. From All Points Blog: "There is no "hybrid" just now and as noted on Import Cartography, the data is from i-cubed. [...] I do like that the button says "aerial imagery" not satellite."

All Points Blog shortly discuss MapQuest rolling out a new API with licensing choices. From the press release: "“It’s our next generation API, the foundation from which we will build our products and services," said Christian Dwyer, Director of Operations for MapQuest. “Designed to be flexible, the new platform translates into higher quality web and wireless applications, lower development costs, and faster time to market while providing all the same great routing, geocoding and feature sets that customers already use on MapQuest.com.”"

All Points Blog's short entry links to an equally short article where a panel found MapQuest is the preferred web location site on mobile devices. From the article: "Yahoo! beat Google, Napster, YouTube and MySpace. Mobile implementations of these brands were found by the panel to be tangibly inferior to the fixed (or full website) implementations. The User Panel awarded user experience ratings ranging form -12 to – 34 index points. Strategy Analytics also found that the MapQuest site is the most sought-after web location on mobile devices followed by Google."

The Map Room covers the Garmin announcement of their API and new website for developers, also at Where 2.0 2007, MapQuest announced a new API for Adobe ActionsScript (press release). From the Garmin press release: "“Until recently, third party websites have been unable to communicate easily with Garmin devices,” said Charles Morse, Garmin’s director of mobile and PND marketing. “This announcement is a win-win for developers and Garmin and it paves the way for more innovative applications. By expanding our developer applications and allowing programmers to integrate Garmin’s leading-edge technology into their sites, we are making it easier for third party content providers to leverage the huge community of Garmin devices by providing tools that will allow them to communicate directly with Garmin systems. This will create new markets for the programmer’s content and services, while generating a grassroots movement that will spread Garmin’s name and technology to consumers through third party websites and content distribution channels.”"

The Map Room shortly discuss the new MapQuest Beta and its blog. From the blog: "The beta’s upgrades are to MapQuest’s user interface, which was, let’s be honest, so last century; the features are outlined here. The problem is, these features have been offered by MapQuest’s competition for years — it’s October 2007, and only now is MapQuest allowing its users to input addresses in a single input box." All Points Blog also offers their own analysis of the new beta and links to a TechCrunch article. See also previous related stories below.

All 72 countries of NAVTEQ's map database will now be available to Yahoo! according to an announcement made by NAVTEQ on GisUser.com this morning. Among the back and forth of "we love you" and "no, we love you more" quotes in the announcement is this from Jeremy Kreitler, director of product management, Yahoo! Maps,

"As we continue to expand the range of sites that integrate Yahoo! Maps, particularly in the mobile and international areas, NAVTEQ's single global specification makes integration simple and allows us to put more of our focus on building great products."

After previous API efforts, MapQuest launched a significant update and Free Edition of their new MapQuest Platform. From the announcement: "We've taken nearly all the features of our platform and made them freely available to developers. We believe that Free Edition provides developers a comprehensive toolset and flexible APIs so they can build well, whatever they want. Developers can choose the programming language of their choice and the features they need to build the applications they want, the way they want." It's worthed to quickly look at everything they offer. See also related stories below.

I admit this is partly a rehash of this January story, but The Map Room offers nice simple graphs on the online mapping services and GPS devices marketshares. In short, MapQuest and Garmin (in the U.S.) are way ahead their competition. From TMR: "MapQuest continued to lead with more than 50 percent of the market, with Google Maps second at 22 percent, and Yahoo and Microsoft trailing. [...] survey conducted in February of the U.S. market gave Garmin a 56 percent share of the consumer GPS market [...]" MapQuest also recently added current traffic conditions to their mapping services, something Google Maps has since over a year. See also related stories below.