Interleaving Nokia and Microsoft mapping services

There are plenty of ways the Microsoft Nokia tie up in phones could go wrong, from Nokia spoiling the frankly delightful Windows Phone metro interface with Symbian-style clunkiness (Nokia is allowed to customise the interface the way no OEM can), to a backlash by disappointed Symbian developers, to sheer delay (the NoDo update has allegedly been ready since late 2010 and carriers and operators may be the hold up - something Microsoft was specifically trying to avoid).

But there are some (pardon me for saying it) synergies that could make this a great way forward for both companies. And one of the big opportunities is integrating the Navteq/Ovi maps service with Bing Maps - something that Bing is uniquely placed to handle.

Using Navteq's mapping information with Google Maps on a putative Nokia Android phone would be problematic; if OEMs want to get the Android Marketplace on their device, Google decreed last year, they'd have to take the Google location and navigation service (so Google could use the phones as sensors to improve its maps and traffic services as well as for the potential ad revenue from location services). But Nokia is already gathering that data from its own phones and using it for Ovi Maps and Navteq, which claims to be a 'world leading traffic information provider'. Two years ago, Henri Tirri, the head of the Nokia Research Center told me that he only needed 5% of the people on a road to be sending back location information for him to do 99% accurate real-time traffic modelling - and in California he thought it would be even lower "I believe with 3.5% of the people on road [contributing] we can predict perfectly real time traffic flow".

Navteq has some fascinating data of its own, which it offered the developer partners who use its maps as Natural Guidance last year; as well as streets and postcodes and points of interest, it's been recording things like which buildings are made of brick and which Starbucks are visible from the road and which roads go under bridges so it can generate more natural directions. We're waiting for satnav that tells us to turn left at the pub, right at the Starbucks, left under the bridge and stop just past the yellow shop…

We're expecting the partnership might end up with Bing saving some money on the data it buys from Navteq, but because of its architecture, Bing Maps can take better advantage of the traffic information, the map data, the streetside photos, the 3D lidar-generated models and the building details than Google. As Blaise Agüera y Arcas, the architect of Bing Maps, put it last year, Bing Maps isn't a single database of location information; it's a "spatial canvas".

Bing Maps, he explained, "is not in itself an app; it's a surface to which all sorts of different things can bind - whether they're content or user images or entities. By bringing all those things onto a common surface we provide a way to weave them together into scenarios. We provide away for information from one source to provide context for another source." Bing Maps is "the canvas that registers everything together," and "a surface on top of which apps can live".

Before Bing Maps, he worked on Photosynth; where "we hoped to mine user photos from the Web ad based only on that sea of photos be able to reconstruct significant parts of the world - there's something frankly naïve about that vision when I look back," he admitted. Even with a building that's been photographed countless times, you can't recreate the whole building. Take the Angkor Wat temple; there are lots of pictures of people standing in the doorway at the front and the doorway at the back and barely enough images to connect the two doors as part of the same building.

The solution to using information like photos is to build up from the detailed information and down from an overall structure at the same time. Arcas rather poetically described Bing Maps as a trellis with grapes hanging from it; the grapes are richer and have more detail, but the trellis puts them in the right place (and makes sure there's at least basic information for all the spots where there aren't any grapes yet).

That's how Bing Maps can go almost seamlessly from an aerial image shot at an oblique 45 degree angle to photos of the buildings on the street in Streetside view - it's all tied together using the geometry and 3D model from Virtual Earth to find the dominant plane of each view and interpolate any information that's missing from a photo, locking together the structured imagery with the detailed pictures. That's an architecture that's ready to take the Navteq info and say 'this is a picture of a pub built of brick' the same way it takes pictures from Flickr and business details from Foursquare and the Oodle listings of flats to rent.

Google Maps does massive amounts of machine learning to generate its map data and it incorporates a lot of sources, but not in a way that makes that base information available to third-party tools on the site; it's not as easy as it is with Bing to add information on top of Google Maps and see it 'in place' on the Google site (mashups take the Google Maps information and build on top of it on other sites - that's a fundamentally different architecture). The more information sources Bing Maps gets, the better the maps are and the more the apps you can run on the Bing Maps site get to work with. It's a synergy Google is struggling with (as you can see from all the arguments over placement with Google Places). Without Google's dominant position, Bing Maps has had to be more creative in the way it works with partners and data and that makes it much easier to take the Navteq and Ovi information and build a better mapping system from them. Certainly, it makes more sense than either partner throwing away the mapping service they have - something that any Nokia Android deal would have had to address.

Mary Branscombe