The Live Maps team has released an updated version of their consumer site, as well as (for all your Virtual Earth platform lovers out there), an API for accessing map tiles of India in your applications via REST or and of our Microsoft Maps Controls (Windows, Web, iOS & Android). Check out the list of new features and data updates. 

Street Maps

Added for 8 more Indian cities (Nasik, Indore, Sholapur, Surat, Nagpur, Pimpri/Chinchwad, Chandigarh/Mohali/Panchkula, Panaji/Marmagao) 

• Richer Coverage for Mumbai  (Locality count increased from 600 in V1 to 2000 and count of Points of general interest increased from 10K to 31K)
• Improved Inter-town Road Network within 16 states 
• Landmarks/places of general interest along the road network
• Cities/towns/major localities count increased from 20K to 48K.

Driving Directions

• Landmark based Driving Directions – Indian users are used to the landmark based routing due to many roads/streets having no name but encompassing important landmarks along them.
• Multipoint Driving Directions and Round Trip – Users can specify multiple stop points between start and end point e.g. Hyderabad to Mysore via Bangalore and back to Hyderabad)

Collections Search

In v1, users could create and overlay their information like places of interests, routes, photographs etc. on the map and share it with others. Now with the v2 release:

• Users can search this information.
• It is integrated with other searches i.e. if no result is found for a  business query, collection search will look for it in the content generated by the community and relevant results will be shown to the users.
• A rich set of community content like wikipedia.org , bbs.keyhole.com, , virtualglobetrotter.com etc. is available to the user.
• Users can now explore all the collections available in a given geographical area like city, locality etc.

B2B API (MONEY!!) Enterprises and developer community can now create custom map applications for en-IN market.

• Interactive SDK – lets developers see the sample codes in action.
• Virtual Earth Map Control samples  – developers can integrate detailed maps of Indian cities in their applications.

Virtual Earth Developer Experience

• Search Service for searching place, business and collection
• Route Service for Route and Find Near By (1-click driving directions)
• Geocode Service for finding lat/long of an address and address for a lat/long (reverse geo-coding)

Namaste.