Today is a big day for the international side of Microsoft has bought UK mapping portal MultiMap, a partner of Mappoint/Virtual Earth for five years. They are also announcing the launch of Live Maps in China.
Multmap will be rolled into Erik Jorgensen’s Virtual Earth organization. It has a large API business and this will immediately bring the combined, paying customer-base of Microsoft’s mapping platform to almost 4000. MultiMaps’ API most recent addition is Static maps, for downlevel browsers. There is no word whether the Virtual Earth Platform will replace MultiMap’s — my guess is that it is a question of “when” not “if”.
Sean Phelan, founder of MultiMap, spoke on the issues of mapping a global world at Where 2.0 2007. He will not be staying with the company post-acquisition.
I find Multimap’s maps to be quite busy, not nearly as clean as VE’s or Google’s. I really like their Wikipedia layer – I hope that feature makes a migration over to VE.
Multimap seems to be more about gaining API traffic than a technology or consumer traffic acquisition. Justin Osmer, a Microsoft spokesperson, told me “Multimap is a mapping leader in the UK and now combined with us Virtual Earth and Live Search Maps is the number one online mapping platform worldwide.” Paying customers are hard to beat — especially in a business as costly as mapping.
VE is also announcing their launch in China today. No 3D data that I can see, but it does have street data and a transit layer for some cities. I’ll have more information on that later as it becomes available.