Mapping the world BRIC by BRIC

People love to create acronyms, with various degrees of success. For example, BRIC is arguably more catchy than CIRB, if we were to categorize Brazil, Russia, India and China in terms of economic importance. The acronym (which stands for Brazil, Russia, India and China) was coined by Jim O’Neill, a global economist ...

People love to create acronyms, with various degrees of success. For example, BRIC is arguably more catchy than CIRB, if we were to categorize Brazil, Russia, India and China in terms of economic importance. The acronym (which stands for Brazil, Russia, India and China) was coined by Jim O’Neill, a global economist working for Goldman Sachs, in a 2001 paper entitled “Building Better Global Economic BRICs. The acronym has come into widespread use as a symbol of the shift in global economic power away from the developed G7 economies towards the developing world.

 

Brazil, Russia, India, China have respectively the 10th; 2nd; 4th and 3rd largest rail networks in the world, and the 4th; 8th; 3rd and 2nd largest road networks in the world. This is a world of opportunity for maps, and everyday Nokia helps millions of people in these markets to locate themselves, navigate around and find places nearby.

 

During the last 6 months alone, we’ve done a lot of work. We added and improved map coverage for 400 new cities in India. We drove and field verified 20% more roads in Brazil. We added 50 regions in Russia. We added more than 60 cities in China while updating another 1000 cities with field verified map data.

 

According to McKinsey Global Institute, the 216 Chinese cities in the City 600 alone would contribute nearly 30 percent of global growth between 2007 and 2025 compared with 3 percent generated by cities in India, which is at a much earlier stage of its urbanization. By 2025, Mumbai, Shanghai, Beijing, Delhi, Kolkata, Sao Paulo will all be in the top 10 most populated cities. This means that as the primary navigation provider for these regions, we will be constantly refreshing and expanding our map network coverage in these places as well.

Today, more than 45% of our Maps active users are in these 4 markets. The world is not revolving just around USA any more, the world is not flat. Out of the top 10 spots in terms of place density in our service, Shanghai occupies the top spot, and many other big cities from BRIC countries are in the list.

 

Everyday, Nokia helps to bridge the gap between the virtual and the physical worlds. Thanks to the unique capabilities of our Maps service our users benefit from offline maps and offline search, therefore enabling new segments of users and entire communities closer to the digital map experience and navigation. In short, we connect BRIC people like no other.

 

China, India and Russia are our top 3 countries for place pages views. Our Chinese users have access to Sohu, Ctrip, Dianping, Qunar, Piao, Sina house. In India they use TimeOut, TripAdvisor, Burrp!, Expedia, Bookmyshow, BookUrTable. In Russia, they have Lonely Planet, Gdeetotdom, and more to come. In Brazil, our users have Lonely Planet, Qype, Apontador, TripAdvisor. There we also have a partnership with Telelistas, a leading  listings provider to offer everyday a better service to our consumers as well as reach out to local merchants for them to be present and advertise themselves on Maps.

Source : http://blog.ovi.com/2011/06/20/mapping-the-world-b...