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X Marks The Spot: Will Apple Crash Nokia's Party, Again?

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This article is more than 10 years old.

Building digital maps looks hard, and it's probably harder than it looks.

Not as hard as competing with Apple, however. Just five years ago, Apple bounded into the smartphone market with the iPhone -- and Nokia’s business has yet to recover.

Maps might prove a little tougher, however.

While Peter Brondmo, head of concepting and innovation at Nokia’s location and commerce unit won’t say if Nokia is playing a role in Apple’s long-rumored mapping product -- reportedly due next week -- if he were he probably wouldn’t be explaining just how hard it is to make good digital maps.

Nokia has been pushing maps for years. In 2006, Nokia acquired mobile mapping company Gate5. In 2007, Nokia agreed to acquire Chicago-based digital map company Navteq for $8.1 billion. Brondmo came aboard with the acquisition of his social-media startup, Plum. In 2011, Nokia struck a deal with Microsoft that puts Microsoft’s software on Nokia’s phones, and Nokia’s maps in Microsoft’s online services.

So what has Nokia got? Brondmo has a few numbers he can share:

Nokia’s mapping service tracks 80 million points of interest...

….in 196 countries...

...that can be read in 50 languages...

...and are currently available on 170 million devices.

Most telling: Nokia -- like Google -- has a fleet of ‘hundreds’ of cars cruising the streets collecting mapping data. If Apple plans to unveil something next week, there’s a fair chance it's been doing a little groundwork, in plain sight, of its own.