Wayfinder

Last updated
Wayfinder Systems AB
Type Subsidiary
Industry IT
GenreMobile Navigation
PredecessorItinerary systems
Headquarters,
Key people
Tommy Ahlers CEO [1]
ProductsNavigation Software
Parent Vodafone
Website http://www.wayfinder.com

Wayfinder was a wholly owned subsidiary of Vodafone [2] specializing in creating mobile navigation systems for a number of platforms such as Symbian 2nd and 3rd edition, UIQ, Windows Mobile and some other smartphones. An external Bluetooth GPS receiver is required for non GPS enabled phones. On March 12, 2010, it was announced that Vodafone was closing the company and all employees would be let go. [3]

Contents

On July 13, 2010, Wayfinder announced [4] that they would open source their software under the BSD 3-clause license. [5] [6] Source code for both the server (with import tools for map data from OpenStreetMap) and client software for various phone operating systems (including Android, iPhone and Symbian S60) is available at GitHub.

Wayfinder Navigator

Wayfinder Navigator is a mobile GPS application that provides turn-by-turn directions through a mobile phone. By downloading pre-loaded maps, Navigator can provide directions and different points of interest without Internet connection. [7]

In May 2008, Wayfinder Navigator was updated to include pre-loaded maps, social networking and map coverage of 150 countries world-wide. [8]

Wayfinder Earth

Wayfinder Earth is a mobile application that displays a 3D globe. The application contains over three million Points of Interest (POIs) including restaurants, train stations, bars, museums, gas stations and hospitals. Another international application, map coverage includes Europe and North America. Wayfinder Earth can set favorites, save address searches and show GPS information such as speed, position and heading as well. [9]

As the maps are downloaded from the internet on the fly so the phone requires a GPRS/UMTS connection. Maps are cached on the phone memory or memorycard. According to the site, maps can even be downloaded from the site and stored on the phone, once you have registered. A half an hour of navigating uses approximately 200 kb of data or only 8 kb in the so-called Guide view.

Wayfinder Active

Wayfinder Active was a mobile phone GPS application to track physical outdoor activities. The application calculated exercise statistics such as distance, calories burned and altitude info, so that people could set and track specific exercise goals. [10] Through an online community, activeoutdoor.com, people could track and share local routes within the community. The product was discontinued spring 2009.

Speed cameras

Wayfinder launched the Wayfinder SpeedAlert application in December 2006. The application runs on Java and Symbian 3rd edition only. It warns the user of 15,000 speed cameras around Europe as well as when they exceeded a manually set speed limit.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">S60 (software platform)</span> Smartphone software platform

The S60 Platform was a software platform for smartphones that runs on top of the Symbian operating system. It was created by Nokia based on the 'Pearl' user interface from Symbian Ltd. It was introduced at COMDEX in November 2001 and first shipped with the Nokia 7650 smartphone. The platform has since seen 5 updated editions. Series 60 was renamed to S60 in November 2005.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GPS for the visually impaired</span>

Since the Global Positioning System (GPS) was introduced in the late 1980s there have been many attempts to integrate it into a navigation-assistance system for blind and visually impaired people.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">TomTom</span> Dutch manufacturer of automotive navigation systems

TomTom N.V. is a Dutch multinational developer and creator of location technology and consumer electronics. Founded in 1991 and headquartered in Amsterdam, TomTom released its first generation of satellite navigation devices to market in 2004. As of 2019 the company has over 4,500 employees worldwide and operations in 29 countries throughout Europe, Asia-Pacific, and the Americas.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nokia 6110 Navigator</span> Cell phone model

The Nokia 6110 Navigator is a smartphone made by Nokia, announced on 12 February 2007. It has been available since June 2007. It runs on Symbian OS v9.2 with a S60 3rd Edition FP1 user interface. It is not to be confused with the 1997/98 Nokia 6110. The Nokia 6110 Navigator includes pre-loaded navigation maps.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">HTC TyTN II</span>

The HTC TyTN II is an Internet-enabled Windows Mobile Pocket PC smartphone designed and marketed by HTC Corporation of Taiwan. It has a tilting touchscreen with a right-side slide-out QWERTY keyboard. The TyTN II's functions include those of a camera phone and a portable media player in addition to text messaging and multimedia messaging. It also offers Internet services including e-mail, instant messaging, web browsing, and local Wi-Fi connectivity. It is a quad-band GSM phone with GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, HSDPA, and HSUPA.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ovi (Nokia)</span> Former Internet services by Nokia

Ovi by Nokia was the brand for Nokia's Internet services. The Ovi services could be used from a mobile device, computer or via the web. Nokia focused on five key service areas: Games, Maps, Media, Messaging and Music. Nokia's aim with Ovi was to include third party developers, such as operators and third-party services like Yahoo's Flickr photo site. With the announcement of Ovi Maps Player API, Nokia started to evolve their services into a platform, enabling third parties to make use of Nokia's Ovi services.

Betavine was an open community and resource website, created and managed by Vodafone Group R&D, for the mobile development community in order to support and stimulate the development of new applications for mobile and Internet communications. The Betavine website allows developers to upload and profile their alpha-stage and beta-stage applications, provides interaction tools for members to share knowledge and give feedback on apps, and discuss topics in mobile. Betavine also contains a growing resources section with technical topics and APIs.

Satellite navigation software or GPS navigation software usually falls into one of the following two categories:

  1. Navigation with route calculation and directions from the software to the user of the route to take, based on a vector-based map, normally for motorized vehicles with some motorized forms added on as an afterthought.
  2. Navigation tracking, often with a map "picture" in the background, but showing where you have been, and allowing "routes" to be preprogrammed, giving a line you can follow on the screen. This type can also be used for geocaching.
<span class="mw-page-title-main">ARToolKit</span>

ARToolKit is an open-source computer tracking library for creation of strong augmented reality applications that overlay virtual imagery on the real world. Currently, it is maintained as an open-source project hosted on GitHub. ARToolKit is a very widely used AR tracking library with over 160,000 downloads on its last public release in 2004.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nokia E71</span> Smartphone model

The Nokia E71 is a smartphone introduced in May 2008 from the Eseries range with a QWERTY keyboard targeting business users worldwide. It runs on Symbian OS v9.2, with a Series 60 3rd Edition, second generation Feature Pack 1. The Nokia E71 succeeded the Nokia E61/61i models, building on the base design and form factor but enhancing on the feature set.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Symbian Foundation</span>

The Symbian Foundation was a non-profit organisation that stewarded the Symbian operating system for mobile phones which previously had been owned and licensed by Symbian Ltd. Symbian Foundation never directly developed the platform, but evangelised, co-ordinated and ensured compatibility. It also provided key services to its members and the community such as collecting, building and distributing Symbian source code. During its time it competed against the Open Handset Alliance and the LiMo Foundation.

The Nokia 6650 fold is a Nokia smartphone announced in March 2008, running Symbian OS. It is a Hex-band unit using GSM 850, 900, 1,800, and 1,900 MHz networks and UMTS 850 and 2,100 Mhz networks. Also noted as a quad-band clamshell 3G smartphone, it was released in June 2008. It was sold through AT&T Mobility in the U.S. It is AT&T's replacement for the S60-powered N75. It was manufactured in three colors, metallic silver, black, and red. It was never a global model, and therefore it was sold exclusively for T-mobile networks in Europe. Models were RM-324 for North America and RM-400 for Europe.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Here Technologies</span> Netherlands-based mapping data company

Here Technologies is an American–Dutch multinational group dealing with mapping, location data and related automotive services to individuals and companies. It is majority-owned by a consortium of German automotive companies and American semiconductor company Intel whilst other companies also own minority stakes. Its roots date back to U.S.-based Navteq in 1985, which was acquired by Finland-based Nokia in 2007. Here is currently based in The Netherlands.

The Nokia 6210 Navigator is a smartphone made by Nokia that is a successor to Nokia 6110 Navigator. It was announced on February 11, 2008 and had been available from July 2008. It runs on Symbian OS v9.3 with a S60 3rd Edition FP2 user interface.

The W3C Geolocation API is an effort by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to standardize an interface to retrieve the geographical location information for a client-side device. It defines a set of objects, ECMAScript standard compliant, that executing in the client application give the client's device location through the consulting of Location Information Servers, which are transparent for the application programming interface (API). The most common sources of location information are IP address, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth MAC address, radio-frequency identification (RFID), Wi-Fi connection location, or device Global Positioning System (GPS) and GSM/CDMA cell IDs. The location is returned with a given accuracy depending on the best location information source available.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Symbian</span> Discontinued mobile operating system

Symbian is a discontinued mobile operating system (OS) and computing platform designed for smartphones. It was originally developed as a proprietary software OS for personal digital assistants in 1998 by the Symbian Ltd. consortium. Symbian OS is a descendant of Psion's EPOC, and was released exclusively on ARM processors, although an unreleased x86 port existed. Symbian was used by many major mobile phone brands, like Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and above all by Nokia. It was also prevalent in Japan by brands including Fujitsu, Sharp and Mitsubishi. As a pioneer that established the smartphone industry, it was the most popular smartphone OS on a worldwide average until the end of 2010, at a time when smartphones were in limited use, when it was overtaken by iOS and Android. It was notably less popular in North America.

Telenav, Inc. is a wireless location-based services corporation that provides services including Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite navigation, local search, automotive navigation solutions, mobile advertising, enterprise mobility and workflow automation. The company’s headquarters are located in Santa Clara, California in the United States with additional offices in the U.S., Germany, Japan, Romania, China, and Brazil.

This is a list of notable commercial satellite navigation software for various devices, with a specific focus on mobile phones, tablets, tablet PCs,.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OsmAnd</span> Offline maps & navigation Android and iOS app

OsmAnd is a map and navigation app for Android and iOS. It uses the OpenStreetMap (OSM) map database for its primary displays, but is an independent app not endorsed by the OpenStreetMap Foundation. It is available in both free and paid versions; the latter unlocks the download limit for offline maps and provides access to Wikipedia points of interest (POIs) and their descriptions from within the app. Map data can be stored on the device for offline use. Using the device's GPS capabilities, OsmAnd offers routing, with visual and voice guidance, for car, bike, and pedestrian. All of the main functionalities work both online and offline.

This article contains a list with gratis satellite navigation software for a range of devices. Some of the free software mentioned here does not have detailed maps or the ability to follow streets or type in street names. However, in many cases, it is also that which makes the program free, avoid the need of an Internet connection, and make it very lightweight. Very basic programs like this may not be suitable for road navigation in cars, but serve their purpose for navigation while walking or trekking, and for use at sea. To determine the GPS coordinates of a destination, one can use sites such as GPScoordinates.eu and GPS visualizer.

References

  1. "wayfinder". GitHub.
  2. "wayfinder". GitHub.
  3. "Vodafone lägger ner Wayfinder". Sydsvenskan. Archived from the original on 2010-03-13.
  4. "Welcome to Vodafone Wayfinder OSS | Vodafone Wayfinder Open Source Software". Archived from the original on 2010-07-17. Retrieved 2010-07-17.
  5. "Start [Vodafone Wayfinder Open Source Software]". Archived from the original on 2010-07-04. Retrieved 2010-07-08.
  6. "Vodafone Demonstrates Commitment to Open Source Innovation - Vodafone". Archived from the original on 2010-07-18.
  7. "Multisport: State of the art mobile navigation – Wayfinder launches improved version of Wayfinder Navigator". Runner's Web.
  8. "Don't lose your way - Wayfinder Navigator | Thinking Aloud". Archived from the original on 2008-05-18. Retrieved 2008-10-27.
  9. "Ebooks: Non-fiction books about history, technology, economy, marketing, business, and hobbies - Klaava".
  10. "Wayfinder Active is a way cool GPS app". CNET. Archived from the original on 2008-05-17. Retrieved 2008-10-24.