Telenav’s free U.S. Scout for iPhone app will use the crowd-sourced and free OpenStreetMap (OSM) for all of its map data. OSM, the “Wikipedia of Maps,” offers users a more accurate and up-to-date map than what is available via commercial maps, the company said.
The rollout of OSM starts today for some Scout users and will be fully implemented for all users by the end of this week. The company plans to switch to OSM for Scout for Android in the U.S. in June. Scout’s companion website, scout.me, is already using OSM.
Telenav also announced today that through a rebrand of the popular skobbler GPS Navigation app for iOS and Android, Scout is now available in more than 50 app store markets with maps and navigation for almost 200 countries. skobbler’s GPS Navigation app was the first OSM navigation app in the world. Telenav acquired skobbler in January.
With this launch, Scout is supporting a growing community of global OSM editors. The OSM community has doubled year over year to more than 1.6 million registered editors, with people mapping every country around the world, ranging from the U.S. to Germany and Lesotho to North Korea.
The OSM crowd-sourced model enables edits to be published every minute, resulting in maps that are often more detailed and more up to date than commercially available maps. In addition to reporting traffic or accidents, now anyone using Scout can send mapping feedback directly from the app to Scout OSM editors who will let the person know once the data has been reviewed and updated.
“As a mapping platform, OSM is a credible alternative to proprietary solutions, with the added advantage of instant updates, resulting in a more accurate and up-to-date map,” said Steve Coast, founder of OpenStreetMap and Telenav’s head of OSM. “Roads change, subdivisions are built, and freeways expand so, just like all other maps, it needs updates on an ongoing basis. Today’s launch has effectively added millions of editors to the OSM global community, breathing even more life into an already exploding free and open-sourced project. Compare this to the billions of dollars that Google has spent — and will have to continue to spend — on keeping its maps updated and I think you can understand why we have switched to OSM.”
“This is a turning point for the mapping industry,” continued Coast. “The amount of effort and investment needed in order to provide high-quality turn-by-turn navigation using OSM crowd-sourced map data cannot be understated. We expect a significant return on our investments to create a better map platform for navigation using the free OSM. It took Telenav years of OSM community engagement, advanced algorithms, technology development, and road testing to reach a point where we felt it was ready for consumers. Now that we are here, we can’t wait for the world to try Scout with OSM. As for the global community of editors, this is true validation that their enthusiasm and passion for making a free, editable map of the world has made a dramatic impact on the evolution of maps and navigation.”
The OSM rollout is automatic for Scout users and does not require an app update. Separately, Telenav also announced today that it has launched a Scout Maps and Navigation SDK, the first GPS navigation SDK that allows mobile app and developers to integrate OpenStreetMap-based GPS navigation and maps within their own products. The new Scout for Developers program also includes a new Scout Maps API for desktop and mobile websites using OSM, allowing developers to replace Google Maps. More information is available at developer.scout.me.
Telenav is also sharing in the celebration of its OSM launch by kicking off a map-editing contest at scout.me/osmcontest where map editors have a chance to win various prizes including cash and tablets.
Telenav, Inc., announced today that it has acquired skobbler GmbH, the European-based navigation company with the highest rated OpenStreetMap (OSM)-based GPS navigation apps in the world. With this acquisition, Telenav brings the most successful OSM navigation experts in the world together as one team — including the founder of OSM, Steve Coast, who joined Telenav in 2013 — and becomes a major contributor to the creation of the open-sourced and most comprehensive map of the world, according to the announcement.
The acquisition closed on January 29 for consideration of approximately $19.2 million in cash and $4.6 million of company common stock.
“Crowdsourced OSM can power personalized navigation services like Scout — with highly detailed maps on a global scale,” said HP Jin, Telenav’s chairman and CEO. “We plan to offer Scout with OSM for much of the world. We have already made significant headway toward this goal in the U.S., including using OSM for our HTML5 version of Scout.”
OSM is the only crowdsourced and open-sourced map of the globe and, for many developers, it has become a clear alternative to Google Maps.
“Waze and Google — or, just Google now — provide similar mechanisms to improve their maps, based mostly on OSM’s innovations. With one big catch. It is very much their map. Not yours,” said Coast in his blog commentary today regarding the acquisition. “OpenStreetMap is different. All of the quality data contributed is openly available — just like Wikipedia. So, anyone can download, experiment and play with it freely. It’s not locked up beyond your reach.”
Since Coast founded OSM, the community has doubled year over year to more than 1.5 million registered editors, becoming a global community of local editors in every corner of the world. Its crowdsourced model publishes edits every minute on openstreetmap.org, resulting in maps that are detailed and up to date. For example, newly laid streets and newly developed areas can be updated on a regular basis and in real time. In addition, OSM allows for greater map detail for pedestrians such as alleys, sidewalks, parks, hiking trails, zoos, and even city trees.
Telenav has been an active contributor to OSM for more than three years, working closely with the community to enhance specific features needed for navigation, traffic and other future location-based services.
With offices in Germany and Romania, skobbler was the first company to launch a commercial navigation app using OSM (in 2010) for both Android and iOS devices and is available in app stores in 49 regions with worldwide map coverage. In order to do this, skobbler developed sophisticated algorithms that evolved OSM data from a display map to a navigable map.
skobbler’s apps are top ranked and highly rated in multiple countries including Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden. skobbler’s CEO, Peter Scheufen, previously served as the CEO of Navigon, which became a leading GPS device manufacturer in Europe and was eventually purchased by Garmin. The other skobbler founders also held senior roles at Navigon before founding skobbler. Telenav expects that all skobbler employees will join Telenav as part of its OSM team, bringing significant industry-leading software expertise in location-based services, navigation and mapping.
“By joining our efforts with skobbler, we will build on our combined successes to bring the best mapping and navigation services to our customers around the world,” said Jin. “The benefits of an open source model will provide an enormous opportunity to change the economic models of navigation and other location-based services.”
“OSM is currently one of the most active and dynamic crowdsourcing communities and is growing at an explosive rate,” said Scheufen. “Our team lives and breathes OSM and so we are excited to join forces with Telenav to create the largest, most sophisticated, and smartest OSM navigation team in the world.”
In connection with the acquisition and in accordance with NASDAQ Marketplace Rule 5635(c), Telenav granted four employees of skobbler and its subsidiaries, upon the closing of the acquisition, restricted stock units for an aggregate of 634,920 shares of common stock.
These RSUs were granted outside of the existing Telenav stock plans and without stockholder approval pursuant to NASDAQ Marketplace Rule 5635(c)(4) with the following terms: each RSU vests as to 50% of the award on the anniversary of Acquisition and as to 50% of the award on the second anniversary of the Acquisition, subject to continued employment through each relevant date.
skobbler has launched a new version of GPS Navigation optimized for iOS 7. The app now includes a travel guide, hyperlocal search, and mapping technology provided by skobbler’s NGx map engine.
Powered by data from the OpenStreetMap — a free and editable map of the world built by over 1 million voluntary contributors and map enthusiasts — GPS Navigation delivers true “hybrid” functionality, allowing users to switch between online or optional offline access through in-app purchases of downloadable maps, regardless of location or cellular connection, skobbler said.
Offline functionality allows for fast and reliable results using only a device’s GPS receiver rather than a network connection, meaning turn-by-turn navigation, alternate routing and various search capabilities are provided in full without a data connection.
GPS Navigation now features a comprehensive in-app travel guide and hyperlocal search via Wikitravel — which provides users with more than 90,000 pages of worldwide travel information in the English language alone — and TripAdvisor integrations.
Much like GPS Navigation’s online-offline mapping functionality, users can also access travel guide information with or without Internet connectivity, allowing access to the app’s travel features without roaming charges by opting for offline usage.
GPS Navigation is available for a one-time purchase of $0.99 via the iTunes App Store.
Not so long ago, paper maps were a necessity in many walks of life. Today, they are increasingly a nostalgic novelty, to coin a term.
It’s not difficult to understand why digital maps replaced their paper brethren. Digital maps are more accurate, more adaptable, and most importantly, in an increasingly real-time environment, much faster at making the appropriate updates and amends.
Now, however, digital mapping finds itself at a crossroads. Crowdsourced navigation platforms like OpenStreetMap — affectionately referred to as the “Wikipedia of maps” — are forcing digital maps and the map-building process to evolve significantly. As a result, the future of mapping is now in the hands of location enthusiasts and everyday map users. These people are redefining what a map is, how data is sourced and utilized, and how much it can cost to harness that information both efficiently and effectively. Those of us who have been in this space for years can see the writing on the wall.
Some, however, are eager to write off crowdsourced mapping. Corporate digital map providers, for instance, often refer dismissively to these mapping platforms as “hobby maps.” Nevertheless, they recognize the potential for change such innovation brings and are vulnerable to it.
What potential? Consider the benefits attainable through a crowdsourced approach, in the following sections.
Scalability
As with any process, cost is critical. It is particularly core to building a digital map. Truth be told, the fewer dollars ultimately spent on a map’s construction, the more its long-term operational preservation and, through that, scalability can be ensured. Despite massive innovation in our field, collecting data and creating a usable international digital map is far from cost-effective or efficient today. Candidly, it is one of the clunkier processes in technology, perhaps because it appears compulsory.
Look no further than Google, which spends billions of dollars a year to maintain its platform, yet we marvel at the huge scope of its operation. In truth, it is an effort in dire need of real streamlining. Google, via its recent acquisition of Waze, along with Navteq, TeleAtlas, and the like, leverage laser-enabled cars and high-tech backpacks that are astoundingly inefficient from a pricing standpoint, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. Nokia’s Map Mobiles, for example, are each outfitted with more than $25,000 of computing equipment.
To think this is sustainable in the long term, on an international level, is wrong. It will inevitably cripple a map’s quality and viability, with corporate providers choosing to limit global detail and upkeep to balance costs.
For crowdsourced map platforms, this problem does not exist. They can and are scaling rapidly, without the exorbitant costs corporate players are used to — and tired of. These costs secondarily manifest in mapping service usage fees for third parties, as well as subscription costs for consumer navigaton products. For either use case (business-to-business or business-to-consumer) crowdsourcing delivers cost benefits traditional players cannot match. Again, this leads directly to scalability, with crowdsourcing the most enduring maps option.
Same time, same place — different look. Crowdsourced OpenStreetMap (left) and Nokia map (right) of central Berlin, Germany. Photo: Oliver Kühn
Detail
Crowdsourced mapping services and platforms like OpenStreetMap are more than just cost-efficienct tools to coax scale. As a crowdsourced dataset built using more than a million dedicated mappers, OpenStreetMap inherently delivers benefits above and beyond those obtained from corporate map providers like TeleAtlas and Navteq.
The most visible benefit is the unrivaled map quality. With an army of contributors, the data dynamically and constantly evolves — just as places do. Locations are rarely fixed or stable. They change and progress over time. No other service or platform can immediately provide developers with the real-time, on-the-ground granularity of a crowdsourced map. Google and the others are trying, but the costs they incur will ultimately be too taxing to maintain detail.
Firsthand influence carries equal weight. Mappers who edit an open-source map have often had personal interactions with a place or locale. They know places intimately, and this makes their contributions detailed, rich, and hyperlocal. More companies and developers are looking to OpenStreetMap for this reason: they want to future-proof their services and products, making sure that they always have the best and most up-to-date data. Only a platform like OpenStreetMap can do this. Corporate map providers are painfully aware of it, too.
Flexibility
Google owns Google Maps, and TeleAtlas owns its TomTom platform. Not surprisingly, this affects what a third party, whether an automotive company or a travel brand, can and cannot do with the service. It is essentially a copyrighted product like an MP3, an audio digital file. So, Google can limit the way you visually render and showcase its platform. Needless to say, this can be suffocating for those interested in building their own unique services. This is what makes crowdsourced mapping such a significant development for those interested in integrating additional data with a digital map. Do with OpenStreetMap what you will, visually or design-wise; there are absolutely no limitations. Every map can be made unique and rendered differently. This also speaks to the flexibility of crowdsourcing more generally.
Beyond design, crowdsourced maps can harness the data to build completely new maps that cater to a specific concept, creating thematic maps for different uses, such as walking, hiking, bicycling, routes for those with disabilities, and more. More traditional digital maps lack this flexibility; it affords possibilities to source non-traditional location data to build even more accurate maps.
The Future — Through Cars
Despite the fact that crowdsourced maps are forcing digital mapping to adopt a more scalable, cost-efficient, detailed, flexible andaltogether long-term approach, digital mapping definitely has room to grow.
One of the most exciting opportunities for crowdsourced maps specifically, and digital maps generally, lies in car user data, which is just coming into its own. Cars are obviously one of the largest travel tools utilized by individuals on a daily basis, and, with the advent of the connected car, the data that they collect via internal/external sensors has grown more nuanced, granular, and specific over the years.
Cars are simply getting smarter, with sensors capable of providing everything from weather conditions to speed-zone information.
Making this information available in the cloud and combining it with data available via crowdsourced mapping platforms produces remarkable possibilities for innovation.
Imagine adding road-condition data, as just one example, to crowdsourced mapping services. By marrying a crowdsourced map with crowdsourced car-sensor data, the map’s overall utility multiplies immeasurably.
To avoid missteps that have positioned companies like Google to spend billions on building a digital mapping service — unsustainable long-term figures — we must always look to embrace that which is cutting-edge. We find that today in crowdsourced mapping platforms, as they enable us to maintain, update, and enrich maps as never before. We must also consider the limitations of the cutting edge and understand how to improve the latest innovation (car-sensor data, and more) before the once cutting edge becomes the next paper map, so to speak. This is key to evolving maps for the better and for the future.
Oliver Kühn has an MBA from the University of Cologne, Germany. He has 10 years of location-based service experience and was Head of Product Management Special Projects at navigation systems specialist Navigon AG (acquired by Garmin). In late 2008, he co-founded skobbler GmbH, being responsible for business development and legal matters. He is also a board member of the OpenStreetMap Foundation.
skobbler brings together hybrid online and offline worldwide maps and full turn-by-turn navigation in a low-priced app with the launch of GPS Navigation & Maps for Android.
skobbler is looking to exploit the weaknesses of established Android navigation alternatives with the fully featured GPS Navigation & Maps, which offers an improved experience compared to both Google Maps and high-priced third-party alternatives, skobbler said. GPS Navigation & Maps is effectively two apps in one, with both online and offline turn-by-turn navigation and digital mapping for smartphones.
Using open-source digital map OpenStreetMap and powered by the skobbler NGx map engine, GPS Navigation and Maps has full online and offline capability. The £1 price includes worldwide online functionality as well as an installable map of one country of choice for offline use. From here, users have the option to in-app purchase individual cities, states, countries and continents to use offline, and worldwide maps are available as standard for online use. Existing users of ForeverMap 2 will receive a free upgrade to GPS Navigation & Maps. New users can either purchase the full app or try GPS Navigation & Maps’ free app with unlimited online functionality and a 14-day navigation trial.
While Google Maps is free to download and use, its offline functionality is restricted. Users cannot perform any searching or routing tasks without an Internet connection, which means that when abroad or in low signal areas they either have to pay expensive roaming costs or spend a significant time without map coverage, limiting its usability while traveling, skobbler said. Expensive alternatives such as Co-Pilot Live or TomTom UK & Ireland/Europe do offer premium features and offline navigation, yet none of them give users a choice of which areas they want to use online and which offline. Most premium sat nav apps generally cannot be used as travel apps at all, as their pure map functionalities are limited at best. GPS Navigation & Maps is the perfect blend. Offering the best of both worlds for a fraction of the price, it can be relied upon to deliver any place, at any time, and being two great apps in one offers a fantastic cost-to-benefit ratio and unbeatable flexibility for consumers, skobbler said. Individuals can build their own navigation and maps app depending on what resources they use the most, and more effectively manage the limited storage space on their devices, skobbler said.
GPS Navigation and Maps has full turn-by-turn navigation, worldwide mapping and all features of the software accessible both online or offline. This unique move, and market first, is made possible thanks to skobbler’s NGx map engine, which delivers a seamless browsing experience with ultrafast real-time rendering and stunning map visuals, skobbler said. NGx also offers a range of unique map styles to, for example, accentuate color density for outdoor use to improve clarity. Maps are highly customizable with control over features such as online/offline functionality, map display (style and zoom), routing, map matching and more.
“We’re very proud to launch the first navigation product utilising our powerful NGx mapping engine,” said skobbler CTO Philipp Kandal. “Being the first and only company on the Android platform to offer full online and offline capability for both mapping and navigation, we hope both new users and our existing customers will be won over by the high performance and flexibility GPS Navigation & Maps offers. We’re already working on future updates and have a few powerful additions lined up to improve the app’s functionality and flexibility even further in the coming months.”
Additional maps beyond the free map provided will be available via in-app purchases for offline use. In keeping with the low price for the initial app purchase, add-ons are similary competitive and are priced at £0.77 for cities, £1.11 for states, £2.22 for a whole country, £4.44 for a continent and just £7.77 for the entire planet, so users can quickly and easily supplement their map coverage as they see fit.
skobbler is committed to providing regular updates to users to keep maps fresh and accurate, and promises a range of new premium features in future updates. GPS Navigation & Maps is now available from the Google Play Store, with existing ForeverMap 2 users able to upgrade for free.
The full version of GPS Navigation & Maps, including one free offline country map, can be downloaded.
Telenav’s free U.S. Scout for iPhone app will use the crowd-sourced and free OpenStreetMap (OSM) for all of its map data. OSM, the “Wikipedia of Maps,” offers users a more accurate and up-to-date map than what is available via commercial maps, the company said.
