Nokia is still putting the pieces together to make their Ovi Store and Ovi Navigation packages as world class and competitive as possible against other (read: Google) offerings out there and have teamed up with Yahoo to do so. As part of the alliance:

• Nokia will be the exclusive, global provider of Yahoo!’s maps and navigation services, integrating Ovi Maps across Yahoo! properties, branded as “powered by Ovi.”
• Yahoo! will become the exclusive, global provider of Nokia’s Ovi Mail and Ovi Chat services branded as “Ovi Mail / Ovi Chat powered by Yahoo!”
• Nokia and Yahoo! plan to work on ID federation between their services, beginning by making it easy for people to use their Ovi user IDs across select Yahoo! properties to easily access the online content and services they need.

Although it’s good to see that Nokia is dedicated to improving their Ovi branded offerings… but seriously. Yahoo?

[ Links: Nokia, Yahoo, Nokia/Yahoo Press Release ]

Some people can travel by landmarks alone. Some people can be given a list of streets and be just fine. I’m a landmarks type of traveler… as long as you’ve included the street names too.

Microsoft is playing around with some tech that will make Google Maps look like an old world map that Lewis and Clark might have used.

While onboard navigation systems are gaining in importance, maps are still the medium of choice for laying out a route to a destination and for way finding. However, even with a map, one is almost always more comfortable navigating a route the second time due to the visual memory of the route. To make the first time navigating a route feel more familiar, we present a system that integrates a map with a video automatically constructed from panoramic imagery captured at close intervals along the route. The routing information is used to create a variable speed video depicting the route. During playback of the video, the frame and field of view are dynamically modulated to highlight salient features along the route and connect them back to the map. A user interface is demonstrated to allow exploration of the combined map, video, and textual driving directions.

Since this is part of the Microsoft Research endeavors, no clue when this is coming out in even a beta release. But I hope it’s soon.

[ Microsoft ] [ Microsoft Research ]