Corporate Blog

When taking a long road trip, having a GPS system is incredibly useful. You will usually be driving through unfamiliar territory, and trying to navigate the old fashioned way will only lead to frustration and a car filled with maps that refuse to fold back up.

While we can’t get you out of speeding tickets or make the trip go faster (well, unless there’s traffic, but we’ll have more on that later), we can give you our top 5 GPS tips for road trips.

1. Don’t always settle for fast food. While fast food meals can get you in and out quickly, sitting down for a meal can be just the break you need to recharge for the second half of the day. NIM navigation apps can let you search for whatever kind of food your mood may call for, so if you happen to feel like sushi for lunch, with mobile navigation, that is an option (unless you are in the Midwest—then sushi may be out of the way).

2. Prepare yourself for traffic. NIM navigation products can alert you when traffic is coming, and oftentimes give you an alternate route to take to avoid it. While there are still some times when it is impossible to avoid the traffic, we have found that if you know it is coming ahead of time, you can prepare yourself and adjust your mindset accordingly. Every little thing helps.

3. Never worry about gas (except for high prices). Many people who have been on road trips have at one point had the scary feeling that can creep up on us when we’re not paying attention—“I may run out of gas.” With mobile navigation devices, you can search the nearest gas stations, and never have to worry about running out.

4. Bring a car charger. There is really no other way to say this–running out of batteries is the worst. If your phone runs out of juice, not only will you not have access to the navigation, but you are also stuck without the other features of your phone, such as playing MP3s.

5. Don’t be afraid to take the scenic route. With the slightest bit of planning, NIM’s navigation products will enable you to get off the main road and take an alternate scenic route. On a long road trip, you never know when you’ll have a chance to detour through a beautiful national park. A road trip is a chance to see the country at its best, and a navigation device can help make sure you do.

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.