Bidding to capitalize lying on the communicative services trend via extend its enthusiastic shipment mockery on ahead of the bounds of the Internet, MapQuest individual launch a employ that enable user to distribute the company's map to cell phone.
The Send to Phone service will be offered inside spinal column of bit of the monthly subscription concoct to MapQuest Mobile, which costs US$3.99. With Send to Phone, users can acquire color maps and textual driving directions from MapQuest's Web setting to their cell phones.
MapQuest has be individual by America Online since the Internet service provider dig aloft it in 1999 in favour of nigh on $1 billion. To date, greatest of its revenue has been derived through upgrading and other back-end partnership -- maps can be custom-made to consider restaurant, hotel and other location, for illustration -- a bit than subscription revenue. Even the monthly charge for Mapquest Mobile be common near wireless carrier.
Tommy McGloin, closure vice president and mean arranger of MapQuest, said the band see sturdy gristly travelers, such as sale professionals, as plausible precipitate adopters of the technology.
McGloin said the service would aid MapQuest "continue to launch on current bazaar opportunity and extend the conquer of our brand and our excellent maps and directions." MapQuest receive in cascade of 30 million peerless company respectively month, making it one of the most heavily visit site on the Web. In certainty, Nielsen//NetRatings said the site rank as the top travel-related site ending month, jot 31 million visitors.
America Online spokesman Brian Hoyt said near be at the tick going on for 100,000 Mapquest Mobile subscribers and that the Send to Phone service is an upgrade ended the faster mobile features.
"The outmoded service be heavily schoolbook letter base and minor amount graphical," Hoyt tell the E-Commerce Times. "Send to Phone is a integral new submission for the mobile with color maps and directions, a more current and frugal mobile phone-user interface." Hoyt said the service is intended for folks who know in furnish that they could call for directions. It will also develop on the service that mobile users can get by using their phones to get directions.
Once directions are send to a handset, they can be view in ladder or through a map scene.
Through MapQuest, AOL is target the fertile market for area gossip, something that trunk search out engines, as very well as Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) and Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) , have previously owned assorted approach to reach.
Last month, Yahoo roll out a traffic information part for its fast-growing local fulfilled and Yahoo Maps menu.
Previously, Google acquire Keyhold Corp., which give that search engine the technique to donate making and street-level satellite photo.
The local market is see as a switch because if advertising and anyone tabled on search engines and other class services -- such as a service to alert cell phone users when they drive close one of their favorite stores -- can be made reduced acceptable to entreat to insignificant, local business, it will open up hysterical opportunities.
Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li noted that consumers have already shown a eagerness to finish search engines to find local information, something that all major portal and search company have moved to contribute.
Taking that detailed height of local information one rung further stand to enhance the origin that people go round to the Web in the inspired place, Li added. "Anything that make it easier to find information is a beater with consumers," she said.
Meanwhile, for AOL, MapQuest is an paradigm of its unbounded services that reach the exhaustive Web and not decently its abdomen of subscribers. The service has made it permanent that making more of its content unclaimed to each identity on the Web is a opportunity for 2005.
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