Socialight / blog+news

Riding high on the news of their acquisition by Nokia for $8.1 billion, NAVTEQ is explaining the future of the location services industry with more clarity than I’ve ever heard from them before. I’ve been attending NAVTEQ-sponsored events for 3 years now, but this morning at their NAVTEQ Connections 2007 meeting in San Francisco, I’m finally hearing a vision that truly resonates, and I’m hearing it loud and clear.

Here’s what caught my attention during Winston Guillory’s (SVP, Consumer and Enterprise Sales) keynote:

• The end-user will have an important role as a source of data. It’s no longer just about getting content to the consumer; users collecting location-based content is an important piece of the puzzle and that’s a big part of why the Nokia marriage makes sense.
• Valuable content changes over time. This isn’t by any means a new realization, but today, it’s finally realistic to build products incorporating live location-based content streams.
• Pedestrian consumption is a huge growth area. Last year, NAVTEQ announced a renewed focus on pedestrian routing. Now they’re starting to talk seriously about pedestrian consumption of content not just for routing, but live content, filtered through the sources you trust, delivered to you when you’re in the city. I think that with the growing growing proportion of the world’s population that’s urban and the growing mobile youth market, this sector will continue to gain in importance.