I’m surprised to see this happen quite this quickly but I’m by no means complaining. Windows live local now has full NZ support! This means you can now do all kinds of cool things that were once reserved for “bigger markets”. My personal favorite is the driving directions feature (that actually work I might add). It works very simply, you enter the starting address, destination address, and click “get directions”. Very quickly it returns a map with a highlighted path (shortest or quickest) as well as written directions (see an example here). Both of these can be printed, email, or even blogged if you are using live spaces. While Live Local still doesn’t have high res street level images for the entire county it does have support for most major centers and full map support for the rest of us.
My family’s business is now using Live Local every day to give job site directions to our staff. It truly has changed the way we do things over night and will no doubt help reduce our fuel costs; best of all it’s free. So if you are looking for an effective map solution for yourself or your business I highly recommend Microsoft’s Live Local.
[Via Nathan Mercer’s blog]