On Wednesday, the folks at Nokia introduced “Here,” which is being hailed as “the first location cloud to deliver the world’s best maps and location experiences across multiple screens and operating systems.”
The embattled smartphone giant is ramping up its available array of products and services as a means to reignite growth in new genres of the mobile realm.
By Nokia’s own admission, Here represents a way for Nokia to inspire a new generation of location services and devices that make the mobile experience more personally significant for people everywhere.
According to Time magazine, Nokia didn’t just unveil a brand… “It also announced a dizzying array of Here products, services and initiatives.” They include:
Here.com is a mapping site along the lines of Google Maps;
- A free Here app for iOS should show up in the App Store in a couple of weeks, Apple willing (it doesn”t have turn-by-turn driving directions, at least for now);
- A Here SDK for Android will let companies which partner with Nokia embed its maps;
- Nokia is working with Mozilla to build mapping and location features into the Firefox OS mobile software;
- It’s buying a company called Earthmine which uses roving camera-equipped trucks to capture Google StreetView-like photography;
- It’s also creating 3D maps of the real world which it’s using, at first, in City Lens, an app for its Lumia phones which lets you point the phone’s camera at the world around you and see an augmented-reality information overlay.
“People want great maps, and with Here we can bring together Nokia’s location offering to deliver people a better way to explore, discover and share their world,” says Nokia President and CEO Stephen Elop. “Additionally, with Here we can extend our 20 years of location expertise to new devices and operating systems that reach beyond Nokia. As a result, we believe that more people benefit from and contribute to our leading mapping and location service.”
