Insurance is available for almost everything these days and the internet has in part produced a highly transparent and competitive market place for insurance providers. Some insurance is required by law such as car insurance (autoversicherung) or medical insurance (Krankenversicherung) in certain jurisdictions. Other insurance although not legally required is viewed by most customers as a ‘must have’ such as insurance for your home and personal valuable property or insurance for a person’s business interests or property belonging to their business. Then there is a third class of insurance aimed mainly at consumers which is more specialised such as pet policies, wedding insurance or Insurance for adventure holidays or extreme sports. Either in the high street or on the internet, companies set their policy prices and excesses at varying rates dependant on many different things. There also exists a secondary market where insurance brokers sell their services who shop around for products at the behest of their consumer or corporate clients. Underwriters are another group of agents operating in the insurance industry. Underwriting is basically where the risk to the insurer and other risks are calculated and the underwriter decides what the insurer should charge for their services or whether to insure at all. An example from car insurance would be to assess the drivers accident record. Another example might be medical insurance where the patients medical records are examined. The mass take-up of the internet definitely helps the insurance sector maintain its competitiveness and transparency but some customers are even now finding themselves without cover when they most need it. Extreme winter sports insurance demonstrates this well. The industry believes that over 50% of travelers to ski resorts are uninsured and although the other half do, only a quarter of them are actually covered for skiing and snowboarding which are classed by most insurers as ‘extreme sports’ and not included in their basic cover. Many European travelers also think that their E111 is adequate to get them treatment but this is untrue at most resorts. Another recent example of The adaptation of the insurance sector is the relentless price war between rival auto insurance firms that has been largely facilitated by the introduction of price comparison sites. We have to buy car insurance as a matter of law so everyone must purchase it. This causes pricing to be the chief competitive factor. A recent example of a failure in the insurance market was when payment protection insurance (Versicherung) policies (PPI’s) were discovered by the FSA to be completely worthless or having been missold to many customers. This has caused a storm of litigation from customers and firms actually being set up for the single purpose of acting as legal assistants so that customers can claim back any PPI that is covered by the FSA’s investigations. A further dubious insurance product is identity theft insurance that promises to refund the subject for any loss as a result of cyber fraud or identity theft. However most customers do not realise that the bank is in almost all instances liable for such acts.

I love using a web mapping service like google mapquest because it provides a lot of benefits to their users, people usually think that web mapping websites are only good for maps, yes they do have the best maps with high quality images, but there are more benefits that they provide and most users do not seem to understand that they exist, when I say most I am just generalizing, online mapping sites like MapQuest have thousands of clients every single day and all of those clients keep going back to the software because they like to use the tools that Google Mapquest provides like the route planner that provides accurate turn by turn driving directions. I have been using web mapping softwares for a a couple of years now, I use them for many different things, I also travel a lot, I also love driving, so now maybe you understand why web mapping softwares are so important to me. As I already mentioned I am a devoted traveler, I travel at least twice a year, and as I already told you I enjoy driving, and boy do I enjoy driving in places that I have never gone to, if I didn’t use mapquest driving directions I would probably get lost all the time on my trips but thanks to mapquest I don’t even need to hire guides or anything I simply rent a car and drive!