August 10, 2009, Toronto, Canada,  NAC Geographic Products Inc. announced that  NAC Locator - a customized NAC enhanced Google Maps for mobile devices now runs on the world's most powerful mobile OS - webOS of Palm Pre handsets to provide maps, satellite images, local searches and turn-by-turn driving/walking directions to all locations no matter whether there are street addresses or not. 

  
With a Palm Pre on hand, no matter where you are, you can open all the free web applications: NAC Locator,  NAC Local and  NAC Directions to get street maps, high resolution satellite images, local business searching and turn-by-turn driving/walking directions to all locations in all countries and areas covered by Google Maps, no matter whether there are street addresses or not (houses, buildings, accident locations, camping sites, fishing spots or locations of countries without street addresses at all) and no matter how difficult it is to input the street addresses because of foreign scripts. This is because the  Universal Address is able to efficiently, language independently and reliably specify any location in the world. 

You can get the Universal Address of any business in the world on NAC Local provided that it can be found on Google Local Search, and find the Universal Address of any location in the world on the satellite image maps on NAC Locator which allows you to recenter, pan and zoom the map and then gives you the Universal Address of the map center immediately. 

"This is a breakthrough for people in countries without well established street addresses such as the United Arabia Emerates, Ghana, Mongolia and Nigeria and countries with vast duplicated addresses such as Ireland to get all the location based services," said Dr. Xinhang Shen, president of NAC Geographic Products Inc. "This will also become a great tool for tourists travelling in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Russia, Thailand, Vietnames and India where the addresses are either in difficult scripts or irregularly located." 

Although Google Maps provides street maps, satellite image maps, local business searching, turn-by-turn driving and walking directions services in many countries in the world, it only allows users to specify locations with street addresses or latitude/longitude coordinates while street addresses have many problems:

• Many countries don't have street addresses;
• Street addresses are language dependent and very difficult for foreign people to input;
• More than 99% of locations in the world such as accident locations don't have street addresses;
• Street addresses are also full of variations, often duplicated in multiple locations, frequently changed or too new to be included in the databases;
• Even street addresses are available, they are always very long and not efficient to input.

Though a pair of latitude/longitude coordinates is able to specify any location in the world, they have problems too:

• They require too many digits to specify locations accurate to houses or buildings;
• They may produce large errors if their geodetic datums are not known;
• They are also written with many different formats.

All these make latitude/longitude coordinates nearly useless to consumers and that's why nobody uses them as their home addresses in their daily lives. 

All these seriously restrict the uses of Google Maps. Now these problems are solved by the introduction of the capability of the Universal Addresses in NAC Locator which allows users to efficiently, language independently and reliably specify any location in the world because:

• All locations including houses and buildings in the world have their unique Universal Addresses;
• Universal Addresses are language independent and easy to input;
• Universal Addresses are highly efficient (50% shorter than latitude/longitude coordinates and 80% shorter than a typical street address);
• Universal Addresses are standard without variations;
• Universal Addresses never change and are never outdated;
• Universal Addresses are mathematically equivalent to longitude/latitude, do not need geocoding and don't rely on any databases;
• Universal Addresses can be directly measured with GPS receivers and pinpoited on all maps with Universal Map Grids;

If you have a business trip to Dubai where street addresses are not available, you can ask your travel agency to give you the Universal Addresses of all your interested locations which they can obtain on  NAC Locator too. With the Universal Addresses, you can get all the location based services there as easily as in any other country. 

If you put your Universal Address on all your business cards, websites and advertisements and list it on Yellow Pages, it will significantly help your customers and friends find you with any Universal Address enhanced location based services such as NAC Locator and navigation systems such as  NAC Enhanced Blackberry Maps as it can help them save 80% of key input, eliminate errors caused by duplicated street addresses, new addresses, outdated addresses and missing addresses and avoid difficulty in inputting addresses with foreign scripts. 

Now with a Palm Pre handset, people can easily retrieve a map, make a local business search or get turn-by-turn driving/walking directions everywhere in the world without worries from the problems of street addresses. 

About NAC Geographic Products Inc. 
Incorporated in 1995 in Toronto, Canada, NAC Geographic Products Inc. is a world's leading company in geographic technologies. In addition to the Natural Area Coding System, the company has developed many important GIS software products and provides  real-time geo-services (geocoding, reverse-geocoding, mapping, driving directions, nearby business searching and traffic information) for web applications and wireless location based services for consumers as well as consulting services. 


CONTACT 
Lixin Zhou 
PR Manager 
Tel: +1 416 496 6110 
Email:  lzhou@nacgeo.com 
Web:  www.nacgeo.com