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May 21, 2009
AT&T Navigator Earns Frost & Sullivan Award
By Vivek Naik, TMCnet Contributor
AT&T announced that Frost & Sullivan has given its “AT&T (News - Alert) Navigator,” powered by TeleNav, a Product of the Year award, specifically “2009 Consumer Navigation Application of the Year.”
“AT&T Navigator has set the pace in the industry with an evolving and comprehensive set of capabilities,” said Jeanine Sterling, Research Analyst at Frost & Sullivan (News - Alert). “As a best in class solution, it provides advanced features that offer far more than just navigation and mapping functionality.”
Officials at AT&T say that its GPS navigation solution was selected because of its rich features, including speech recognition to encourage non-use of hands while driving, dynamic three dimensional maps for multiple angle viewing, and automated alerts for vehicular bottlenecks, traffic disruptions, or taking the wrong route.
Other features that caught the imagination of adjudicating panellists, official sources claim, are its route rectification capability, computing and updating the approximate time of arrival based on vehicle speed and network feed-back, one touch activation for pedestrian mode, intelligent voice-based suggestions synchronized with on screen visuals depending on city and state, and, importantly, it can be loaded on most hand-held Smartphone devices.
“It’s terrific to be recognized by Frost & Sullivan for our AT&T Navigator service,” said Mark Collins (News - Alert), Vice President of Voice and Data Products for Mobility and Consumer Markets, AT&T. “AT&T Navigator has been a big hit with our customers since its launch last spring. It was our top-performing application in 2008 and continues to top our apps leaderboard in 2009.”
A few more aspects that swung the title AT&T’s way were its anywhere on-line Yellow pages access; anytime WiFi (News - Alert) hotspot, ATM and restaurant pin-pointing; and helping out with the lowest possible fuel rate within a few mile radius; and, value-add guidance during poor visibility or disorientation scenarios such as electrical grid blackouts at night, blizzards and displaced landmarks as happened because of Hurricane Katrina.
Additional value for customers, say officials, comes by way of Bluetooth audio capability and interactions via U.S. English, UK English, Italian, German, and Spanish languages; a global edition that has detailed coverage of mostly all Western European countries, Complete North America, the U.S. Virgin islands, and six U.S. business strategic cities – Beijing, Qingdao, Shanghai, Tianjin, Shenyang and Qinhuangdao – in China.
Frost & Sullivan has reportedly predicted that the revenue generated from solutions for Location Based Services (LBS) will touch approximately $3.3 billion in the consumer sector by 2013. The market and technology research company also anticipates that although the quantity and variety of LBS applications and related business streams will significantly increase, the prime segment will continue to be the navigation services throughout the lifecycle.
Adding value to AT&T’s LBS navigation applications is its support of A-GPS (Assisted GPS), reported TMCnet, which is a technology that utilizes the best of the GPS and cellular worlds allowing faster and more accurate position tracking. GPS, while fairly accurate, can take minutes to initialize and requires a fairly strong signal to work accurately. Quite often in fact, GPS does not work indoors or in areas where there is dense foliage.
A-GPS assists GPS by allowing, continues the TMCnet report, the cellular network to tell the device generally where it is located, meaning the GPS receiver can narrow down its search for satellites which in turn means faster and more accurate positioning results.
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Vivek Naik is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Vivek's articles, please visit his columnist page.
Edited by Michael Dinan
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