Location based services and maps company MapmyIndia has partnered (pdf) with a series of car makers to offer its GPS solutions on a range of car models. It’s partnerships are across car manufacturers, for offering the GPS solution to their customers. MapmyIndia’s partners include BMW, Jaguar-Land Rover, Mercedes, Toyota, Honda, Volkswagen, Renault, Mitsubishi, GM, Ford, Tata, Mahindra and Maruti, and the cars involved in this partnership include sedans like New Honda City, Tata Manza, Fiat Linea and Renault Scala; luxury sedans like the BMW 7, 5 and 3 series; SUVs (Sports Utility Vehicles) like Mahindra XUV 500, Mahindra Ssangyong Rexton and Ford Endeavour; and luxury SUVs like Jaguar Land Rover Freelander 2. These cars will have MapMyIndia Maps available on their built in navigation systems, thereby making it easier for customers to adopt/purchase the maps.
MapmyIndia Maps 7.1: MapmyIndia has said that these car models will offer the company’s navigation solution as part of its GPS navigation offering to their consumers. This solution includes the recently launched MapmyIndia Maps 7.1 which claims to cover 7.1 million places of interest, 1.9 million road kilometers, and 600,000 towns and villages. It also claims to provide maps for 4,751 cities with street level details, 39 cities with house level details and 36 cities with full 3D city models.
Navigation Features: Besides this, the company stated that the solution will offer various navigation and driver assistance features like live traffic information and visual cues like extended lane guidance, junction views, signposts, city guides, regional voice guidance in nine regional languages, regional maps in four local languages and rich points of interest. Extended Lane guidance alerts users the lane they should choose prior to a turn or an exit while junction views offers a sneak peek at upcoming intersections and sign posts provides information on the major landmarks, localities and cities that come during the journey.
The company also mentioned that the maps will offer information on time-based turn restrictions and whether a particular road is a one-way or a two-way.
MapmyIndia claims that it has sold over 1,40,000 GPS navigation entertainment systems through its network of more than 1,500 car showrooms and car accessory shops across 100+ Indian cities till now. Note that these sales include the company’s Portable Navigators, CarPads and fitted In-dash systems.
Last month, SAP India had partnered with MapmyIndia to improve its SAP Data Quality Solution using MapmyIndia’s India Address Directory, in order to help enterprises verify precision of data, profile, cleanse and standardize it and enable them to manage customer records effectively.
Prior to this, it had launched a maps and GPS navigation app called Don’t Panic for iOS users. It had also reduced the price of its iOS navigation app, ‘Sygic & MapmyIndia: GPS Navigation’ to $29.99 from $49.99, for a limited time period, in a bid to attract users who had updated their devices to iOS 6 and were disappointed with Apple’s default Maps app. The app is currently available for $34.99 on the iTunes App Store at the time of writing this article.
In August 2012, MapmyIndia had launched a new device, ‘CarPad 5‘. which was essentially a 3G enabled Android tablet offering its navigation interface along with communication and multimedia capabilities. Earlier in the year, it had launched an Android based In-car Navigation and Entertainment system which featured a large touch screen, DVD player, iPod connectivity, USB and SD card support, Aux-in and AV-in for connecting other audio and video sources, Bluetooth connectivity for hands-free calling, AV-in for reverse camera support, Steering Wheel Controls, AV-out to connect to rear-seat or roof-mounted monitors and a built in FM radio player.
Besides this, it had also recently launched a mobile web portal for GPRS enabled smartphones, a navigation app with house number search for iOS platform, and MapMyIndia ShowNearby, a places app for iPhone, Android and BlackBerry platforms.
