Phone Cards

Recent discussions have turned the spotlight onto the mapping business, that is additionally the leading theme of the wherever conference presently happening in point of entry.

But what's the placement business truly all about? however square measure the large players, app developers and customers participating? What’s all the fuss concerning licensing, worth models and crowdsourcing?

We, at Nokia, have a robust opinion concerning location. Here’s why.

Location is at the core of however Nokia goes to form a distinction to folks as they move around within the globe. Nokia is so reaching to solve various problems:

Being lost and eager to notice the approach

Travelling somewhere for the primary time and eager to grasp the route

Knowing that bus to catch on a daily commute

Being able to avoid a traffic delay

Understanding the buildings around North American nation

Making plans with friends and family for brand spanking new adventures

That’s why Nokia is building a location platform to form a digital, prognostic model from places and objects within the physical world, together with people’s activities. What we tend to decision ‘Where Platform’ offers compelling, market-leading practicality to app developers via a collection of genus Apis (available at http://developer.nokia.com/maps) to assist them quickly and simply produce their own app experiences with location-based practicality.

At a similar time, Nokia is building its own apps and services supported the platform, not solely serving to customers to effectively navigate their worlds, however to find new adventures on the approach – each day.

“Our wherever Platform allows partners, app developers and customers to have a made and meaningful  expertise around location,”

Says Christof Hellmis, vp Map Platform, explaining the advancements in Nokia’s location business.

In the following video you'll see the complete interview within which Christof describes what a mapping platform truly is and the way our wherever Platform is on the market on all the screens that matter.

Last however not least, Christof explains that Nokia is mixture professionally-built and valid maps with user contribution and feedback that we tend to collect through completely different tools like Map Creator.

What’s additional, we tend to were additionally ready to get a sneak peek into the longer term of maps and map platforms. Watch the video to learn all concerning it and if you have any extra queries, please use the comment section below.

We’re not the sole those who picked informed the thought of running a March Madness tournament, of course. the oldsters at laptop computer Magazine are commercial enterprise the same campaign supported the thought of finding people’s favorite smartphone.

We were very happy to search out 2 of our kids – the Nokia Lumia 900 and Lumia 710 – within the cluster of sixteen phones elite by the editors for thought.

We were delighted once the community voted each those phones into the ‘Aristocratic Eight’.

And we were completely over the moon after they got through to the ‘Penultimate Four’.

Then they were each within the final. Terrific news however it left U.S. with a difficulty. UN agency we tend tore we to vote for? the massive, beefy Nokia Lumia 900 is top-of-the-range with all the options, however the Lumia 710 has won plenty of fans since launch. several argue that its a lot of acquainted, ‘phone-sized’ dimensions create it a stronger suited their hands and pockets.

We had to let the individuals decide. And currently they need.

Winner of the laptop computer Magazine Smartphone Madness tournament is… the Nokia Lumia 900 (by a rather decisive 4225 votes to 454).

While [*fr1] the workplace is breaking out champagne, the opposite [*fr1] has burst into tears. Would you have got voted for the Nokia Lumia 900 or the Lumia 710?

Like last year, when we first introduced Nokia Maps 3D, Nokia is this year taking part in the annual Where Conference. Organized by O’Reilly and focused on the location business, this conference is gathering people from all over the world to exchange information about how to build apps, develop strategy and distribute location-aware products.

As we explained earlier, Nokia has a particular interest in supporting the Where Conference through our gold sponsorship, because we aim to be the “Where” company. While today’s internet is well organized around the “What” and the “Who” via search engines and social networks, we are striving to provide answers to the “Where.”

We recognize that there is an appetite for location-relevant information, which proves to us that the concept of hyper-local has never been more essential to people today. At the same time, people are buying, owning and using multiple mobile devices. And these devices are getting smarter – firstly, because they are increasingly connected to the cloud and secondly because they are sensor-rich.

From NFC for payment in stores and on transport, to more advanced sensors that interpret if you’re running as opposed to taking a bus, all the way to sensors that connect with devices like wrist band heart rate monitors. These sensor-rich devices provide us with a whole range of data that helps us better understand people’s behavior in order to identify patterns and trends.

Key to being able to provide this insight is the Nokia’s Where Platform, a learning engine fueled by two types of data: reference data and activity data.

Reference data is an index of the world around us and it enables routine location functions like search, routing and navigation. While activity data uses sensors to understand how people interact with their devices and apps.

Together, these two types of data power our Where Platform and enable us to create digital, predictive models from places and objects in the physical world and consumer’s activities.

This Where Platform offers compelling, market-leading functionality to customers via a set of APIs to help them quickly and easily create their own app experiences with location-based functionality.

Built on the world’s most accurate mapping and navigation assets (in over 190 countries, with over 50 languages), our location platform serves 24 million route requests daily, 147 million map tiles daily and over 1 billion search queries annually.

Because the Where Platform supports a wide set of operating systems and programming languages (including HTML5 for maximum reach), many customers including Yelp, Yahoo! and, more recently, Groupon are already using it to power their location-based apps and experiences.

If you are interested in understanding more about our vision for the location business and you are visiting the Where Conference, you can attend Gary Gale’s (Director of Places, Nokia Location&Commerce) session on Tuesday, April 3rd at 1:40pm in Yerba Buena Salon 10-11.

But there’s more! Nokia has its own booth (#208) at the Where Conference to show all our location based apps, from Nokia Maps to Nokia Drive and Nokia Transport. We’ll also be showcasing Nokia Pulse, which is currently in beta, our web offering at http://maps.nokia.com and the mobile web companion for iOS and Android devices at http://m.maps.nokia.com. You can meet experts who will be happy to answer all your questions.

March Apps Madness kicked off just a few weeks ago and it has been a fun competition. Each day, we’ve seen big apps go up against independent applications and the voting has been fun to watch unfold.

We’ve seen 32 applications divided into four categories go head to head in a competition that drew an amazing amount of votes, lots of interest from developers, and of course support from all those involved. In all, there were almost 15,000 votes registered for all apps over the course of the competition.

Thanks to all those who made App Madness a reality, from the developers that tweeted and blogged about their apps in the various rounds and most importantly to the the fans that voted day in and day out.

Without further ado, let’s unveil the big winner!

The winner of the 2012 March Apps Madness is Nextgen Reader!

Nextgen Reader enables you to read your news from Google Reader on Nokia Lumia phones. This full featured news reading application supports Live Tiles, allows you to share articles on Twitter, Facebook or read them later on services such as InstaPaper and Read It Later.

A fully featured news reader, Nextgen Reader allows for custom themes, has YouTube support and even supports Offline mode – something that comes in handy quite often.

We’re proud that an independent application won this years competition and Conversations readers should keep an eye out for a full interview with the author of Nextgen Reader in the coming weeks!

Here’s the final version of the bracket, so you can see how it all played out.

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The best place to search out sensible low cost phone cards is on the web as there square measure several sensible sites that carry international phone cards. Or if you\'re not a friend of buying on-line you\'ll perpetually head to your native shop or discount club and raise the cashier if you\'ll see their phone cards available. sensible luck and bear in mind, choose CAREFULY!