Maporama Incorporating Virtual Earth with LBS Offerings

location based services

Jun 28, 2007
GPS World
Microsoft Corp. and Europe's Maporama International said today that they have completed a major technological and commercial partnership in the mapping market, based on the software giant's Virtual Earth.
The Virtual Earth mapping platform, which combines roadmaps, satellite and aerial imagery, plus bird's-eye and 3D views, will be transparently incorporated into Maporama's platform, making it available to its corporate customers. Maporama, based in Paris, provides a number of location-based services, including store locators and fleet management GPS navigation, as well as a collection of related integration and development application programming interfaces (APIs). The company has some 500 corporate customers worldwide.
"Maporama covers all corporate mapping needs and offers: for marketing departments, turnkey solutions or solutions for integrating maps, itineraries, and searches and for functional departments, the solutions connect to business applications—ERP, CRM, SFA, etc.," stated Daniele Drahy, Maporama director of operations. "For mobile users, Maporama also ensures full access to information with GPS navigation solutions, trip planning assistance for sales teams, and fleet management.
"Thanks to Virtual Earth, the Maporama service offer now includes fundamental mapping data enabling our customers to design new types of applications," Drahy continued. "Several industries (real estate, tourism, assistance, retail, call centers, banking and insurance) have expressed an interest in multi-dimensional visualization (bird's eye and 3D views) in additional to traditional mapping."