Nokia reveals secret of their great maps: UPS and FedEx

Nokia recently published an infographic touting how great their maps were.  They have now revealed part of the secret to their success: an army of drivers drawn from their own cars, but also UPS and FedEx trucks.

"While Google’s driven 5 million miles in Street View cars, UPS drives 3.3 billion miles a year," writes Alexis Madrigal from the Atlantic, which tackled the issue.

"We get over 12 billion probe data points per month coming into the organization," Nokia senior VP of Location Content Cliff Fox told Madrigal. 

All this data helps Nokia identify changing roads and keep their maps up to date.

"To build it the first time is relatively the smaller task compared to maintaining that map," Fox said.

In 2012, they’ve used the GPS data they get to identify 65,000 road segments Madrigal explained.

Nokia Maps are already widely used in in-car navigation, and has been seeing increasing recognition with deals from Amazon and Oracle recently to adopt the maps for their services, and even Apple recommending it to their troubled customers.

Read more at TheAtlantic.com here.

Thanks Charles for the tip.