Turn By Turn

By now we’re all familiar with navigation applications on mobile devices, PND’s, and desktops. Typically it’s the person using the navigation application that does the following – of directions, that is. These days, however, there’s been a paradigm shift where navigation applications are adapting to people’s lifestyles and supplying above and beyond pure navigation information. Real-time, or live, content such as weather and local movies and showtimes has now become a high-demand feature, along with ways of streamlining application use such as voice input.

NIM is showcasing its answer to this demand at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain next week. In its latest releases NIM’s AtlasBook Navigator features user favorites such as traffic updates and alerts, place messaging (a social networking feature), movies, local events, weather, and gas prices. Also featured are new capabilities such as ASR voice input for easy local searches, global support across various new smart devices, advanced pedestrian mode, speed cameras, and extensive public transit information. Navigators are no longer just for getting from point A to point B, and when used in everyday situations, these systems can really benefit people’s on-the-go lifestyles.

As consumers want more than just navigation, mobile operators have responded by offering customers their own suite of LBS applications. Historically this effort has been costly and complex for carriers who had to start from scratch with vendor identification, technology selection, application design, etc. Through working with carriers worldwide, NIM has created a recipe for success with simplified navigation deployments that have a proven track record of 3 million-plus paid subscribers and counting. As I discussed in an earlier post, one way to facilitate new launches is through a platform partnership. A Wall Street Journal article today announced such a partnership between Ericsson and NIM that will deliver valuable LBS applications to both new and existing Ericsson partner operators. The goal is to make it turn-key easy for carriers to launch navigation applications with an all-in-one approach, delivering both platform and application.

Now that carriers see the demand for people-centric applications such as live content search and navigation, carriers are aiming to increase data applications to replace revenue lost from decreasing voice plan sales by offering must-have features and experiences to users on a daily basis. The trick is to make it easy to use and sticky for users as well as easy to launch and profitable for carriers. Now that’s a win-win situation.