Estonian mobile service company Mobi and mobile mapping firm Nutiteq have announced that Mobi has acquired a 33% stake in Nutiteq. The investment will be used to strengthen Nutiteq’s product development and international marketing. Nutiteq’s provides customized white label open mobile mapping applications for developers, service and content providers.
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Nutiteq and Mobi Solutions Join Forces For Mobile Location-Based Services
Locago Offers An Open Mobile Map API
Locago is a mobile map service provided by Swedish Idevio. Locago is a free mobile map browser with an open interface for third party content. Locago shows different content sources and points of interest on top of map data. The service is based on a downloadable J2ME application and is free for consumers.
What makes Locago interesting is its open API, which allows for creation of mobile map mash-ups. One can use Locago to build an own custom map service based on XML input, using own geographical data. These mash-up services are caller layers in Locago. The currently available Locago layers include Wikipedia articles, Flickr and Panoramio photos, WCities travel guides, Yahoo! and Eniro business listings, and Foreca weather forecasts, to name a few. It is also possible to keep track of friends and their status using a Yahoo Fire Eagle layer.
Selecting Your Hotel Just Got Easier
Ted Valentin, Swedish serial web entrepreneur, has lately been buy building a map mashup empire. Ted disclosed his maps gather 100′000 to 150′000 unique visitors per week at the moment, and growing. That is a great accomplishment considering all services are still mainly targeted for Swedish users.
Ted’s latest service is a hotel map, hotellkartan.se. It essentially aggregates the global hotel infromation from (currently) three services, Booking.com, Hotels.com, and Expedia.com. It shows the hotels geographically on top of Google Maps, so that one is able to visually browse the hotels.
The great thing about the service is that you can search for the hotels in a variety of different ways. You can search alphabetically, by rating, by distance from a certain map point, by price – or the cheapest hotel within 1000 m from London Paddington station, for example. In my opinion, this makes it one of the most useful mashups I have ever run across. Having spent much too long a time lately looking for the perfect hotel trying to optimize location and distance along with price and hotel selections from different services, I just love this elegant solution to the problem. Continue reading »
Nutiteq Releases Open Source Mobile Mapping SDK
Nutiteq is an Estonian startup founded in 2006. The company has released an open source J2ME mobile mapping library product called MGMaps SDK, which might be the first open source one (add in comments if you know others). The software enables fast development of advanced mobile mapping applications, and also allows adding mobile mapping to other mobile applications.
Nutiteq’s objective with the library is to make the custom mobile mapping development as easy, affordable, and flexible as Google Maps API on the web. The company claims that anybody with basic J2ME knowledge can make custom mobile mapping applications with their tools in less than 30 minutes. The library is also customizable and extendable. J2ME and Blackberry platforms are supported currently, and support for other mobile platforms is promised to come later.
The main target of the company are mobile application developers, but Nutiteq offers also end-to-end client-server custom solutions. By default Nutiteq’s library uses OpenStreetMap global map data, but it also supports other commercial and custom sources. Nutiteq uses dual licensing for its products, offering the library both under GPL and commercial license. The firm lists a few references already, including Estonian mobile operator EMT, Connect2Car, and Navizon.
Nutiteq is currently looking to expand it’s reach and international partner portfolio. I heard through the grapevine the company might also be doing something with Finnish Whatamap.com, though it’s yet unclear how the companies’ interests align.
Whatamap.com launches web-to-mobile map platform
Whatamap.com, the Finnish custom mobile maps provider, has launched a technology platform targeted towards directory businesses. The platform is called Whatamap Directory Assistance (WhatamapDA), and it is designed to help the directory businesses to enable business on custom maps and provide web-to-mobile tools for maps and other rich content. With the technology the directory businesses can offer consumers context-bound street and custom maps directly to the customers’ phones from call centers and web and SMS services.
The main value proposition of the technology is to enable the directory businesses to increase the revenue per customer. Whatamap.com claims consumers are ready to pay for “Rich Map Content”, but the problem is on the provider side in enabling and optimizing the content for all different phone models. With WhatamapDA the company promises to provide easy transformation of any map content to several different mobile formats, suitable for the vast majority of phones models (yes, they mention iPhone as well).
Whatamap.com explains WhatamapDA Platform is the basis of all of their products, so this is another way the company is trying to monetize their technology. The service is offered quite typically for a fixed monthly price or fixed price per user.
Our previous coverage on Whatamap.com.
Whatamap.com starts from where Google Maps ends
Whatamap.com Ltd published Thursday a new mobile map service allowing users to create, find, and share maps on the web, and download those directly to the their cell phones as Java applications anywhere in the world. The target of Whatamap.com is nothing less than to be the world’s best consumer map service.
CEO Matti Saarinen explains Whatamap.com takes you from where you’re left with Google Maps mobile. He stated one can use Google or Nokia maps to get somewhere by car, but when you get on foot, you’ll need something more detailed than just road maps showing buildings or park areas. Pedestrian maps should look nice and show information related to the specific usage context, like store locations, restaurants, and meeting places in parks. This is backed up by also Nokia stating interest in pedestrian maps.
Whatamap.com’s offering includes fully-customizable maps, which can be either created by private users, or offered to visitors by different public and commercial property owners. Whatamap.com is currently building up its customer network in Finland, while developing partnering deals in Middle-Europe. The business model is built to scale – partners abroad can handle sales, implementation, and deployment by themselves with the web tools.
In the press conference were Risto Räikkönen, Managing Director of the Children’s Day Foundation (operating Linnanmäki amusement park in Helsinki) and Atte Köykkä, Shopping Center Manager of Shopping mall Itäkeskus (biggest in the Nordic countries) explaining their organization’s reasoning on getting aboard. Both are pioneering with the solution, and Itäkeskus already offers its visitors the possibility to download the map of the mall to their mobile just by sending a normal SMS to a shortcode number presented on the info signs.
Partners can also add context-related information and places on the map along with advertisements. Similarly consumers can create and share their maps on the web automatically, and add points of interest (e.g. interesting places, bars, shops) and – GPS points. Adding the GPS points makes all the difference, since by doing that you can locate yourself even on a totally custom-made and shaped map with your GPS phone.
An impressive example is the map of Himos (a smallish skiing center in Southern Finland) – it presents a panoranic map of all skiing routes, but also the services from rentals to restaurants and first aid. 
(Most of the services you can also call to with just a couple of clicks.) With Whatamap.com’s proprietory technology, GPS positioning will work on this panoramic map also – and on any other type of map, as long as you’ll place a few GPS fixed points on the map, done by using Google Maps interface on the Whatamap.com’s web page.
This born-global company has been founded in the beginning of 2007, and it currently employes 11 people, out of which most are owners. There are former Nokia and TeliaSonera managers aboard to bring business and user focus to the company. The map technology is based on several patents, with more coming. Whatamap.com has been operating with TEKES funding so far, but the first VC funding round will most likely take place early next year. The firm is looking for international venture capitalists to speed up access to global markets.
It’s great to see a new Finnish startup with real drive to grow and conquer. Having tested their service on both web and mobile, it seems Whatamap.com might very well be onto something here. We’ll be following up closely on this one.
A related hint on the topic:
If you know Finnish, you might want to see recording of last Wednesday’s A-plus talk show, with Nokia’s Anssi Vanjoki (Executive Vice President and General Manager of Multimedia) and Google’s Petri Kokko (Country Manager, Finland) in studio discussing the convergence of mobile and internet. Maps are an essential part of the conversation, and Vanjoki e.g. states the mobile map in the always-on mobile internet age is a whole new platform with huge amount of possibilies, while Kokko also concords mobile maps will offer lots of services in addition to just routes.
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