IranMap

Germany-based mobile navigation supplier Jentro launched this week a new brand called FoxNav in the United Kingdom. This time the German company is looking at direct sales to consumer through handset makers application stores. Available on Blackberry App World and Android Market,and soon to be on the Microsoft Windows marketplace, the off-board navigation system will be offered at the very low price point of GBP 19.99 for one year unlimited navigation in the UK and GBP 39.99 for Western Europe. These price points include traffic information and speedcam warnings.

“This is a complementary business to our existing B2B offer”, explained Param Singh, CFO at Jentro in a phone interview with GPS Business News. He was however not very talkative about launching these new solutions in other markets than the UK.


The last chance for Jentro?

After raising $29 million from US venture capital firms in June 2007, Jentro hired a US management based in Chicago while the development was in Munich and core business in Europe. In addition to this strange choice, Jentro had many issues with its customers. Motorola was a major client in the mobile space and its mobile navigation ambitions went south, in addition the other customers pursued in the PND space (for connected services) – namely Mio and Magellan – never or half-launched their connected PNDs. In the US the company never succeeded to convince a wireless operator on a market owned by NIM and TeleNav. In Europe sales to operators never materialized while competitors Telmap, Appello and Wayfinder signed up customers after customers. In the end none of the existing business was able to sustain the company which finally drastically reduced its headcount at the beginning of 2009.

For Jentro FoxNav might be the last chance to make a real business out of the navigation market.

Yesterday on the Google blog, it was announced that Google is indeed tracking and analyzing the traffic patterns and movement info of the Google maps users when they opt to show their location to Google, and expanding it nationally to US highways and arterial roads when data is available. By analyzing thousands or millions of phones with map and posted speed limit data, they should be able to start to assemble a traffic picture that starts to build accuracy when overlaid on top of a base set of data (to fill in the gaps).



“When you choose to enable Google Maps with My Location, your phone sends anonymous bits of data back to Google describing how fast you’re moving. When we combine your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around a city at any given time, we can get a pretty good picture of live traffic conditions. We continuously combine this data and send it back to you for free in the Google Maps traffic layers.”

The crowdsource sharing capability is available on the MyTouch 3G and the PalmPre; not the iPhone which doesn’t support the crowdsource feature. See the Google Blog post for more information and a way that you can opt out if the whole idea of being anonymously tracked by google freaks you out too much.

More at Google blog

Google on Tuesday invited US motorists to share their progress — or lack thereof — with other drivers through the Internet giant’s online mapping service linked to smart phones.

Google Maps is being enhanced this week to combine feedback from individual drivers with other traffic information to let people know which roads are likely to get them to their intended destinations the quickest.

“It takes almost zero effort on your part,” Google Maps product manager Dave Barth said in a message on the California technology titan’s website.

“Just turn on Google Maps for mobile before starting your car, and the more people that participate, the better the resulting traffic reports get for everybody.”

Google Maps software for mobile devices will use satellite positioning features in smart phones to gather anonymous information regarding how fast people are moving along different roads, according to Barth.

“Crowdsourcing traffic gives us a way to harness bits of location data from our users and give it back to them in a form they can use to make decisions that affect their free time, their pocketbooks and the environment,” he said.

Google Maps users with concerns about strangers keeping track of where they drive can opt out of the program, according to the Internet firm.

“We understand that many people would be concerned about telling the world how fast their car was moving if they also had to tell the world where they were going, so we built privacy protections in from the start,” Barth said.

Information regarding vehicles remains anonymous and no records are kept regarding start and end points of journeys, according to Google.