Live Maps India v2 Released (with an API)

The Live Maps India team has released an updated version of their consumer site, as well as (for all your Virtual Earth platform lovers out there), an API for accessing the Indian map tiles in your applications via an AJAX Control or SOAP XML Web Services. Check out the list of new features and data updates.

Street Maps for 8 more Indian cities (Nasik, Indore, Sholapur, Surat, Nagpur, Pimpri/Chinchwad, Chandigarh/Mohali/Panchkula, Panaji/Marmagao) taking the count to 17

• Richer Coverage for Mumbai  (Locality count increased from 600 in V1 to 2000 and count of Points of general interest increased from 10K to 31K)
• Improved Inter-town Road Network within 16 states 
• Landmarks/places of general interest along the road network
• Cities/towns/major localities count increased from 20K to 48K.

Driving Directions

• Landmark based Driving Directions – Indian users are used to the landmark based routing due to many roads/streets having no name but encompassing important landmarks along them.
• Multipoint Driving Directions and Round Trip – Users can specify multiple stop points between start and end point e.g. Hyderabad to Mysore via Bangalore and back to Hyderabad)

Collections Search – In v1, users could create and overlay their information like places of interests, routes, photographs etc. on the map and share it with others. Now with the v2 release:

• Users can search this information.
• It is integrated with other searches i.e. if no result is found for a  business query, collection search will look for it in the content generated by the community and relevant results will be shown to the users.
• A rich set of community content like wikipedia.org , bbs.keyhole.com, , virtualglobetrotter.com etc. is available to the user.
• Users can now explore all the collections available in a given geographical area like city, locality etc.

Ratings & Reviews

B2B API (MONEY!!) – Enterprises and developer community can now create custom map applications for en-IN market.

• Interactive SDK - lets developers see the sample codes in action.
• Virtual Earth Map Control  - developers can integrate detailed maps of Indian cities in their applications.

Virtual Earth Web Services (VEWS)

• Search Service for searching place, business and collection
• Route Service for Route and Find Near By (1-click driving directions)
• Geocode Service for finding lat/long of an address and address for a lat/long (reverse geo-coding)

Live Search and MSN Technologies Org @ IDC

EXPLANATORY NOTES ON THE V2 FEATURES

URL: http://maps.live.co.in

Street Maps: Political Map of India with national roads connecting around 48,000 Indian cities and detailed maps for 17 top cities having important places likes monuments, restaurants, hotels as icons in the maps. Street maps of supported cities have been stitched with Inter-town road network visually and navigationally.

Multipoint Landmark Based Driving Directions: Apart from the standard set of routing features like Intra-city visual driving directions, Intercity integrated routing, One-click driving directions, users can now provide multiple stop points between the start point and end point. Users will see state, city, locality and landmark hints as they drive along the way.  In emerging markets like India, road names are missing quite often. In such scenarios, a nameless road can be identified by the important landmarks and/or locality along the road in the driving directions.

· Click driving directions and specify start as Hyderabad to Mysore and add a stop point at Bangalore, the driving direction will take you through Bangalore. Below screen-shot depicts multiple hints along the way.

Collections: Apart from creating collections of pushpins, custom drawings on the maps, routing etc. and saving it with a Windows Live ID for viewing later or sharing it with others, users can now search / explore collections created by others. Below screen shot depicts example of explore collections in Hyderabad.

Namaste.

CP