Yahoo! Maps move indoors with HERE Venue Maps

Our friends at Yahoo! continue to improve and expand on their maps offering, powered by HERE. If you go to maps.yahoo.com today, you’ll notice some big changes to the way in which venues are represented.

The company has now integrated full venue maps for places like shopping malls, travel interchanges and sports stadiums, letting you see inside such locations and continue to map your route indoors.

The new maps have also been given Yahoo’s gorgeous purple and lilac livery and look amazing, as you can see.

And it’s a good time for us to reiterate why venue maps are important.

When you plan a trip or arrange to meet someone somewhere, a lot of the time that place will be indoors: being able to see and share a map of that location makes complete sense and can save a lot of time wandering around in circles once you’ve arrived.

When you’re in a venue, being able to quickly find facilities like cash machines and toilets can make big difference to your happiness. Venue maps from HERE include all these and allow you to see across multiple floors.

The average person spends 90 per cent of their time indoors. If HERE is able to help make those hours better by extending the technology it uses to map outdoor areas, then that’s a huge benefit.

Meanwhile, the number of venues mapped by HERE continues to rise at a ferocious pace. When we first reported on the arrival of venue maps for HERE in 2012, there were over 4600 venues in the system. Now, the total figure stands at 75,000+ buildings, with many more being added on a regular basis.

Are you using indoor maps on your devices?