Virtual Earth, An Evangelist's Blog : Live Search Maps China

The Live Search Maps China site just got some improvements. Innovation is burning like wildfire worldwide.

Driving Direction – New!

Country-wide (mainland China) road coverage
Inter-city (e.g. Beijing to Shanghai) and intra-city (e.g. Tiananmen to Bird's Nest in Beijing) directions
Multi-point directions (e.g. Tiananmen to Bird’s Nest to MS office)
New data pipeline for China driving data

Transit Direction

Improved performance by reducing engine average response time by 27% without quality degradation
China is now the first VE market to ship both Driving and Transit Directions

VE China API

Real-time traffic:

Added coverage for Shanghai - We now provide real-time traffic for Beijing and Shanghai.

Send-to-mobile

Switched to new SMS channel with better coverage (GSM and CDMA) and higher success rate (>97%)

Local Search

Improved Coverage for Map Answer and Phonebook Answer
Map Answer triggered by query pattern “location + map (地图)”, e.g. search for “北京地图”
Rich UX in Phonebook Answer with map thumbnail (currently at 5% flight), e.g. search for “上海 ATM”
Phonebook Answer triggered by location detection

Data updates

I need to track down all these international sites. We're going worldwide so fast!

Virtual Earth, An Evangelist's Blog