Navteq.com: Consumer Map Portal or Showcase Site?
I saw the screaming headline from TechRadar this week that Navteq had launched a beta site at navteq.com ‘as a clear rival to Google Maps’ and the All Points Blog folks going along with the corporate line that it seems to be more of a showcase site. Since Navteq had acquired Mapsolute/Map24 over a year and a half ago, this development wasn’t totally out of left field, but it’s interesting to think about what is potentially going on here.
Navteq positions the new service simply as a “showcase” for their products and services, which makes a lot of sense, specifically highlighting that it will contain the most fresh data available. As they layer on new and interesting data and capabilities into the database, a directly accessable web front end seems like a great sales tool to be able to actually demonstrate some of these things in action immediately.
For example… lets say Navteq Direct Access just sold in McDonalds and corporate bigwigs want to be able to SEE the result of the deal now? Great have em go on over to navteq.com and search for “McDonalds” to see what they got. The inability to ‘look’ at a database as well as the lagtime in how long it takes some of their clients to pick up and distribute the new data must have been a challenge.
But on the flip side, this tool appears to now have pretty much taken over as the purpose of the main navteq.com website, with the previous content shuffled off to corporate.navteq.com. That and the fact that they did of course buy into a consumer map portal with Map24 has to make you wonder.
I also found it interesting that they seem quite interested in asking for feedback on and presumably improving the features and capabilities of the online map application. And much of the veribiage like “Let Navteq find it for you.” could be perceived as consumer oriented.
My guess is that they’re trying to delicately put their big toe in the water… or maybe their whole foot at this point, since Map24 could have been considered the big toe… to start to play in the consumer map portal market. But today in the here and now there is more money to be made from selling data to other map portals versus running your own as the uber map portal.
But potentially Navteq sees the day when this will no longer be the case and is preparing for that day?
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