Networks In Motion (NIM), the award-winning wireless navigation and location-based services (LBS) company, announced an agreement with Nordisk Mobiltelefon AB (NMT), a mobile communications operator licensed in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Poland and Ireland, to provide mobile phone navigation and group finder services.
Utilizing NIM’s LBS technology on GPS-enabled mobile phones, Nordisk will offer NMT Navigator, which includes turn-by-turn, voice-prompted directions as well as local search of millions of points of interest and detailed color maps, and NMT Team Finder, which tracks friends, workforce, children or family, to its customers in Q1 2008.
“We chose Networks In Motion because of its proven success in the U.S. and because they provide unique functionality, better maps and more effective user-interfaces than its competitors,” said Johan Lodenius, co-founder of Nordisk Mobiltelefon AB. “By providing NIM’s applications to our consumer and enterprise customers, we’re able to offer unique applications for finding people or places, with extremely high availability, through our outstanding network coverage and high precision assisted GPS service.”
“As the leading provider of mobile phone navigation services to major North American wireless carriers, with the largest number of paid subscribers, Networks In Motion is now bringing its successful products and strategies to European consumers through Nordisk,” said Doug Antone, president and CEO of Networks In Motion. “Mobile phone navigation has quickly acquired more than three million subscribers in the U.S. and is competing with personal navigation devices due to its convenience and price point, and we believe the same adoption rate is possible in Europe.”
According to a recent research report by Berg Insight, “Mobile Maps and Navigation,” the number of mobile subscribers accessing maps and downloading routes using their mobile handsets in Europe and the U.S. is expected to grow from four million users in 2007 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 60.8 percent to reach 43 million users in 2012.
Andre Malm, telecom analyst, Berg Insight, says, “Record shipments of PND devices in Europe and the U.S. have introduced the benefits of GPS for motorists. Now the major players in the mobile industry are in hot pursuit of delivering the same experience for pedestrians, commuters and travelers on the handset display.”