Nokia Bullish on LBS Web Applications

September 10, 2009 By: Kevin Dennehy

LBS Insider Newsletter, September 2009

LBS activity seems to be growing in Europe. Nokia, along with its Navteq subsidiary, is leaning forward to introduce location-based social networking applications on Facebook. In another event, such companies as Navigon and Garmin are rolling out new connected personal navigation devices (PNDs) in Europe — even though many in the industry think that technology isn’t a moneymaker in North America.

The bigger location-based services stories, as we leave the summer behind, are coming from Europe with several important announcements springing out of Nokia World 09 in Stuttgart, Germany, and from the large consumer IFA Conference in Berlin. At Nokia World 09, the company announced its Lifecasting LBS with Ovi, which is a partnership with Facebook.

“Although a bit late to the party, Nokia is now fully embracing social media. This point was driven home by having a Facebook exec deliver one of the keynotes, and announcing a new service called Lifecasting, which links location into your Facebook experience,” said Clay Babcock, Primordial vice president, who attended the conference. “It is written using Nokia's web-centric technologies. Nokia has coined the term SoLo, Social Location, to describe the experience, and is building teams to flesh out the vision of your Nokia device being on constant, location-aware contact with your friends. GPS is clearly key to this new product. All of the devices announced include internal GPS with A-GPS support for fast TTFF (time to first fix).”

Nokia says Lifecasting is the first application to let people publish their location and status updates directly to their Facebook account from the home screen of a mobile device. Lifecasting goes beyond just publishing your status — it is about building deeper and closer connections between people. It triggers new kinds of communication patterns, such as sending messages or status updates or even navigating to a friend or a place.

Lifecasting will be installed on the Nokia N97 mini, which is a companion to the company’s Nokia N97.

Babcock, who was an executive with Magellan GPS, said that while Nokia rolled out several devices at its conference, the new N800 caught the imagination of the audience. “The new device is interesting because it is being powered by Nokia's Maemo Linux distribution and there is a general sense that Symbian/S60 has been pushed past its comfort zone with the v5 touchscreen version,” he said. “Partly to address this, Nokia is rushing to get V2 of the OS in the hands of suffering N97 users. The current V1.x software in the devices has been roundly panned.”

He also said that while having a nice operating system is one thing, application support is another. “Launching a new platform from scratch will leave developers with a tough choice in how to spend development and marketing funds,” Babcock said. “Nokia plans to build HTML-CSS-Javascript front-ends on all of their OVI-branded phone applications. First to get the treatment will be Nokia Maps, now rebranded Ovi Maps.

At the conference, Nokia held a worldwide “Calling All Innovators” developer contest to promote the technology. Babcock’s company, St. Paul-based Primordial, won the competition with software that uses Nokia’s new technology to operate its pedestrian/off-road routing technology.

“For all the noise about its dominant market share, Nokia could not shake the public feeling that it was losing ground in the hearts and minds of developers and the public in general. It is in part rooted in its poor performance in the United States, where most of the social networking application have the roots, and also the largest user communities,” Babcock said. “With its current 5 percent to 7 percent market share, Nokia has its work cut out for it.”

In other European news, Garmin rolled out its nuvi 1690 connected PND at the IFA Conference, which is basically the fall CeBIT. The unit, which costs about $500, will have two years of connected service for free, and then a montly renewal fee of $5 per month. Pretty heady stuff in this economy as many manufacturers, such as Magellan, questioned the size of the market for connected PNDs.

Also at IFA, Navigon introduced its first connected PNDs. The 6350 Live, which is about $425--and the 8450 Live at $650. Both units have real-time connected services that are free for three months, then it goes to more than $100 a year. Navigon has made inroads in the European market with its free speed camera monitoring and other features.

TomTom Getting Into Enterprise Biz

Gartner Vice President Thilo Koslowski’s mantra has been that companies offering portable navigation devices need to reinvent themselves, particularly now that smart phones have the same type of navigation capability that they offer. One company, TomTom, seems to be trying to diversify as it TomTom recently established its work, business-to-business division and plans to rolls out enterprise products for fleets.

The company plans to offer a suite of products, some with traffic-capability, for fleets and companies needing to report position of vehicles and equipment. The new fleet products, TomTom GO 7000, LINK 300 and WEBFLEET platform, will go on the market in October.

TomTom isn’t the first PND manufacturer to offer fleet products. ALK Technologies has been offering a PND in Europe to the trucking industry for a few years. The company said that truckers like the larger screens and it seemed like a natural business extension.

ALK, like many other companies, has an iPhone app. Its North American version of the CoPilot Live GPS navigation system has been approved for sale on the iPhone App Store and is available immediately for iPhone 3G and 3Gs for a one-time fee of $34.99.

The company hopes the application will take off in North America as its CoPilot Live has raced to become the No. 1 paid navigation application — and moved into the top 20 of all paid apps in the United Kingdom in just a week after it launched.