The location business – Nokia’s Where Platform

Recent discussions have turned the spotlight onto the mapping business, which is also the leading theme of the Where conference currently taking place in San Francisco.
But what is the location business actually all about? How are the big players, app developers and consumers participating? What’s all the fuss about licensing, price models and crowdsourcing?

We, at Nokia, have a strong opinion about location. Here’s why.

Location is at the core of how Nokia is going to make a difference to people as they move around in the real world. Nokia is indeed aiming to solve numerous problems:

Being lost and needing to find the way
Travelling somewhere for the first time and needing to know the route
Knowing which bus to catch on a daily commute
Being able to avoid a traffic delay
Understanding the buildings around us
Making plans with friends and family for new adventures
That’s why Nokia is building a location platform to create a digital, predictive model from places and objects in the physical world, including people’s activities. What we call ‘Where Platform’ offers compelling, market-leading functionality to app developers via a set of APIs (available at http://developer.nokia.com/maps) to help them quickly and easily create their own app experiences with location-based functionality.

At the same time, Nokia is building its own apps and services based on the platform, not only helping consumers to effectively navigate their worlds, but to discover new adventures along the way – every day.

“Our Where Platform enables partners, app developers and consumers to have a rich and meaningful experience around location,”

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

In the following video you can see the whole interview in which Christof describes what a mapping platform actually is and how our Where Platform is available on all the screens that matter.


Last but not least, Christof explains that Nokia is mixing professionally-built and validated maps with user contribution and feedback that we collect through different tools like Map Creator.

What’s more, we were also able to get a sneak peek into the future of maps and map platforms. Watch the video to learn all about it and if you have any additional questions, please use the comment section below.