mapquest

Comcast announced Thursday that it has rolled out its DOCSIS 3.0 service to four more markets: Chicago, Atlanta, Baltimore, and Ft. Wayne, Indiana. The company now offers wideband services in 10 cities. Comcast claims it now reaches 20 percent of its customer base with the addition of those four markets and by the end of December, 10 million homes and businesses in each of the cities will be able to sign up for the service.

MapQuest was busy Thursday announcing the launch of two new widgets for Twitter and CareerBuilder users. According to the company, its Twitter widget on … Read more

MapQuest today got a few useful additions: You can now save personal data in your My MapQuest account -- like your home and work addresses, your mobile numbers, and car's mileage. The first two features make it easier to create a route involving one of your typical hangouts and send it off to a phone. The third helps you with your expense reports or taxes.

Other updates dropped on MapQuest users recently: You can drag a map around on-screen (finally), and grab and move a route if you want to change it (the "Highway 101 Always Sucks" … Read more

MapQuest will begin showing business reviews from start-up Yelp on Thursday, part of a plan to expand from just a mapping site into a go-to hub of local information.

Through the deal with Yelp, MapQuest will get better locally specific content, and Yelp will get more Web site traffic from beyond tech-savvy places such as Silicon Valley that currently are familiar with the site, said Christian Dwyer, MapQuest's senior vice president and general manager.

In addition, the AOL site will add sports information to its MapQuest local site, said Mark Law, MapQuest's vice president of product development. The … Read more

Google Maps has expanded its lead in features in the last year, a move that will help the company vanquish rival services in mobile search, Cowen and Co. analysts said Monday.

"Since our initial survey in July 2007, innovation at (AOL's) MapQuest and Yahoo Maps has stagnated," and although Microsoft has improved Live Search Maps, it remains the least popular of the four top services, said analysts Jim Friedland and Kevin Kopelman. "Yahoo and MapQuest do not have the resources to keep pace and are forced to aggressively monetize a declining franchise in the maps segment.&… Read more

In talking to Mark Law, the new VP of product development for AOL's MapQuest, I was surprised to learn how powerful the service still is. To my mind the formerly leading mapping system is a trailing contender against Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Ask.com, but apparently MapQuest is still in the game as a leading Web site, with 48 million monthly visitors to the site, not to mention the users of the service who see it embedded on partner sites.

Law walked me through updates to the service that will be rolling out as an optional beta test to … Read more

The link between online mapping services and global positioning devices is growing stronger.

Starting Tuesday, people using Google Maps to plan trips will be able to send location data to their Garmin GPS systems, the companies announced on Monday. The feature, called "Send-to-Garmin", will eliminate the need to re-key route information into GPS devices.

Likewise, Garmin has inked a deal with Mapquest to send mapping information from that online service to Garmin's GPS products. The service is expected to launch in April. Mapquest already lets people send mapping information to mobile phones.

Roughly one year ago, Garmin … Read more

Garmin and MapQuest want others to share the geospatial wealth.

In conjunction with the Where 2.0 conference in San Jose, Calif., both companies on Tuesday announced moves to share application programming interfaces (APIs) that let programmers take advantage of their products. For years, products or service APIs were often kept secret, but nowadays it's vogue for companies to share them in an attempt to become a vital part of a larger ecosystem.

Garmin, which makes GPS (Global Positioning System) devices that tell people where they are, announced a number of free and licensed APIs that permit sophisticated interactions … Read more

General Motors and MapQuest have teamed up on a new service enabling drivers of GM's OnStar-enabled cars to use the Web to select and store destinations for their turn-by-turn guidance when out on the road. The new service, called OnStar Web Destination Entry, will allow drivers to find up to five destinations on MapQuest's Web site, then send them to the OnStar system directly from their computers.

The theory goes that these destinations can then be accessed while out on the road by connecting to the OnStar service center and selecting a stored destination via OnStar's automated … Read more

We knew it was going to happen one of these days; with all this talk about telling everyone where you are, from Twitter maps to Dodgeball, it was only a matter of time before a mainstream instant-messaging service decided to integrate location-based features. Well, now we have it. Sort of.

A company called Skyhook Wireless, which appears to specialize in location-based Wi-Fi data services, has built a plugin for AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) that will allow you to share your location through Skyhook's Wi-Fi Positioning System (WPS) -- kind of an alternative to GPS. (Skyhook also created the Loki … Read more