December 8, 2010, Toronto, Canada, NAC Geographic Products Inc. NACMaps for iPhones – a suite of three tools: NAC Locator, NAC Searcher and NAC Router. announced the release of
NACMaps is a feature enriched Universal Addresses and GPS enhanced Google Maps for all HTML5 enabled mobile web browsers to provide locating, searching and routing services supported with detail street maps, high resolution satellite images and terrain maps as well as 3D street views. You can use the software to obtain the Universal Address of any location on the map or with cellphone internal GPS or a street address, a street intersection, a postcode or a pair of lat/lon coordinates, and use the Universal Addresses to specify locations for retrieving maps, making local business search or getting turn-by-turn driving, walking and biking directions to all locations no matter whether there are street addresses or not in the country.
"As the world is getting more digitized and globalized, people need a unified address system to communicate location information and access all kinds of location based services. NACMaps seems a right solution to provide both Universal Addresses and location based services.Users all over the world can use NACMaps to get the Universal Addresses of any locations in the world with phone’s GPS, interactive maps or input of street addresses or latitude/longitude, and use Universal Addresses to efficiently, language independently and uniquely specify locations for powerful Google Maps, Google Local Search and Google Directions on their smartphones. This is especially helpful to people in countries without well established street addresses and countries with difficult addresses, who are now able to obtain door-to-door navigations with their smartphones," said Dr. Xinhang Shen, president of NAC Geographic Products Inc. "Journalists can use their smartphones to obtain the Universal Addresses of events and insert them into their news reports to help readers know the exact locations of events; police officers can use Universal Addresses to accuratelly record accidents and communicate emergency locations."
Although Google Maps provides comprehensive street maps, satellite image maps, local business searching, turn-by-turn driving and walking directions services in many countries in the world, it only allows users to specify locations with street addresses or latitude/longitude coordinates while street addresses have many problems:
- Many countries don’t have street addresses;
- Street addresses are language dependent and very difficult for foreign people to input;
- More than 99% of locations in the world such as locations of accident don’t have street addresses;
- Street addresses are also full of variations, often duplicated in multiple locations, frequently changed or too new to be included in databases;
- Even street addresses are available, they are always very long and not efficient to input.
Though a pair of latitude/longitude coordinates is able to specify any location in the world, they have problems too:
- They require too many digits to specify locations accurate to houses or buildings;
- They may produce large errors if their geodetic datums are not known;
- They are also written with many different formats.
These make latitude/longitude coordinates nearly useless to consumers and that’s why nobody uses them as their home addresses in their daily lives.
All these seriously restrict the uses of Google Maps as well as other location based services. Now these problems are solved by the introduction of the capability of the Universal Addresses in these location based services as:
- All locations including houses and buildings in the world have their unique Universal Addresses;
- Universal Addresses are language independent and easy to input;
- Universal Addresses are highly efficient (50% shorter than latitude/longitude coordinates and 80% shorter than a typical street address);
- Universal Addresses are standard without variations;
- Universal Addresses never change and are never outdated;
- Universal Addresses are mathematically equivalent to longitude/latitude, do not need geocoding and don’t rely on any databases;
- Universal Addresses can be directly measured with GPS receivers and pinpoited on all maps with Universal Map Grids;
If you have a business trip to Dubai where street addresses are not available, you can ask your travel agency to give you the Universal Addresses of all your interested locations which they can obtain on NAC Locator. With the Universal Addresses, you can get all the location based services there as easily as in any other country.
If you put your Universal Address on all your business cards, websites and advertisements and list it on Yellow Pages, it will significantly help your customers and friends find you with any Universal Address enhanced location based services as it can help them save 80% of key input, eliminate errors caused by duplicated street addresses, new addresses, outdated addresses and missing addresses and avoid difficulty in inputting addresses with foreign scripts.
There are also downloadable versions of NACMaps for handsets of Blackberry, Palm webOS and Android.
About NAC Geographic Products Inc.
Incorporated in 1995 in Toronto, Canada, NAC Geographic Products Inc. is a world’s leading company in geographic technologies. In addition to the Natural Area Coding System, the company has developed many important GIS/GPS software products and provides real-time geo-services (geocoding, reverse-geocoding, mapping, driving directions, nearby business searching and traffic information) for web applications and wireless location based services for consumers as well as consulting services.