Yandex Moving International Maps Over To NAVTEQ
Russia's largest search engine has announced it has purchased map licenses from NAVTEQ, the Nokia maps subsidiary. The digital maps will be used to develop a detailed world map for the Yandex.Maps service, which currently shows a more "artistic" than realistic cartography of international locations (a current map of Helsinki is shown below). NAVTEQ's service includes highly detailed maps of Europe, North America, Australia and developed countries in Asia, and show intercity motorways, urban traffic networks, streets and buildings. Yandex says it will gradually add new content both to its desktop version and to its mobile application that supports all major platforms.
Russia Goes Mapping With Yandex Maps
Yandex has success written all over it when it comes to being the leading search engine and the most visited site in Russia with over 21.5 million average monthly users. When you are this big, there is little reason why you won’t try different things. We have been talking about the Russian Internet company and news has always been different. From providing aspiring entrepreneurs with mentoring at Yandex.Start to funding the same with Yandex.Factory. In its latest release, Yandex announced the launch of Yandex Maps, with map of Moscow and Moscow region being the first to be rolled out earlier.
Russian Mobile Market's Trends
Yandex recently conducted a survey among the users of its mobile maps application. Turns out the majority of the people use the app for keeping track of traffic to avoid being stuck in traffic jams. Searching for addresses and places is only second on the list and most of those requests appear in the afternoon (between 13:00 and 16:00), which means most of the smartphone users live in populous cities and travel to unknown destinations for work or lunch. The report also gave an insight into the mobile platforms market in Russia. Nokia is the current market leader: Symbian phones are currently the most popular in the Russian market. However, their market share has shrunk by a staggering 12% last year. Apple is on the second position and during the past 12 months iPhone's marketshare has risen as much as Nokia's has fallen - by 12%. Finally, Android's popularity is growing even faster than iOS' - it grew by 14% in 2010.
