Nokia launches photorealistic 3D models of metropolitan areas in Ovi Maps

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Nokia launches photorealistic 3D models of metropolitan areas in Ovi Maps

Espoo, Finland - Nokia today announced photorealistic 3D models of metropolitan areas for the web version of Ovi Maps. This immersive and free feature adds a new dimension to the Ovi Maps experience and enables people to explore places in a completely different way.


Introduced at the Where 2.0 conference in Santa Clara, California, Nokia's 3D offering is the most realistic available and goes beyond rendering limited areas and buildings by making entire cities, including suburbs, available for exploration.


Starting with a bird's-eye view, people can scale up and down and move around objects such as buildings and trees from their desktop, experiencing a virtual but super realistic perspective of new places. Road-level imagery completes the experience with a detailed 360-degree panoramic view of streets.


With the beta service featuring 20 metropolitan areas, the number of photorealistic 3D models will increase over time. The road-level imagery is now available for five cities, Copenhagen, Helsinki, London, Oslo and San Francisco.


With the goal of bridging the real and virtual worlds on both mobile and web, Nokia's Ovi Maps for mobile covers 180 countries, nearly 100 of them navigable in 53 languages. Ovi Maps on the web covers 180 countries, 93 of them navigable, in 29 languages.


"Ovi Maps' photorealistic 3D models of metropolitan areas are a significant step towards our vision of bridging the real and virtual world, with location-based services being the glue," said Michael Halbherr, senior vice president, Nokia.


"With Ovi Maps on mobile, Nokia has shown its ability to transform a useful feature into a mass market experience that lays the foundation for innovation in location-based services beyond traditional routing benefits. With its efforts to expand the service to the web, Nokia is proving that it offers a holistic service," said Daryl Chiam, Principal Analyst, Canalys.


Nokia's photorealistic 3D models of metropolitan areas initially include:


- Barcelona


- Boston


- Chicago


- London


- Copenhagen


- Florence


- Helsinki


- Las Vegas


- Los Angeles


- Madrid - Miami


- Milan


- New York


- Oslo


- Prague


- San Francisco


- Stockholm


- Toronto


- Venice


- Vienna

Nokia sign agreements with SINA and Tencent

Tweet Pin It Nokia sign agreements with SINA and Tencent

Beijing, PRC - Nokia announced today that it has signed agreements with China's two leading Internet service providers, SINA and Tencent. Both SINA and Tencent services will be seamlessly integrated with Nokia's Ovi Maps in China, inviting millions of people to share their location with friends and communities through Ovi Maps on their favorite social network.

Users of SINA microblog and Tencent's online community (QQ) will be able to share their location through Nokia mobile devices, check-in to locations and be able to upload location based content such as recommendations and comments of restaurants, shops and movie theatres. The first location based services for SINA and Tencent customers through Ovi Maps are planned to be available during the first quarter of 2011.

"This collaboration with SINA and Tencent marks a significant milestone, as we bring together mobile internet and location based services in China. More than 250 million people are using a Nokia device in China and with this partnership, we can help people share their location with their friends and communities through Ovi Maps on their favorite social network," said Phil Kemp, Vice President, Services, Nokia.

"With Nokia's Ovi Maps and Sina's location based services we will be able to offer SINA netizens new dimensions to their social networking. The mobile internet in China is growing rapidly and location based services will increase user generated content, making services more interactive and fun to use," said Wang Gaofei, Vice President of SINA.

"Location and context are becoming the core elements of mobile social networking services and we are proud to partner in this area with Nokia, the leading player in the mobile industry. We believe that with Nokia's Ovi Maps, we will offer more added value to the users of QQ Mobile Online Services, "said Liu Chengmin, President of Mobile Business, Tencent.

SINA Corporation is a leading online media company and mobile value-added service provider for China and for the global Chinese communities. With a branded network of localized websites targeting Greater China and overseas Chinese, SINA provides an array of services, including region-focused online portals, MVAS, social networking service (SNS), blog, audio and video streaming, album, online games, email, search, classified listings, fee-based services, e-commerce and enterprise e-solutions

Tencent, founded in 1998, is one of China's largest and most used Internet services portal offering Internet value-added services, mobile and telecommunications value-added services and online advertising. Tencent's leading Internet platforms in China - QQ (QQ Instant Messenger), QQ.com, QQ Games, Qzone, 3g.QQ.com, SoSo, PaiPai and Tenpay - have brought together China's largest Internet community, to meet the various needs of Internet users including communication, information, entertainment, e-commerce and others. As of September 30, 2010, the active QQ user accounts for QQ IM amounted to 636.6 million while its peak simultaneous online user accounts reached 118.7 million.

Source:Nokia