HERE: the next generation of location services

Mapping and location-based services are integral to Nokia’s future and a key way that we stand out from the crowd.
Nokia’s commitment to building the leading location offering is demonstrated every day around the world in its rich set of location-based apps like Nokia Drive, Nokia Transport, Nokia Maps, Nokia Pulse and Nokia City Lens. Quite literally, Nokia helps people navigate their world. But this is only the tip of the iceberg: as a result of our acquisition of NAVTEQ and other mapping industry players, Nokia was the first to build the world’s most accurate and comprehensive global digital map by sending teams to verify every street in every city.

The next step forward – sensing our world

We can do more with our location heritage and mapping expertise, and go beyond a digital version of the paper map. Maps can be more than getting a person from point A to point B. They should bring places to life and inspire us to sense our world.

This is why today we are introducing HERE, the world’s first location cloud that delivers a location platform, location content and location apps across any screen and any operating system.

Just like digital cameras created possibilities that were unthinkable with analog photography, today’s digital mapping has amazing potential to grow into what we call computational cartography, the ability to produce maps on-demand and tailored to their actual use cases. Today’s digital maps are generic – i.e. always the same, irrespective of the content they visualize. We also believe that this game-changing evolution in mapmaking should be available to more businesses and more people around the world – it should expand beyond cars and beyond Nokia devices.

“Location based experiences need to evolve from an app-centric approach towards a holistic customer experience; consumers want services that are optimized for multi-mobile device use and available on demand, everywhere”, said Thilo Koslowski, VP and Lead Automotive Analyst, Gartner.

What does it mean?

Nokia Lumia and HERE are naturally made for each other, providing the best location experience on a smartphone, but we aren’t reserving HERE just for Windows Phone. Instead, we are opening it up to all devices and operating systems to give everyone, with any type of device, the possibility to recognize and the ability to use the best location platform in the world. This openness is what sets HERE apart from other digital maps in the world. And with HERE, location will be an even more powerful differentiation for Nokia.

We’re making HERE Maps available for iOS in the Apple App Store as a HTML5-based app and introducing HERE Maps API for Android. We will also introduce HERE Maps for Firefox OS and we’ll continue working, together with Mozilla, to give people the best mapping experience on the OS.

We are introducing LiveSight, a technology based on a highly accurate, 3D map of the world, which provides the most precise and intuitive augmented reality experience. Nokia City Lens, developed exclusively for Nokia Lumia devices, is the first application using LiveSight.

Our industrial collection of data is about to leap a chasm with the planned acquisition of earthmine. earthmine offers a complete solution for collecting, processing, managing, and hosting 3D street level imagery.

So stay tuned. There is so much more to say in the coming hours and days and the long-term, and we’re looking forward to your continued feedback as we move ahead. You can also follow us on Twitter: @heremaps.