NIM Corporate Blog

We were proud to be the first voice guided turn-by-turn app on the iPhone, but we never expected we’d be the only nav app there. Today, our friends at AT&T joined us on the iPhone platform, making a turn-by-turn app available for $9.99 a month. Charges go on your AT&T mobile bill.

A couple of observations about the different approaches to similar applications:

· Gokivo integrated with iTunes: We chose to integrate our navigation with popular apps on the iPhone. So you can play music from iTunes and still get voice-guided navigation that you can hear. Gokivo automatically mutes music to make the navigation announcement and then returns to your music.

· Gokivo lets you navigate to addresses in Contacts: Gokivo can easily navigate to addresses in your contacts on the iPhone. AT&T Navigator does not currently allow an easy way to click on contacts and get immediate directions.

· With Gokivo, just shake to recalc your route! As we mentioned earlier, we built Gokivo to maximize its integration with other features of the iPhone. So if you need to recalc your route to avoid traffic or get back on course, just give the iPhone a shake. No button pushing required.

· Gokivo local search, ratings and content from Yahoo! We know any app is only as good as the content you find there. That’s why we partnered with Yahoo so that our users would get the latest in information and the widest possible assortment of opinions and reviews when looking for food, fun and entertainment, much more than just business listings. AT&T is using ratings and information from www.yellowpages.com and you may find that some categories have no ratings at all.

· No auto billing for Gokivo and cancel sub easily: There is no “free” version of AT&T Navigator. Users must download the app and then enter their phone number so the subscription can be billed on the AT&T mobile bill. But be careful, there’s also no way to cancel your AT&T subscription from the app. You’ll have to call or email AT&T to stop billing, even if you’ve deleted the app from your phone. Users will get a chance every month to use In App purchasing to get another 30 days of navigation with gokivo. Gokivo and the apple iTunes App Store neither allow auto-renewals nor free apps that charge a subscription.

Anyway, we salute our colleagues at AT&T and welcome them to the Apple store. Consumers always win when there’s healthy competition. Stay tuned to the App store for more nav apps. We certainly will be watching!

As a follow up to our last post, we want to go into a little more detail about what exactly you get when you download the $0.99 cent app, and what you get with the monthly subscription.

Basic download of the Gokivo app

Our partnership with Yahoo! is one of the most exciting aspects of the new app, and everyone that pays to download the app will get to take full advantage. When you want to perform a search, Gokivo uses the iPhone GPS to pinpoint where you are, and then uses your location to tap into the Yahoo! search database and find search results close to you.

Some examples of search categories include: restaurants, movie theaters, hotels, gas stations and ATMs. Whatever it is that you choose to search for, Gokivo will pull up a map and then show all the nearest applicable results. The partnership with Yahoo! also means that Gokivo users have access to Yahoo! Local’s ratings and reviews, so you will be able to quickly monitor the quality of your search results as well.

As far as navigating to these places goes, the basic $0.99 cent download will give you written directions to wherever you want to go, but not voice guided directions.

Monthly subscription to Gokivo

The monthly subscription costs $9.99/month and includes every feature in the app. When you select a place you want to go, instead of getting a list of directions to take, you will get voice-prompted directions that use GPS to follow you while you go and make sure you get to your destination.

While we understand that consistent, accurate navigation is the most important part of our app, we also wanted to make sure that people got more than that. Here are some of the other functions we have included in the subscription model of Gokivo

· Real-time traffic alerts warn you about delays along your route and allow you to easily detour around traffic as needed – simply give the iPhone a shake and you will be prompted to take a detour

· Have an at a glance view of estimated arrival times, and the distance between you and your destination

· Enjoy your music library while navigating! Listen to your tunes, and then when a voice needs to direct you where to go, the music will fade

· Integrate your contacts to navigate to a business or friend’s house

As a whole, we think that both options can provide value depending on what someone may want. If you are someone who decides that voice prompted turn by turn navigation is what you are interested in, we feel confident that our app will provide everything you are looking for.

If you are someone who just wants to be able to tap into Yahoo! to search locally and always be informed of what is around you, then it sounds like just downloading the app and not paying for the subscription is for you.

We expect different users to select different options, and hopefully, you will select whatever is right for yourself.

It was really great to get Gokivo launched yesterday in the app store. But the launch was admittedly not perfect.

We want to clarify how our pricing for the app works… Users pay 99 cents to get access to the maps and all of the local information provided by our partner Yahoo! Local, as well as one-click access to the great discovery features in the app. Looking for a place to eat nearby? Just click “restaurants” in the category section and users instantly see what’s around them. Need a tank of gas quickly? Just click “gasoline” and instantly see what’s nearby. That is what you get for 99 cents.

If you want voice guided turn-by-turn navigation to one of these destinations, there’s a different price. For $9.99 a month users get immediate access to the first and only turn-by-turn, voice guided app currently on the iPhone. Delivering an in-dash quality navigation experience isn’t easy and it isn’t cheap - it takes a lot of work and money to deliver all these features and functionality that’s included in a turn-by-turn navigation app; and unlike product with maps on the device, we are updating maps and search indexes constantly. subscription based navigation apps have been generally priced at $9.99 “in the market”…..and Apple now has options in line with that. If you want free step by step directions, just touch the blue right arrow for more detail, scroll down to “Walking Directions”.

Some users also felt that the initial description of the app did not make clear that turn-by-turn navigation was only available to users who chose to subscribe. We quickly updated our description in the app store to make it much clearer about the pricing for the navigation.

But wait there’s more in the misstep department. Due to an error in the build that was initially posted in the iPhone app store some users were told they would have to pay 99 cents a minute for turn-by-turn navigation. Yikes!! Clearly a mistake on our part and one we quickly corrected as soon as we noticed, the update should be up in the store shortly. These (1 minute and 10 minute) were part of the QA test build and were there to test the new in app billing with out having to wait 30 days to resubscribe.

What can we do now? Certainly we apologize to anyone who felt our description of the app could have been clearer. We agree and we’ve changed that. To those who saw the incorrect “per minute” pricing, we apologize for that bonehead mistake and hope it won’t discourage you from trying this great application with some really awesome features that have never been available on the iPhone.

So it’s onward and upward from here. Stay tuned for new features and capabilities in Gokivo.

Since the day Apple said they were opening up their apps to navigation developers, we’ve been on the move. We’ve long thought Gokivo, our consumer brand, was prime for iPhone development, so we hit the ground running. Ok, we sprinted. So fast that we’re one of the first navigation apps in the app store for 3.0, which went live today.

While we (clearly) love navigation and knew it would be great on the iPhone, we wanted to go a step further. So, we struck a deal with Yahoo! Local to provide Gokivo users with comprehensive and robust local search and content within the app. More specifically, the app helps people easily get where they want to go with voice prompted navigation, as well as get access to Yahoo! local data, including contact information and ratings and reviews.

As you’ll see when you check out the product, we really took advantage of all the new software functionality (literally EVERY single one of the new features of the software) in an effort to make Gokivo look like a native iPhone app, and offer as much functionality within the product as possible.

Below are a few of the cool new features we listed in our press release today:

• Robust hyper-local search and discovery powered by Yahoo! Local. One-click searches for bars, restaurants, gas stations, ATMs and many more local points of interest

• Access to the most robust real-time traffic notification on mobile devices, giving users plenty of advance notice to avoid traffic snarls and road work slow downs

• Syncing with Bluetooth in the car or via headset, providing output for music and turn-by-turn navigation audio prompts

• An embedded iPod control, which allows you to listen to music while you are navigating with Gokivo – the music automatically fades (or pauses, if changed in settings) for voice prompts

• The ability to simply “shake” the iPhone to immediately receive alternate route suggestions when encountering things such as traffic congestion

• Find address information directly from any contact in the iPhone and get immediate one-click navigation to the specific address

As any company would be on the day of their launch, we were excited to see the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and BusinessWeek mentions of our product in their stories. Would love to hear what you think as well.

It’s .99 cents to download the app and the full navigation functionality is available for $9.99/month subscription.

- Wall Street Journal - http://bit.ly/cAkQq
- New York Times - http://bit.ly/nbJS
- BusinessWeek - http://bit.ly/13foiv

Almost 2 months ago, we launched Gokivo in the Blackberry App World. Since then, we’ve enjoyed seeing the (excuse the boasting for a moment) feedback and high marks we’ve received - 52 reviews and counting, with an average rating of 4 out of 5!

It’s exactly this type of feedback and reinforcement that motivates us come to work each day. With that said, we are interested in all feedback, not just the positive bits. We’re trying our best to make Gokivo as great as it can be – and with your help and feedback, we’ll
get it there.

If you have any opinions or suggestions you want to share with us, shoot us an email at contactus@gokivo.com, or review in the Blackberry App Store. We’re listening.

NIM has recently created a new Twitter account called NavigationNews. With this account, we plan to not only provide updates on happenings at NIM, but also broader news in the Navigation/GPS space that we all know and love. We do not intend for it to be solely a self-serving marketing platform. Yes, yes, we’ll post a retweet or two about people loving our service, but we really hope for NavigationNews to be a place where we engage with others in the industry – and with people who just care about cool navigation and local search stuff.

Once again, our handle is NavigationNews, and if anyone has any comments or suggestions for us, send a direct message and we will get back to you as soon as possible. Follow us!

Gokivo

NIM’s Gokivo was recently announced as the winner of Microsoft’s Mobile Incubation Week. This contest, an American Idol style competition for mobile application developers, was a first-ever and was held on Microsoft’s campus in Silicon Valley. The purpose was to show off top mobile applications and the upcoming Windows Marketplace for mobile available this Fall.

And (in case we didn’t make it clear) we won!

Out of a pool of 50 applicants, they chose six finalists to give a presentation of their app to a panel of judges including reps from CNET and Gizmodo. NIM was announced as the winner via the Twitter feed of Brian Hoskins from Microsoft.

By winning the contest, Gokivo will receive early placement into Windows Marketplace when it is finally released to the general public.