NAVTEQ announces finalists and judges panel for 2010 NAVTEQ Global LBS Challenge® in North America Region

NAVTEQ yesterday announced the finalists of the North America region of the 2010 NAVTEQ Global LBS Challenge. Twelve contestants have been selected to advance to Final Judging, including location-aware applications with the latest features in mapping, social networking, user-generated content, augmented reality, geofencing and location-based gaming.

Here are the finalists for North America:

• 3D Arts, Finland: Hile Arcade is a fast-growing, converged, social gaming community for mobile devices with multiplayer games supporting location-based services in player profiles, scores and buddy pages.
• Cell Storm Mobile Inc., United States: Cell Storm Real Estate is an augmented reality application that lets consumers retrieve estimated prices and additional data about a residential home simply by pointing the viewfinder of their mobile phones at a house.
• Cutlass® Inc., United States: Citizen FYI is a community action network application for GPS cell phones that empowers global citizens to get involved in the improvement and maintenance of their town or city.
• Cypress Solutions Inc., Canada: VUE is a marine fleet solution capable of tracking and reporting the movement and actions of tugboats, barges and log booms.
• eVOTZ, United States: The eVOTZ mobile voting authentication and verification platform and application programming interface (API) turn any GPS-enabled mobile device into a trustworthy and secure voting machine using geofencing.
• Nobex Technologies, United States: Nobex Radio Companion™ is a mobile application that enables smartphone users to listen to more than 5000 radio stations in over 60 countries, with relevant ads delivered in real time using NAVTEQ LocationPoint™ Advertising.
• Razavi Application Developers, United States: Search Party™ is a location-based game that combines live-action player activity with classic gaming and puzzle solving. Players compete in a variety of challenges that track their movement on NAVTEQ® maps.
• SachManya LLC, United States: 360News is an innovative mobile application that puts the power of news reporting in the hands of citizen journalists and news enthusiasts. Geotagged user-generated news can be shared with the rest of the world in a fast and easy manner.
• Spime Inc., United States: Spime’s MapMan® hybrid engine and Map Viewer application offer complete map-related functionality whether connected or not and can be upgraded with premium LBS services from within the application.
• Spriv, United States: Spriv revolutionizes automatic Internet authentication, preventing fraudulent use of stolen credit cards and user/password information by tying their use to the owner’s mobile phone location.
• Tracker Software Inc., Finland: MyWay Outdoor Fitness combines NAVTEQ maps with a calorie calculator for walking and running and the ability to report the user’s performance to a web community.
• ZOS Communications, United States: Zhiing is a rich messaging application with location at its core, enabling services from social to enterprise to be layered into the lives of users—your universal inbox for location communications and interactivity.

The NAVTEQ Global LBS Challenge is a worldwide developer competition conducted by NAVTEQ Network for Developers™ (NN4D), NAVTEQ’s global community and support program for location-based solution (LBS) developers and business partners. Every year NN4D invites developers to build and submit original, pre-commercialized applications using dynamic positioning technology and NAVTEQ maps.

“It is encouraging to see that the Global LBS Challenge continues to attract new developer talent and inspire increased diversification in the development and use of location-based applications among new target audiences. Location features will soon be core to any mobile application coming to market, and NAVTEQ is proud to be driving this development,” commented Marc Naddell, vice president, partner and developer programs, NAVTEQ. “By hosting the Awards Ceremony for the North America region in conjunction with a conference like Where 2.0, it is our hope to spread the wealth of LBS opportunities to a greater number of web and mobile developers around the world.”

Judging panel
Final Judging will take place on March 30 in San Jose (CA) with the following official judges:

• AT&T – David Hildebrant, Associate Director, Enterprise LBS
• deCarta – Louis Bouchard, Marketing Director
• Denso – Yoshi Sasage, Chief Engineer, Business Development for Ubiquitous Product, ITS Engineering
• DeviceAnywhere − Leila Modarres, Vice President, Marketing
• DigitalGlobe − Jim Beckley, Director, Global Account Sales
• Imagination Technologies – Peter McGuinness, Director, Business Development
• Intel − Uday Keshavdas, Senior Marketing Manager, Ultra Mobility Group
• Microsoft Corporation − Chris Pendleton, Technical Evangelist, Bing Maps
• Research In Motion (RIM) − Brian Zubert, Senior Application Development Consultant
• Samsung – Donald Pitt, Senior Director, North America Tech Sourcing
• Tanla − Harri Myllyla, Vice President, Business Development
• Verizon – Kristi Crum, Director of Communication Products

Awards Ceremony
The winners will be announced at an Awards Ceremony on Tuesday, March 30 in San Jose, California, in conjunction with the O’Reilly Where 2.0 Conference, following “Ignite Where, Part 1.” This is an event not to miss: pencil it into your calendar for 8 p.m. in the San Jose Marriott Ballroom III-VI. The address is 301 South Market Street, San Jose. The Global LBS Challenge Awards Ceremony is open to all registered Where 2.0 attendees.

NAVTEQ is also serving as a Platinum sponsor of this year’s Where 2.0 Conference – see more info in previous blog post>>

Global LBS Challenge prizes
NAVTEQ and sponsoring companies are offering prizes that contribute to a global prize pool of over $10 million dollars US in cash, tool and data licenses, and handsets, making the NAVTEQ Global LBS Challenge one of the industry’s most rewarding developer competitions. In addition, “Best of” recognition awards will be awarded in various categories to recognize achievements in particular areas.

Sponsors
Bing Maps, deCarta, DeviceAnywhere, DigitalGlobe, HTC, Intel Moblin, RIM, Samsung and Tanla globally sponsor the 2010 NAVTEQ Global LBS Challenge, with AtlasCT, Alcatel-Lucent and Telefónica as regional sponsors for North America. Imagination Technologies and Mobile Distillery are global award sponsors, with The Code Project, GPS Business News and MundoGeo serving as media sponsors.

Visit http://www.lbschallenge.com/ for information on the other four regions in this year’s competition: Europe-Middle East-Africa (EMEA), India, South America and Asia-Pacific (APAC).