May 19, 2009, Toronto, Canada,  NAC Geographic Products Inc.  announced that  NACMaps - a NAC enhancement for  Blackberry Maps has been released and available on the  Blackberry App World of Research In Motion (RIM), to make Blackberry Maps work everywhere in all its covered geographic areas no matter whether there are no street addresses such as in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and no matter whether there are no standard street addresses in English as in many Asian countries thanks to the power of  Natural Area Code (NAC) which is able to efficiently and language independently specify any location and area in the world.

Although Blackberry Maps is the most comprehensive mobile map application in the world, providing locating, nearby business searching, turn-by-turn driving directions and navigating services in 67 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, Middle East, Carribean and North America, it can specify locations only with street addresses which have many problems:

• Many countries such as UAE don't have street addresses, which makes users no way to specify destinations on the Driving Directions of Blackberry Maps even though it has a perfect street network database;
• Many countries and areas such as Hong Kong don't have standard street addresses in English, which makes Blackberry Maps frequently fail;
• More than 99% of locations in the world such as accidents don't have street addresses, which makes Blackberry Maps not work in all these locations;
• Street addresses are also full of variations, often duplicated in multiple locations, frequently changed and too new to be added in databases, which makes Blackberry Maps either fail to find or find wrong locations;
• Even street addresses are available, they are always very long and not efficient to input.

All these seriously restrict the uses of Blackberry Maps. Now NACMaps inserts two items to the menu of Blackberry Maps: NACLocating and NACRouting to allow users to specify any location with the Universal Address (i.e. eight or ten character NAC). The advantages of using Universal Addresses instead of street addresses to specify locations are:

• All locations including houses and buildings in the world have their own Universal Addresses;
• Universal Addresses are language independent and easy to input;
• Universal Addresses are highly efficient and 80% shorter than a typical street address;
• Universal Addresses are standard without variations;
• Universal Addresses never change without addresses outdated or too new to be found;
• 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 and pinpoited on all maps with Universal Map Grids;

People may argue that longitude/latitude coordinates can also accomplish all these works. But have you ever asked yourself "why don't people use longitude/latitude in their daily life?" The answer is simple: longitude/latitude coordinates need more than 15 characters to distinguish individual houses and buildings that are too long for our brain to handle. That's why nobody tries telling you the longitude/latitude of their home although GPS is already very popular. Universal Addresses have kept all the functionalities of lon/lat, but overcome its inefficiency so that both human brains and machines can easily handle accurate locations. 

Enhanced with the capabilities of Universal Addresses, Blackberry Maps now works in all its covered countries. Regardless the existence or completeness of street addresses, you can easily specify any destination on the map, search its nearby businesses and get the driving directions to it.

• If you have a business travel 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 find on  the Universal Address Lookup Maps. With the Universal Addresses, your Blackberry Maps will work there as perfectly as in any other country.
• If you have found a good fishing spot or injured in skiing, you can use the NAC enhanced Blackberry Maps to obtain your current Universal Address and tell it to your friends or emergency services. Then they will be able to find you immediately with any NAC enhanced map applications.
• If you are a parking enforcing officer, you can use the Universal Address obtained from this NAC enhanced Blackberry Maps to record the exact location of a wrongly parked car on the ticket to avoid disputes on the location.
• If you are a journalist writing a story, you can simply insert its Universal Address into the story. No matter it is sent as an email or as an email attachment, your reader will see the Universal Address automatically become a smart tag on Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft Word. A click on it will instantly opens the detail map of the location without any hyperlinking efforts thanks to the  NAC Smart Tag Technology.
• Police officers can use the Universal Address to report a traffic accident or a crime site, Road inspectors can use Universal Addresses to report potholes, and so on.

Universal Addresses of any location in the world can be obtained on  Free Geocoding Service and  NAC Enhanced Google Maps. Universal Addresses of businesses can be found on the  NAC Enhanced Google Local. You can use Universal Addresses to get the driving directions on the  NAC Enhanced Google Driving Directions. 

Once you know your Universal Address, you should put it on all your business cards, websites and advertisements and list it on Yellow Pages to help your customers and friends easily find you with NAC enhanced navigation systems and maps because Universal Addresses can help them save 80% key input, eliminate errors caused by duplicated street address, new address, outdated address and missing address and avoid difficulty in inputting the address with foreign characters. 



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 

Keywords 
Universal Address, NAC, Blackberry, Address System, Blackberry Maps, RIM, Research In Motion, Driving Directions, Google Maps, Google Local Search, Navigation, Search Engine, Mapping, Street Address, Geocode, Geocoding, LBS, GPS, Location Based Service, Navigation, Locating, Tracking, Searching, Wireless, Cellphone, Map Grid, Geography, Geographic Technology, Geographic Coordinates, Longitude, Latitude, Property Identifier, E-911