The current consortium of High-Tech Gruenderfonds, SeedFonds Bayern and SpaceTec Capital Partners teamed up with ClusterFonds StartUp! and now massively extends the initial Seed-investment into a Series-A round. Taking United Maps to a next level, the investors substantiate United Maps' technology of algorithmically conflating vector data sets, thus manifesting its potential in a quickly growing market for professional Geodata and Geoservices.

Deploying its technology, United Maps GmbH optimizes quality, density and contents of vector maps. Market leading base maps from Navteq or Tele Atlas - well known from navigational devices made for vehicle traffic - are algorithmically combined and merged with supplemental cartographic data sets. The resulting new and comprehensive mapping products are perfectly fit for mobile and location based use cases.

United Maps premiers completely integrated geometries and fully compatible and routable data sets enabling multimodal routing: seamless navigation across all means of transport, from car to public mass transit and pedestrian options. Content rich United Maps offer new perspectives to LBS (location based media and services), business process optimizing and planning.

With GPS capabilities increasingly being available on mobile devices and smartphones, mobile navigation and mapping will become a mass market trend. Latest estimates see over 40% of German mobile users deploy some form of navigation on portable devices. As better and more informative vector maps are essential for a quick adoption, United Maps sees itself well positioned in a thriving market environment.

After only six months of production, United Maps recently introduced 'UM-DE': a comprehensive, nationwide vectormap in scales up to 1:2'000.

United Maps' initial product 'UM-DE' is ready for delivery:

With its highly detailed feature set, United Maps targets mobile usecases and location based media and services that need professional quality maps beyond conventional standards.

• Germany on a nationwide and hyperlocal scale of 1:2,000
  
• based on Navteq primary data and fully navigable
• massively enriched content and original features:
• additional streets, pathes and squares, public buildings
• building footprints and exact point addresses
  
• public mass transport
• touristic, cultural and many more quality assured POIs
• All geometries and attributes remain intact and fully navigable.

The complete set or any areas and subsets of metropolitan regions are available now.
Further worldwide destinations are scheduled.

As we promised a fully qualified pre-release of our mapping product UM-DE to quite a bunch of industry players, we're working on a nice and unique visualisation to complete the proposition.

Here are snapshots of the current work in progress. Dimmed, soft coloring, rather greyish but clear enough to enable meaningful location based media and services on top.

Public transport is added today, some artefacts are removed. We learn a lot within this process - both for the data gathering process and the strict editorial quality control we apply.

Here it is - Metacarta's revamped Geosearch News - a chip pass to all regional, local and hyperlocal content dealers offering news search by geography. Via Adena Schutzberg from AllPoints Blog, quote:

MetaCarta's "demo" provides what may be the best geographic search tool for the largest changing digital data database of unstructured content on the planet.

Play around with it - drilling deeper into the feeds gives a crisp foretaste on how location based media could work.