Live Maps in India

Microsoft has launched Live Search Maps for India that offers access to detailed street maps for nine cities, business listings acros s 29 cities and access to highway networks to 20,000 cities and towns.
The service is the first version of its local mapping service for India with the key features developed by the Microsoft India Development Centre (MSIDC) based in Hyderabad. Available both on PC and mobile, Live Search Maps for India is available on Microsoft's Live Search Service.
Speaking at the launch, Rishi Srivastava, consumer & online marketing operations Head, Microsoft India, said, “Over the last two years, Microsoft has made significant investments into research and development for Live Search, acquired global resources and introduced several new features which we believe are extremely relevant and will deliver great value to our users."
He further elaborated that the key features of the service includes street maps, location search, business listing search, routing or directions for navigation and options for users to print, share collections through email, blogs on Windows Live.
Some of the aspects of Location Search on Live Search Maps are its global relevance, context-awareness, error-tolerance, partial decoding of address, acronym expansion, road intersection and context sensitive global fuzzy search.
He further added, “After recent innovations for Live Search such as image search, video search, local search, xRank and instant answers, we have rolled out Live Search Maps on our search platform to enable people to learn, discover, and explore specific locations in India.”
Live Search Maps on mobile is a direct service to customers without any interference from the mobile carriers. It will deliver 2D Mobile Maps, location search and driving directions and supports adaptive rendering for results from Web, news, instant answers and spaces search.
Gurpreet S Pall, GM, Live Search and MSN Technologies, Microsoft India Development Centre said, “In the near future we plan to add new features such as landmark based driving directions, collections search, options for enterprise customers and developer community to create custom mash-ups, along with satellite imagery and related features for India and key cities."