Competitors chart fierce challenge to MapQuest

MapQuest also had no equivalent of the service launched by Amazon.com Inc. subsidiary A9.com to offer street-level photos in two dozen U.S. cities. A9’s photos of Times Square show MTV’s studios and the Toys R Us across the street as if you were riding past in a cab.

Nor was MapQuest matching Google Maps’ offering of maps with overhead photos showing, for example the gold dome atop Colorado’s state capitol building in Denver.

Stephen Lawler, general manager of Microsoft’s MapPoint unit, says users want to be able to ask a search engine not only to find places for them but also to provide a rich visual environment to explore on their own.

Mapquest claims it gives the best directions because of its experience: knowing how to present information that is useful, without confusing users by giving them too much.

But its tools and features have changed little in appearance over the years.

Google Maps, by contrast, offers technology — even on mobile devices — that lets consumers more easily move maps in any direction by using familiar drag-and-drop techniques. And Yahoo is testing similar features while adding more types of data, such as live traffic conditions and subway locations.

Google also is adding maps to its shopping site, Froogle. A new feature maps out merchants selling a particular item in a given area and lists price differences.

MapQuest does boast the GPS-enabled “Find Me” service, available for $3.99 to $5.99 a month on some Sprint-Nextel phones and BlackBerry devices — functionality that Google has yet to offer. The service lets users pinpoint their location and use their phones to map what’s nearby. They can share their locations with friends with a text message — and even post turn-by-turn directions to a private Web page.

The company also plans to revive its satellite images by the end of the year, and it’s already letting consumers find local businesses based on their location.

Its “Find It” feature lets users type in a business by name — say, the Double Door nightclub in Chicago — and get a map, phone number and address. And a new $699 navigation device for cars blurts out MapQuest’s turn-by-turn directions to drivers.

MapQuest’s roots date to 1967, when it was the cartographic division of the publisher R.R. Donnelley & Sons Co. before becoming an independent company. In pre-Internet days, the group made the road maps that were distributed free at gas stations as well as the computerized TripTik system for AAA.

MapQuest.com went live Feb. 5, 1996, and started trading shares publicly three years later. McGloin, former chief of AOL’s Moviefone, took over as general manager two years later after MapQuest became a property of AOL’s parent, Time Warner Inc.

McGloin is betting on a boom in wireless map services, though analysts say mass adoption of maps on portable devices is likely years away. He says, without offering specifics, that growth in MapQuest’s paid mobile map services has more than doubled this year.

“You never know when you catch a current within the mobile business,” he said.

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