Press Release
Vicinity Corp.'s Web-Based Driving Directions Service Is Now Live On Customer Web Sites
About Driving Directions
Driving Directions is a new and powerful component of Vicinity's
YourTown™ family of GeoEnabled services for web publishers,
corporate web sites and web advertisers. Driving Directions provide
users with a set of instructions that includes a mini map, or
maplett, for each turn to guide them from their point of origin to
their intended destination. While other companies offer driving
directions on the web, they are only from city-to city, and some only
offer limited door-to-door directions within a limited selection of
cities. With Vicinity's Driving Directions, users can request a
preferred route such as: the fastest/shortest, or freeway/surface
streets, or walking/biking routes and door-to-door driving
instructions will be given accordingly. A complete map is provided
at the conclusion of the turn-by-turn directions with the chosen
route highlighted.
Live on Customer Web Sites
Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com)
announced today its expanded Yellow Pages service, a feature of
Vicinity's YourTown family of GeoEnabling services, that lets users
not only search for a specific business from Vicinity's database of
16 million listings, but to "browse" for the business closest to them
using logical, intuitive categories. In addition, Yahoo! Yellow
Pages will now include the ability to produce maps with driving
directions to any chosen destination. Yahoo! will demonstrate this
expanded service today, including the Driving Directions
capabilities, at the Yellow Pages Publisher's Association's annual
conference in Florida. The Yahoo! Yellow Pages Services will go
on-line for public use October 7, 1996 and will be located on
Yahoo!'s front page for immediate access. "Yahoo!, in partnership
with Vicinity, has created one of the Internet's most popular
interactive Yellow Pages," said Jeff Mallett, senior vice president
of business operations at Yahoo! "Continuing to improve upon
Yahoo!'s already popular services reflects our ongoing committment to
providing users with the best resources and content available today."
Travelocity (http://www.travelocity.com) is a leading travel web site that offers consumers "one-stop" shopping for planning their vacation and business travel. It recently added Driving Directions to its selection of services; the directions can be accessed easily in the Destinations & Interest section on Travelocity's web site. Travelocity enables its customers to research travel destinations, airline schedules and fares, hotel and car reservations and more. "By adding the Driving Directions to our vast library of travel services we are enabling consumers to pinpoint venues or activities quickly, easily and accurately," said Neal Checkoway, president and CEO of Worldview Systems Corporation, co-creator with SABRE Interactive of Travelocity. "Customers needing directions to a particular retailer, or for the business/vacation traveler unfamiliar with a new city, can now search for a location closest to them and obtain a detailed route with both text and visual maps."
About YourTown
Vicinity's YourTown family of services provide web publishers,
corporate web sites and advertisers with a geographically oriented
choice of information services that can be customized to the look and
feel of individual web sites. These services include GeoEnabled
directories that can integrate millions of business sites, landmarks
and other locations that define an audience's community of geography
or interest; proximity searches that enable users to find a specific
business nearest to their home or business location, and door-to-door
driving directions that provide in-depth directions to a targeted
destination, advertising functionality and more.
About Vicinity Corporation
Established in August of 1995, Vicinity Corporation is the leading
supplier of GeoEnabled, or geographically oriented, content and
services for the World Wide Web. The company licenses its YourTown
family of services to leading web search and directory services,
travel services, Yellow Pages providers, newspapers, and other
businesses who brand the Vicinity services with their own company
look, feel and attitude. Vicinity also offers MapBlast! its free,
interactive mapping service that enables end-users to generate a
digital map for U.S. locations, embed it in a Web page or email it to
others. Vicinity has expanded into the European markets to offer
high quality, detailed, interactive, web-based maps for most of
continental Europe. For more information, users can access the
company's web site at http://www.vicinity.com, or contact its
corporate office at 408/732-5940.
YourTown, MapBlast! and GeoEnabled are trademarks of Vicinity Corporation.Vicinity is a trademark of Vicinity Corporation. All other names are properties of their respective holders.