deCarta Adds China to Global Deployment of Location-Based Services

location based services

Latest deCarta (formerly Telcontar) platform delivers new, custom performance features to meet regional needs of rapidly growing Chinese Internet and mobile LBS market.
deCarta, announced the launch of its Drill Down Server (DDS) 4.1. The newest version of the LBS industry's most widely deployed geospatial software platform adds China map data and a host of customized performance enhancements that enable deCarta customers to deploy dynamic location-enhanced applications that meet the region-specific needs of China's burgeoning market. China presents a significant opportunity for today's wireless, Internet portal and telematics companies. According to the Ministry of Information Industry, April 2006, there are more than 400 million mobile phone users and an increasingly growing demand for in-car and personal navigation systems. As well, there are over 110 million Internet users; second only to the United States. "With China's Internet and wireless markets booming, there's no better time to enter this market," said J. Kim Fennell, President and CEO of deCarta. "China's mapping and address data are very different from its US and European counterparts. Traditionally it's been difficult to deploy location-based solutions that meet the specific needs of that market. Our newest software platform solves these challenges by enabling users in China to interact with location-based services in ways that are intuitive and most relevant to their society. At the same time, we continue to provide the benefits that have been the hallmarks of our success: speed, scalability and the ability for our customers to apply their specific identity and brand to their application."In addition to the building blocks of consumer mapping and routing programs—map rendering, driving directions, geocoding and proximity search — the latest version of deCarta's DDS platform adds a number of new performance features designed to meet China's cultural needs. These features include support for Chinese characters, the ability to look up streets and points of interests and most especially, the ability to conduct landmark-based navigation — which is the preferred method of navigation in China as many streets are not identified by name. Supporting the release of DDS 4.1, deCarta is also releasing map data of China from NAV2 formatted in deCarta's highly efficient and patented Rich Map Format (RMF), a compact and optimized data format that provides efficient map data access for fast route calculation and map display.The deCarta DDS platform also enables customers to customize location-enhanced applications with their own branding, logo and proprietary content as well as provides a high-level of user customization for greater service differentiation. With DDS 4.1, developers can deliver Web-based and mobile location-enabled applications to the Internet as well as to mobile devices such as cell phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), personal navigation devices (PNDs) and in-vehicle telematics. The DDS platform, which already processes more than 2 billion mapping and routing transactions per month for Google Local, Yahoo! Local, Ask.com and the company's other Internet, mobile and telematics customers, provides scalability with the proven capacity to handle the large influx of traffic expected as location-based applications are deployed in China.