But in May, a group of 600 volunteers in Belarus, mostly geography students, teachers and local mapping aficionados, began carefully canvassing the flat, marshy country, logging the names of streets and highways, along with the exact locations of important stops like gas stations, hotels and restaurants.
The catalyst for Belarus’s geographic coming out, so to speak, was not a change of heart by the longtime president, Aleksandr Lukashenko, but the pursuit of a pressing market opportunity by Nokia, the Finnish maker of mobile phones, whose own digital mapping business, HERE, has become one of the world’s most active cartographers.
In just three months, Nokia’s volunteers in Belarus added 22,000 kilometers, or 14,000 miles, of streets and roadways and 11,000 places of interest to the global database at HERE, formerly Nokia Maps. Besides rendering the maps for the millions of users of Nokia’s line of cellphones and Lumia smartphones, HERE’s information powers the maps of Microsoft Bing, Yahoo and AOL, along with the in-dash navigation systems of automobiles made by BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, Hyundai and Toyota.
Nokia is in a race with Google and TomTom, the Dutch maker of auto navigation devices, mapping and traffic data, to create a detailed digital representation of the physical world as a foundation for profitable location-based services, said Martin Garner, an analyst in London who covers mobile services at CCS Insight, a research firm.
So far, the promise of context-based services — suggesting restaurants, traffic routes or other personal endeavors based on location — has been greater than the reality. Nokia is losing money on its HERE division; Google and TomTom do not break out details on location-based sales and profits, Mr. Garner said in an interview.
“We’re in the early stages of mobile context services, which represent a large future opportunity,” he said.
Nokia took the time to fill in the topographic blanks in Belarus, a market with 10 million consumers, after map enthusiasts there organized on VK, a Russian social network that competes with Facebook, and approached Nokia with a request to map their country digitally. The request coincided with demand from phone users in Russia, who are increasingly making the 20-hour drive through Belarus and Poland to Western Europe for business or vacations.
“One of the biggest requests we received for map data in Belarus was from Russia,” said Andreas Herger, a senior manager for location content at HERE, which is based in Berlin and oversees Nokia’s location-based services and mapping business.
After spending $8.1 billion in 2007 to buy Navteq, a Chicago-based producer of geographic data and mapping software, Nokia has expanded its commercial sale of mobile geographic data, producing a series of ever-more-exact and detailed global maps.
In the three months that ended June 30, Nokia increased HERE’s sales of mapping data and services to automakers and other external customers by 8.3 percent to €195 million, or $261 million, from €180 million a year earlier. Research and development expenses of €207 million pulled HERE to a quarterly operating loss of €89 million.
Unlike paper maps, digital maps are not static. They are updated constantly to ensure relevance. The 6,000 employees of HERE in 56 countries, in addition to their volunteers, generate 2.7 million changes each day to HERE’s global map database. Nokia, like Google, also operates a fleet of mapmaking cars to compile data.
The goal, said Stephen Elop, Nokia’s president and chief executive, is to provide a detailed, up-to-date cartographic archive to drive Nokia’s location-based services.
“We’re creating maps that are fresh and accurate down to real-time traffic information and the curvature of the roadway,” Mr. Elop said in response to a written question. “So, no matter where you are — Boston or Belarus — you can make informed decisions about navigating your daily life.”
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/12/technology/nokia-map-project-sheds-light-on-belaruss-roads.html?partner=rss&emc=rss