SUNNYVALE, CA — (Marketwired) — 09/03/13 — Telenav®, Inc. (NASDAQ: TNAV), the leader in personalized navigation, today announced that Steve Coast, founder of OpenStreetMap (OSM), has joined the company to lead its crowd-sourced mapping initiatives for Scout GPS navigation services.
Founded in London in 2004, OSM is a collaborative project to create a free, editable map of the world. The OSM community has doubled year over year to more than 1.3 million editors, with representation for every country around the world (196 countries). Its crowd-sourced model publishes edits every minute, resulting in maps that are often more detailed and more up to date than commercially licensed content.
“Community-based models have dramatically transformed numerous industries already — everything from Wikipedia replacing the encyclopedia to Yelp harnessing word of mouth reviews,” said Coast. “Today, the same kinds of people are building OSM — one block and neighborhood at a time — to make the world a better place.”
Coast joins Telenav from Microsoft, where he was a Principal Architect for Bing and responsible for adding satellite imagery to OSM. To watch him tell his story about how OSM started with a backpack, a bike, and a GPS device, go to .
For more than three years, Telenav has been a key contributor to OSM and has worked closely with the community to enhance specific features needed for navigation. Using billions of crowd-sourced GPS data points, Telenav provides suggested corrections via , a tool created by current U.S. OSM board president and Telenav employee, Martijn van Exel. In addition, Telenav was the first to create a standardized protocol for integrating traffic information into OSM, which is a significant step in commercializing it for navigation.
The use of OSM allows Telenav to update data — such as newly-laid streets and newly-developed areas — on a regular basis rather than depending exclusively on traditional map vendors. In addition, OSM allows for greater map detail for pedestrians such as alleys, sidewalks, parks and hiking trails.
Telenav also leverages the power of crowd sourcing for traffic information, combining reports from its users with more than 100 million other sources, to provide up-to-date, real-time traffic. , Telenav-s top-rated personalized navigation app, lets people report and share congestion information to alert other drivers of nearby incidents and help beat traffic during their daily commutes.
“People want fresh, accurate, and hyper-local content when they-re on the go,” said Ryan Peterson, director of traffic and navigation services at Telenav. “Crowd-sourced models like OSM can power personalized navigation experiences like Scout — with block-level accuracy — on a global scale.”
Telenav will initially launch OSM in Scout for Browsers (), the world-s first HTML5-based, voice-guided, turn by turn navigation service and become the first U.S. company to use OSM as a primary navigation source. The company plans to continue to promote and invest in the OSM community and integrate OSM into other Scout mobile and automotive services in the future.
OSM is a free, editable map of the world that allows people to view, edit, and use geographical data in a collaborative way from anywhere in the world. Edits and data downloads are available at . Recent adopters of OSM for map display include Yahoo!, Flickr, Foursquare, Craigslist, Evernote, USA Today, NPR, FCC, Slate Magazine, Mapbox, and numerous other commercial and government agencies globally.
As OSM-s founder, Steve has grown the community from a local group in London in 2004 to more than 1.3 million editors worldwide. In 2007, he founded VC-backed CloudMade to build commercial tools for OSM. Steve joined Microsoft in 2010 as a Principal Architect for Bing, responsible for adding satellite imagery to OSM. In addition, he recently founded OSM Plus to drive commercial collaboration. Steve will be presenting the keynote as the OSM Founder and Chairman Emeritus at the annual international OSM conference: State of the Map 2013 in Birmingham, England, Sept 6-8, 2013.
Telenav-s mission is to help make people-s lives less stressful, more productive, and more fun when they are on the go. Our personalized navigation services help people make faster and smarter daily decisions about where to go, when to leave, how to get there, and what to do when they arrive.
We aim to be everywhere people need us. Our partners are wireless carriers, automobile manufacturers, app developers, advertisers and advertising agencies. Our carrier and automotive partners include AT&T, Bell Mobility, Boost Mobile, Ford, NII Holdings, QNX Software Systems, Rogers, Sprint, Telcel, T-Mobile U.S., U.S. Cellular, and Vivo Brazil. You can also find us in mobile app stores and on the web at and .
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Copyright 2013 Telenav, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
“Telenav,” “Scout,” the Telenav and Scout logos, “telenav.com” and “scout.me” are registered and unregistered trademarks and/or service marks of Telenav, Inc. Unless otherwise noted, all other trademarks, service marks, and logos used in this press release are the trademarks, service marks or logos of their respective owners.
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Mark Burfeind
Telenav, Inc.
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Cynthia Hiponia
The Blueshirt Group for Telenav, Inc.
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