NAC Geographic Products Inc. announced the release of NAC Google – a powerful Google Desktop gadget that has integrated NAC Enhanced Google Maps, Google Local Search and Google Driving Directions onto one simple user interface, and brings the ease and power of Universal Addresses and Google Maps directly onto your desktop. You can immediately get any of these services not only with lat/lon pairs, street addresses, street intersections, POIs and postcodes/ZIPs, but also with Universal Addresses.
Commonly used street addresses for location based services have many problems. They are always very long and it is time consuming to input them. They are language dependent and it is difficult to type when they contain foreign characters. They are full of variations and frequently result in failures. They are available to very limited locations (<1% of the earth surface) and more than 99% of locations can’t be specified by street addresses.
Enhanced with the capability of the Universal Addresses, users of NAC Google can directly get the maps including high resolution satellite images, seach nearby businesses and obtain turn-by-turn driving directions of any locations in the world whenever they want on their desktop thanks to the efficiency, language independency and geographic complet coverage of the Universal Addresses. For example, you can simply input the short Universal Address: H5Q2 R48Q to get the map of Eiffel Tower in Paris instantly.
A Universal Address is an eight or ten character Natural Area Code (NAC) which can represent both areas and locations anywhere in the world. A two character NAC can specify any area about 1000 km in length and width like a province, a four character NAC represents a 30 km long and wide area (like a city) approximately, a six character NAC is roughly equivalent to any square kilometer area on the earth, an eight character NAC can uniquely identify every house or building in the world, and a ten character NAC can pinpoint any location in the world to the resolution of one meter.
With the Natural Area Codes, people can easily represent any areas and locations from countries, provinces, national conservation parks, cities, stadiums, museums, universities, hospitals, shopping malls to hotels, restaurants, post offices, railway stations, bus stops, docks, street lights, fire hydrants, sewage exits, electric wirepoles, trees; and from locations of crimes scenes, accidents, pollutions, underwater wreckages, news events to locations of your dating benches, BBQ tables, camping sites and fishing spots. Therefore, more and more businesses start including the Universal Addresses on their websites, advertisements, business cards and yellow pages listings such as Campgrounds.
With NAC Google, all main stream media (televisions, radios, newspapers and magazines) now can easily participate in the discussion of tourist attractions, natural disasters, and important events anywhere in the world as effective as online websites by publishing Universal Addresses with their reviews and reports so that their audience and readers can get to the "scenes" instantly on NAC Google. They can also publish hot virtual sightseeing destinations gracefully on their travel sections daily or weekly thanks to the efficiency and beauty of the Universal Addresses.
Source: NAC