NAVTEQ announces Mobile Distillery as Sponsor

16 February 2009, 9:29pm

Mobile World Congress, Barcelona, Spain. Stand 1G45 Hall 1 – February 16, 2009 –NAVTEQ, a leading global provider of digital map data for vehicle navigation and location-based solutions (LBS), today announced that Mobile Distillery, a leader in device porting software solutions and testing services for mobile application developers, has signed on to become a Global Awards Sponsor for the 2009 NAVTEQ Global LBS Challenge and will be awarding licenses totalling $160,000 to the winners of the competition for all three regions (Americas, APAC and EMEA). This brings the total value of the 2009 NAVTEQ Global LBS Challenge prize pool to over $5.4 million in cash and data licences.

The Grand Prize Winners and Runners-Up in each region will receive a six month licence to Alembic, an advanced device database and powerful web search engine which benchmarks fully tested characteristics of more than 1,000 handsets. It allows developers to identify which brands and models of mobile phones their application could potentially work on before prototyping or launching their mobile projects.

Each Grand Prize Winner for the three regions will also receive a 12 month licence to Celsius, an industry leading mobile application development and porting suite, allowing developers from one single Java™ ME source code to automatically port (adapt) different optimised versions of their application to the widest range of existing and upcoming compatible Java enabled handsets.

“We are excited to become sponsors for the first time at this year’s Global LBS Challenge. Developers are incorporating location enabled services in their mobile offering at an accelerating pace,” says Eric Lemaréchal, Co-Founder and COO of Mobile Distillery. “This initiative will help some of the world’s most innovative LBS providers to easily get their applications to the broadest possible handset range and accelerate their time to market.”

Mobile developers face a number of challenges on their road to commercialisation, including choosing between or supporting multiple operating systems, device fragmentation even on a particular platform, differences in implementation of network and technical standards and download limitations in operator networks.

"The combined Alembic and Celsius solution from Mobile Distillery not only provides a technical insight into what features and performances are available on thousands of handsets but also allows developers to produce multiple versions of their applications in just a few clicks, making sure they will always take advantage of each handset at its best by employing both handset-unique and standard mobile technologies. The traditionally prohibitive barrier of porting costs and effort is largely removed,” says Marc Naddell, vice president, partner and developer programs and NAVTEQ.

The Alembic online database, to which more than 40 new devices are added every month, enables developers to assess handsets and market potential. This is important information for any developer to make an educated decision on porting to mass-market devices.

Mobile Distillery’s Alembic and Celsius solution is fully integrated as a plug-in and tool set in standard Integrated Development Environments (IDE’s) such as NetBeans and Eclipse. This enables developers to use standard IDE’s to rapidly prototype and develop their LBS applications

The winners of the Global LBS Challenge – EMEA region will be announced February 17, 2009 in Barcelona during Mobile World Congress. The winners for the Americas regions will be announced April 2, 2009 in Las Vegas during CTIA. The APAC winners will be announced June 17, 2009 in Singapore during CommunicAsia. For more information, please visit LBSChallenge.com.

Global LBS Challenge

Geo: International