Microsoft continues to push forward with efforts to expand its mapping, search and location platform. While Bing Maps, formerly Virtual Earth and Live Search Maps, is essentially a Cloud based application covering the entire world, the company does focus on specific markets more than on others. Case in point: Bing Maps China, which along with Bing Maps (US) and Bing Maps UK, gets preferential treatment in comparison with other countries around the world. Chris Pendleton, the Bing Maps technical evangelist for Microsoft, announced that the software giant introduced a massive update to Bing Maps China.

“The Bing Maps China site has updated much of their data, added tons of new data and added a few new features,” Pendleton noted. Usually, the Redmond company measures its Bing Maps updates in multi-Terabytes, and most probably it is the case here, but no actual figures on the size of the refresh were made public.

Instead, Pendleton enumerated a range of new features that were brought to the table with the latest update. Chinese users of Bing Maps will be able to enjoy enhancements associated with the Yellow Pages integration, business images, transit and traffic information, road data, directions, etc. At the same time, Microsoft has also bumped up a notch the resources made available to developers to build on top of the Bing Maps China platform.

Here are the new features of the latest Bing Maps China update, according to Pendleton:

“- Yellow Pages – Over 8 million yellow page listings are now searching from Bing Maps China.
- Business Photos – Hundreds of thousands of business front photos are now available as a part of our YP listings results.
- Transit – Bing Maps China has had transit information for a while now; however, the site now hosts hundreds of transit lines around China
- Road Data Refresh – Updated the entire country with new road network data inclusive of over 4 million road segments
- Traffic – Higher fidelity, wider coverage traffic flow information for more roads around the country
- Performance Enhancements – Route and transit calculation times cut by over 50%
- Signposts (Directions) – visual improvements for driving directions
- Signposts (Highway Exits) - visual improvements for highway exit signs
- Signposts (Border Crossing) - visual improvements for border crossing signs
- Bing Maps China API SDK – updated SDK to support Bing Maps 6.2 for building applications using the Bing Maps China maps and services.”