Nokia shuts down Nav4All

JerryMungo

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This is shocking by nokia - taking a leaf from Micro$oft's book:

Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 28-01-2010 16:30 GMT+1

Subject: Nav4All navigation shut down by Navteq

Letter to 27,625,631 Nav4All navigation customers

Dear Customers,

It is with the deepest regret that we hereby notify you that the
global navigation of Nav4All and the Tracking & Tracing will go
offline in 3 days. The reason for the same is that the data licence
agreement with Navteq (a 100% Nokia subsidiary) was not extended, in
a totally unexpected manner. It is not possible to implement data
from another supplier in our Nav4All systems within the short term.
The Nav4All navigation system was developed for Navteq data. Nav4All
has therefore been constrained to stop.

We greatly regret the fact that we have to suspend the operation of
our service. With your help, we have developed Nav4All into a global
product with 27.5 million users in 56 languages, in 5 years. This has
made Nav4All the largest navigation supplier. This large number of
users also has to do with the fact that Nav4All works on hundreds of
different mobile telephones of many makes such as Blackberry, Sony
Ericsson, Samsung, Motorola, Android, HTC, Nokia, LG, Iphone, Ipod
etc.

After 5 years of testing and market development, we witnessed rapid -
in fact, exponential - growth during the last two years. That growth
was reported in the licence reports to Navteq. In mid-December 2009,
the global coverage was extended to include the Philippines, Morocco
and Kenya.

Please contact the Nav4All support desk in case you have any
questions: www.nav4all.com/support. If there is any further
information from Nav4All concerning the subject of this letter, the
same will be published on our website: www.nav4all.com. For reasons
of privacy, Nav4All does not have the email addresses of all its
customers, and we therefore request you to forward this email to the
maximum extent possible, in order to ensure that everyone is
informed.

Kind Regards,

Hennie J.M. Groot Koerkamp (CEO)

Nav4All BV

Keizersgracht 62-64

1015 CS Amsterdam NL

The text of this e-mail will be available on our website as soon as
possible in the following languages: Dutch, French, German, Italian,
Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Arabic, Russian, and Indonesian.
Someone please tell them it doesn't help to give a sales pitch when you are closing shop.
 
Why do I get the idea that this is a hoax? The whole forward this email thing doesn't quite appeal to me...
 
Also got the email, it's on the website too. There are still free alternatives.
 
OpenstreetMap.org offered their data to Nav4All... but as far as I know Nav4All turned it down. I think they have concerns that they cannot adjust to using OpenStreetMap due to the open tagging of data. The Openstreetmap mailing list is alive with chatter about this. It would be nice if they did make a plan to use OSM data. That would be a win win:P
 
Ah okay so its true. What exactly does this mean for Nokia owners though? That theres no more Nokia Maps and GPS?
 
No, just that Nokia didn't renew the licence for the mapping data Nav4All used. Nothing much to do with Nokia users at all.
 
Oh I see! My bad. I had never heard of Nav4All before, so I thought it might be some kind of backend for nokia maps. A quick google search corrected that.
 
This announcement is a cry from Nav4All that NavTeq (apparently Nokia) never renewed the licence, and that now their business is down the drain (fair enough cry I suppose).
I wonder if it has something to do with Nokia releasing navigation on their own mapping software for free?
 
It has everything to do with Nokia closing down the competitors IMO. Nav4all works on all handsets. Nokia have no interest in that point. They want people to buy their handsets and not get a freebie on a samsung for example.
Nokia handing out freebies for maps means more nokia users, but not if nav4all is still around.
 
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