2010 NAVTEQ Global LBS Challenge® Expands

13 August 2009, 9:55am

Chicago – August 10, 2009 – NAVTEQ, the leading global provider of digital map, traffic and location data for in-vehicle, portable, wireless and enterprise solutions, today announced the launch of the 2010 NAVTEQ Global LBS Challenge (www.LBSChallenge.com) competition which now includes five regions: Europe-Middle East-Africa (EMEA), North America, South America, Asia-Pacific (APAC) and India. Registration for all five regions opens today.

The details for the first two regions have already been confirmed:

· The registration period for EMEA ends on Friday, October 30, 2009. Solution submission deadline is Friday November 20, 2009. The judging and awards ceremony will be held at a NAVTEQ hosted event at Poble Espanyol in Barcelona on February 14, 2010 during Mobile World Congress 2010.

· The registration period for the North America region ends on Friday, November 20, 2009. Solution submission deadline is Friday January 8, 2010. The judging and awards ceremony will be held at Where 2.0 (March 30-April 1, 2010) in San Jose (CA), USA. NAVTEQ will present the winner on stage after the opening keynote on the evening of March 30, 2010.

Details on the other regional tracks will follow shortly on the NAVTEQ Global LBS Challenge website. The addition of the dedicated tracks for India and South America regions to the competition this year reflects the global interest in location-based services, the ambition to tap the innovation in the fast-growing mobile developer community and show industry support for emerging markets.

This year’s NAVTEQ Global LBS Challenge also introduces new features to encourage wider developer participation and provide even more industry exposure for contestants:

· Contestants may submit their pre-commercialised location-based applications for any platform and for any device, provided they employ NAVTEQ map data. Technical support will be given for sponsor endorsed platforms and devices from multiple vendors.

· In addition to prizes given for the three applications with the top scores in each region, NAVTEQ will award “Best Of…” recognitions to individual applications in a wide range of categories, for example Best Use of User Generated Content (UGC), Best Use of Location-Based Advertising, and Best Use of Pedestrian Content (see regional rules for details).

· NAVTEQ will hold a competition at the conclusion of the 2010 NAVTEQ Global LBS Challenge with each Grand Prize Winner from the five regions competing against each other for the title of “Global LBS Challenge CHAMPION.” The five Grand Prize Winners will compete for the title in conjunction with the European Satellite Navigation Competition (ESNC) International Evaluation Meeting to be held in mid to late September of 2010.

The global prize pool for this year’s competition will start at $6.7 million USD in cash and licences and is expected to grow as all sponsor prizes are finalized.

Now in its seventh year, the NAVTEQ Global LBS Challenge is the premier event in the location-based services (LBS) industry, inviting application developers to build innovative applications for devices using dynamic positioning technology and NAVTEQ® maps. It is a world-wide competition conducted by NAVTEQ Network for Developers™ (NN4D), NAVTEQ’s global community and support programme for LBS developers and business partners. Over 32% of finalists have gone on to receive venture capital funding or launch commercially distributed applications.

“With the addition of India and South America as contest regions and the expansion of the rules to include LBS applications for any platform and device, we expect the 2010 edition of the Global LBS Challenge to produce our best group of location and context aware applications to date,” commented Marc Naddell, vice president, partner and developer programs, NAVTEQ. “We believe that the extended scope of the competition, the breadth of awards and the significant prize pool, as well as the additional industry exposure around the CHAMPION selection make for a very attractive proposition to developers globally.”

To see full details on this year’s competition, go to the new Global LBS Challenge website at the link below.

Global LBS Challenge

Geo: International