Microsoft Launches Live Search Maps for India

Users can now access Detailed Listings and Street Maps for 9 Cities, Business Listings across 29 Cities and access to highway networks to 20,000 Cities and Towns, on the PC and Mobile

Mumbai, November 3, 2008- Microsoft India today launched Live Search Maps for India that offers users access to detailed listings and street maps for 9 Cities, business listings across 29 Cities and access to highway networks to 20,000 cities and towns. Live Search Maps for India is on Microsoft’s Live Search Service, thereby allowing users to search for geographical information, places of general interest and business listings both on the PC and Mobile at http://maps.live.co.in and http://m.live.co.in. This is the first version of its local mapping service for India with the key features developed by the Microsoft India Development Centre (MSIDC) based in Hyderabad.

Speaking on the launch, Rishi Srivastava, Consumer & Online Marketing Operations Head, Microsoft India, said, “We are proud to launch Live Search Maps for users in our country. This is the first version of Live Search Maps for India and Microsoft will continue to introduce new features and improvements in the near future to meet emerging needs of consumers. Over the last two years, Microsoft has made significant investments into research and development for Live Search, acquired global resources and introduced several new features which we believe are extremely relevant and will deliver great value to our users. Live Search Maps will be accessible on the PC and the mobile, thus ensuring that users get the information they need anytime”.

Users can now access on their PC or Mobile …..

Addresses, roads, localities, landmarks, detailed street maps and places of general interest like monuments, restaurants, hotels and other places of interest across 9 Indian cities – Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, Ahmedabad, and Jaipur.
Business listings across 29 major Indian cities such as Mumbai, Delhi, Pune, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Ahmedabad, Kolkata, Agra, Allahabad, Amritsar, Bhubaneshwar, Chandigarh, Cochin, Coimbatore, Jaipur, Jalandhar, Kanpur, Lucknow, Ludhiana, Mangalore, Nagpur, Nasik, Patiala, Patna, Rajkot, Surat, Vadodara and Vishakapatnam.
Basic geographical information on the national road network of India across 20,000 cities and towns.

Key features of Live Search Maps for India include Street Maps, Location Search, Business Listing Search, Routing or Directions for Navigation and options for users to print, share collections through email, blogs on Windows Live. “After recent innovations for Live Search such as Image Search, Video Search, Local Search, xRank and Instant Answers, we have rolled out Live Search Maps on our search platform to enable people to learn, discover, and explore specific locations in India”, said Rishi Srivastava.

Some of the unique aspects about Location Search on Live Search Maps are its global relevance, context-awareness, error-tolerance, partial decoding of address, acronym expansion, road intersection and context sensitive global fuzzy search.

How Can Live Search Maps Help?

Short city names such as “Blr”, “Hyd” ”Dl” will take you to the city of Bangalore, Hyderabad or Delhi. While you are in a particular city, say, Bangalore, “MG Road” will show the MG Road on the map of Bangalore and other MG Roads in India as suggestions.
While you are in Hyderabad, the query “Bangalore Golf Course” will place the pushpin on the “Bangalore Golf Course, Bangalore” at their exact position on the map while showing other golf courses in India as suggestions.
“Airport, Delhi” will lead to the “Indira Gandhi International Airport, Gurgaon Road, New Delhi, Delhi” at the exact position on the map.
If a user poses the location query “#643, Janu’s Residency, CMH Road, 100 ft road, Blr” it will return with the suggestion “Chinmaya Mission Hospital Road, 100 Feet Road, Indiranagar, Bangalore, Karnataka, India”.
If user is in Bangalore and queries for “MG Road”, he will get “MG Road, Bangalore”. If the user searches for “Begumpet”, he or she will get “Begumpet, Hyderabad”

Several key innovations and features of Live Search Maps India were developed at MSIDC based on their research and understanding of the search needs of users in India; thus ensuring local relevance and customization of the product, Live Search Maps on Mobile is a Direct To Consumer (DTC) service without requiring one-on-one relationships with the mobile carriers. It leverages the Live Search Maps for India to deliver 2D Mobile Maps, Location Search and Driving Directions and supports Adaptive Rendering for results from Web, News, Instant Answers and Spaces Search.

“In the near future we plan to add new features such as Landmark Based Driving Directions, Collections Search, options for Enterprise Customers and Developer community to create custom mash-ups, along with satellite imagery and related features for India and key cities,” said, Gurpreet S. Pall, General Manager – Live Search and MSN Technologies, Microsoft India Development Centre.

“Live Search Maps India was created after carefully studying search and map information needs of Indian consumers and will continue to be improved in terms of coverage of cities, details of locations, search relevance and overall user experience”, added Gurpreet.

Live Search Maps India is powered by the Microsoft Virtual Earth platform, draws information through multiple local vendor sources such as NavTeq and uses Government of India approved data.

Partner NavTeq provided Microsoft the data for the maps on Live Search Maps in India. “We are proud to be working with Microsoft in its launch of Live Search Maps for India. Together we have brought Live Search Maps India to consumers in a manner that provides value to the users by delivering quality data that is relevant to them. And it is notable that Live Search Maps has the approval from the Government of India. We are proud that Microsoft has recognized the depth and quality of our India map data, and we look forward to continuing to play a role as we both expand our presence in this key market,” said Rich Shuman, senior vice president Asia-Pacific Sales, NavTeq.

Notes for the Editor
1. Microsoft recently introduced new features for Live Search in India such as Image Search, Video Search, Local Search, xRank, Instant Answers, etc to enhance the search experience for consumers. (Please refer cd attached)

2. Microsoft has made significant investments into research and development for Live Search for different global markets besides acquiring resources and strengths over the last two years. Some of these acquisitions include Fast Search & Transfer (Ent. Search), Multimap.com (Location-based service), Jellyfish.com (Reverse Auctions), AdECN (Online Advertising), aQuantive (Digital Marketing), ScreenTonic (Mobile Advertising), TellMe Networks (VOIP), DeepMetrix (Web Analytics), Massive Inc (In-game advertising), MotionBridge (Mobile Search) and Power Set( Natural Language Search).

3. Microsoft launched the first ever mobile search offering in partnership with Hutch (now Vodafone) in India in 2006. Over the years Microsoft has introduced new services with Vodafone such as Local Search service & Click-to-Call services in 2007 and SMS Search in 2008. Microsoft today offers Windows Live, MSN India and Live Search services across different mobile operator networks.
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About Consumer Online International
Consumer & Online International (COI) is Microsoft’s new global sales and marketing organization to create a seamless experience for consumers across PCs, Phones, and the Web across 22 countries, including India. COI drives all sales, marketing, content & programming, business development, and operations across Windows Vista, Windows Live, Windows Mobile, MSN, Live Search, advertising sales, and other services. COI was created to deliver great end-to-end experiences to consumers around the world, in close cooperation with a broad network of retail and online partners, advertisers, and publishers.

About Microsoft India Development Center
The Microsoft India Development Center (MSIDC) at Hyderabad plays an important role in contributing to innovation and building products – it is fully integrated with the key product families of Microsoft and is one of the largest MS software development centers outside Redmond. MSIDC commenced operations in 1998 with about 20 people under the leadership of Srini Koppolu, who is now the Corporate Vice President and Managing Director of MSIDC. Today it has around 1500 employees with end to end engineering responsibility for several major Microsoft products, features or technologies. MSIDC has contributed to the filing of 220 patents for Microsoft in the last four years.

About Microsoft India
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (NASDAQ “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software for personal and business computing. The company offers a wide range of products and services designed to empower people through great software – any time, any place and on any device. Microsoft Corporation India Private Ltd is a subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation USA. It has had a presence in India since 1990 and currently has offices in 16 cities – Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Chandigarh, Chennai, Coimbatore, Hyderabad, Indore, Jaipur, Jamshedpur, Kochi, Kolkata, Lucknow, Mumbai, Nagpur, New Delhi, and Pune.

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