Nokia brings live traffic advice and geocoding to Bing
As you all know, our partnership with Microsoft goes beyond Windows Phone on our Nokia Lumia smartphones. We're also teaming up with Bing to offer the best location-based services and apps. — One of the results of this partnership …
Context & Ripple Effects
This announcement is the third step in a fast-moving Nokia-Microsoft location alliance. After the February release of a unified map design for Bing Maps and Nokia, Nokia updated Drive, Transport, and Maps in March with offline navigation and transit directions, and now it is supplying Bing itself with two of the hardest-to-build layers of a mapping service: live traffic advice and geocoding.
The relationship is old but has changed shape — back in August 2007 the two companies partnered to put Windows Live services on S60 devices, when Nokia was the platform owner. In 2012 the direction of value runs the other way: Nokia's location assets flow into Microsoft's services, extending the Lumia-Windows Phone partnership into search. The pickup across eight outlets including Engadget, The Verge, and MediaNama signals how closely the location layer is watched as a competitive front.
First-order effects
- Bing gains Nokia's live traffic feed and geocoding engine immediately, closing part of the data-quality gap with rivals' map offerings without Microsoft building the capability itself.
- Nokia turns its mapping investment into revenue and reach beyond its own handsets — every Bing Maps query now depends partly on Nokia data.
Second-order effects
- Google, whose Maps dominance underwrites Android's appeal, now faces a Bing that can match core navigation features through partnership rather than internal spend — raising the bar for what map quality counts as table stakes in search.
- Other device makers and app developers evaluating map APIs see Nokia positioning itself as a supplier to competing platforms, which pressures alternative data providers on both price and feature cadence.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, mapping consolidates around a handful of data suppliers licensing to whichever platform will carry them — location becomes infrastructure sold across ecosystems rather than a moat owned end-to-end.
- For handset makers losing share, monetizing proprietary assets like maps through cross-platform deals becomes a survival template, decoupling the value of an asset from the fortunes of one phone line.
The trend: Mobile map data is shifting from a per-platform asset to licensed infrastructure, with Nokia's location services increasingly powering Microsoft properties rather than only Nokia devices.