Nothing moves the memory market quicker than FUD - Andrew Norwood, Dataquest
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Nokia puts the squeeze on Nav4all
NAVIGATION FIRM Nav4all is set to suspend operations tomorrow, following Nokia's decision to not extend the data licence agreement with Navteq.
In a letter to all of its purported 27,625,631 customers yesterday, the company stated that "the global navigation of Nav4all and the Tracking & Tracing will go offline in 3 days."
After several years of development, the company's software is currently available in 56 languages and works on most major mobile platforms including Blackberry, Apple, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, Motorola, Android, HTC, Nokia and LG.
According to the missive, this is was due to the unexpected decision by Navteq not to renew the data licence agreement, and the developer reckons, "it is not possible to implement data from another supplier in our Nav4all systems within the short term."
The news comes hot on the heels of Nokia's announcement that it is ramping up its play in the navigation market by offering turn-by-turn navigation for free on its many of its mobile phones.
Nokia announced plans to buy up Navteq in October 2007 for around $8 billion and wrapped up the deal nearly a year later.
The letter only stipulates that a new data provider can't be implemented in the short term, so Nav4all might well resurface in the not-too-distant future with a new partner, however as Navteq's biggest rival Tele Atlas has been snapped up by the navigation device firm Tomtom, things aren't looking too rosy. µ
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NAVTEQ continues to work across all companies and industries. There is no change to the fact that NAVTEQ operates as a completely independent unit of Nokia. All customers continue to have access to all data under consistent terms and conditions. Unfortunately, we were unable to reach agreement to extend our contract with Nav4All in alignment with these terms and conditions. Our priority is to operate a manner that is fair to all our customers. We are pleased that Nokia recognizes that one condition of this is for NAVTEQ to remain independent. From a NAVTEQ perspective, providing equitable terms and conditions is another.
We've been dealing with Nokia (you can call them Navteq if you want, but it's clear who is calling the shots) for a while, and this comes as no surprise. Over the last two years the license fees have increased dramatically, and a heap of new conditions on the use of the data have been applied.
For example, we are not allowed to aggregate the Navteq data with data from any other provider. The result (and from Nokia's view, the objective) being that we can never provide better coverage or results than Nokia can. If we want to use Nokia's data, we can only use their data.
Unfortunately, we don't have any other option.
Because of the differences in formats etc, it'd cost at least a couple of man-years (design/buid/test) to re-tool things to use TeleAtlas. Plus, there's nothing stopping TomTom pulling the same tricks, in which case we're back to square one but a chunk of change down.
OSM isn't an option because of the poor covereage, lack of consistancy (dealing with all 438 different ways of describing a one-way street burns a *lot* of developer time), and licensing issues (using OSM with the current license in a closed source app is playing with fire, legal-wise).
There's a few other small country-specific providers, but you run into the same problems as OSM - dealing with tons of ways of expressing the same thing, poorly mapped areas or areas simply not mapped at all, and licensing/cost issues.
Fortunately, Nokia hasn't decided that they want to expand into our market yet, so they're happy to take our money and let us survive. But if they change their minds, we'd have to do the same as Nav4all and just walk away when our license gets pulled.
There's an alternative - open street map.
I've just driven to work using routing on a Garmin i3 with a map set for the whole of the uk - and it was perfect. And if I found a deficiency, it could be fixed by tomorrow. The future is here!