Thursday, July 2. 2009

NAVTEQ: "The phone will not replace the sat-nav"

Not a new sentiment, though I've mostly heard it from sat-nav providers, not data providers. That comment comes from NAVTEQ vice president, Serge Bussat. He goes on to say, in an interview from Pocket-Link, "It's not about building the map, it's about building the layers on top of it." That says the article means not data layers, but apps. The future for NAVTEQ in sat-nav? In-car solutions. As the article points out, most folks commenting suggest phones will indeed push stand alone sat navs aside.

I'm not sure why it matters to NAVTEQ where its data end up. And, I'm not sure why a spokesperson would say, "it's not about building the map" unless it plans to get out of the data business and into the app biz. And, of course, the company is getting into the app biz, at least a bit, with its online and mobile phone directions/traffic apps.

Discussions in an MSNBC article that highlighted missing information in a satnav highlight the importance of the added layer. This was official NAVTEQ response from Navteq spokesman Bob Richter:

“The information for travelling on the I-66 is correctly referenced in the Navteq [sic] map and is made available to our customers. We regret we cannot comment on the actual system performance, as it is our policy not to speak on behalf of our customers who make other necessary decisions in the final system development once we deliver our data.”

- Pocket-Lint

In other NAVTEQ news:

NAVTEQ Vice Chairman (and former CEO) Judson Green is joining the board of human resources consulting and outsourcing company Hewitt Associates Inc.

- press release

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Satellite Navigation at 09:08 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

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