Multimap.com
Encyclopedia
Multimap.com was a United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 based provider of mapping and location-based service
Location-based service
A Location-Based Service is an information or entertainment service, accessible with mobile devices through the mobile network and utilizing the ability to make use of the geographical position of the mobile device....

s. It was acquired by Microsoft in 2007 and merged into Bing Maps in 2010.

History

Multimap.com was founded circa 1997. It offered street maps and door-to-door travel directions on a public web site. Other offerings included aerial photographs
Aerial photography
Aerial photography is the taking of photographs of the ground from an elevated position. The term usually refers to images in which the camera is not supported by a ground-based structure. Cameras may be hand held or mounted, and photographs may be taken by a photographer, triggered remotely or...

, local information, and business services. Services were also offered through its partners, including accommodation, restaurant and train-ticket booking. It also sold historic and aerial photograph prints. In 2004 the public web site regularly delivered more than 160 million page views per month and received more than 7.3 million unique users per quarter.

The Geo microformat
Geo (microformat)
Geo is a microformat used for marking up WGS84 geographical coordinates in HTML. Although termed a "draft" specification, this is a formality, and the format is stable and in widespread use; not least as a sub-set of the published hCalendar and hCard microformat specifications, neither of which is...

 is used to provide a Wikipedia map overlay generated from the official database download. This is used to browse geotagged
GeoTagging
Geotagging is the process of adding geographical identification metadata to various media such as a geotagged photograph or video, websites, SMS messages, QR Codes or RSS feeds and is a form of geospatial metadata...

 articles.

In December 2007, the company was bought by Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

.

In 2010 it was merged into the larger Bing Maps service. The Multimap name is due to be removed from service by the end of 2010.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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