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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.

NAVTEQ today announced that MapQuest, has expanded its agreement with NAVTEQ. Under the new agreement, MapQuest now has access to all 73 countries in the NAVTEQ map database, as well as future country releases. MapQuest will utilize NAVTEQ data in both its Internet and mobile applications.

You can read the entire announcement at GISCafe.

Last week both APB and TMR mentioned the new MapQuest beta. From APB: "Continuing on its "too little, too late" strategy, MapQuest has tinkered with its home page. [...] Bottom line: if you love MapQuest, these enhancements will be nice, if you use something else, these enhancements don't matter at all." The changes are shown on the MapQuest blog entry. It's worth to take a look at the previous MapQuest stories below, the last beta was less than a year ago, and MapQuest is still having a dominant marketshare.

There is an article currently running on CNet news about a report by analysts Cowen and Co. analysts. Here is part of the report taken from the article : "Since our initial survey in July 2007, innovation at (AOL's) MapQuest and Yahoo Maps has stagnated," and although Microsoft has improved Live Search Maps, it remains the least popular of the four top services, said analysts Jim Friedland and Kevin Kopelman. "Yahoo and MapQuest do not have the resources to keep pace and are forced to aggressively monetize a declining franchise in the maps segment."

Earlier this month The Map Room published an entry named MapQuest: ‘Out of Hibernation’ or Muddling Through? From a SEL interview with MapQuest VPs: "During the last six months, MapQuest has come out of hibernation and is now firing on more cylinders and delivering more products. There were two things going on prior to that time period that explain our low profile. There was considerable effort working on our new back-end technology. It is based on completely new platform technologies that was consuming a fair bit [of] our effort. There was also a bit of miscalculation in that we didn’t do much that was visible to the user. In hindsight we should have been more visible but we knew we needed to get our house in order to do what we wanted to do. This is exemplified by the deliveries in the last four months. Every two weeks for the last four months we have delivered new functionality and features." And just last Friday, APB mentioned two newly added widgets for MapQuest: local tweets and CareerBuilder jobs. See also previous related stories below.

GeoWeb Guru offers a technical overview of MapQuest. From the overview: "MapQuest have fought back and have produced a public API which is available in free/developer and enterprise versions. The API's strongest point is probably the wide range of supported languages (JavaScript, Adobe Flex, Flash, ActionScript, C++, Java, and .NET). All are documented. Documentation and samples are generally good, although it would be useful if the HTML documentation was available online, as well as in ZIP archives. [...] MapQuest also features a native Traffic Control. This displays traffic status reports as an overlay and can be customized in a number of ways. This is a feature that is currently only available on Google Maps and Virtual Earth from third parties." Don't miss the previous related stories below.