New mapping service to cover whole of UK

192.com technology will cover every street in the country

192.com is to launch an online mapping service at the end of the month covering the whole of the UK.

The service will cover every street in the country, compared to rival services that reach around 80-85 per cent of UK streets.

Dominic Blackburn, 192.com technology director, says this differentiates the site for business use such as home delivery services.

The web site will be licensing the mapping technology to business users following its launch on June 26th. Blackburn expects widespread adoption of 192.com store finders on retail websites as well as corporate customers integrating mapping on their websites.

The site includes the highest resolution arial photography on the web. Arial photography on the site has one metre per pixel resolution for the whole of the UK and 25 cm pixel resolution for key urban areas.

The mapping technology deployed by 192.com merges mapping and aerial photography in a flash format when zooming in and out.

Blackburn said: ‘Our ariel photography covers the whole of the UK in a much better quality than you can get anywhere else on the Internet.’ He says this will provide a range of benefits and uses from insurance companies looking at risks to buildings and property developers.

Black says the biggest challenge was to develop something better than Google maps.

‘We opted to use a flash client to make sure we were able to operate on any sort of platform and browser compared with Google’s which only operates on three or four of the major browsers,' he said.

Blackburn says another challenge was the ‘huge terabytes of data’ that the web site has to organise.

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