Navteq location begins permeating all of Nokia’s apps

BARCELONA--Nokia is leaning heavily on its Navteq acquisition as it builds out its services strategy. Today at its annual press and analyst event, Nokia World, the handset vendor unveiled plans for several new services, from social location to point-of-interest information applications, that rely directly or indirectly on Navteq’s mapping and location technology as well as the increasing availability of sensors in its devices.

What appeared to be a defensive acquisition in 2007 when it purchased Navteq for $8 billion has become a key element of its Ovi services strategy. The company has not only used Navteq’s mapping and data tools to power its Nokia Maps navigation service but is integrating the platform with all manner of network and phone-based applications to essentially location-enable all of its primary services. For instance, its series of city and travel guides integrate directly with Nokia Maps, as does its Sports Tracker application, which allows runners to calculate route distances and time their runs.

Perhaps most interesting, Nokia is exploring ways of taking other contextual information from its customers’ Ovi profile and tying it into the location engine. Today it announced plans for a platform called Social Location, or So-Lo, which uses GPS coordinates to update a user’s social network profile, creating a real-time map of the user’s location, which can be seen by friends on a Facebook or MySpace profile. The platform is still in the conceptual stage and will be first introduced in 2009 on the Nokia N97, a new high-end touch-screen smartphone, which Nokia also unveiled today. Initially it will display a user’s location on a map and link that location to related pictures and videos. But the potential for sharing other types of information is enormous, said Jonas Guest, Nokia vice president heading the N series line. Contextual information combined with GPS could be used to tell not just where a user is but what they are doing. The phone could communicate to the social network what song a user is listening to or whether a user is at home, at lunch or even on a business trip.

“If your location is your office, you’re most likely at work,” Guest said. “If you’re following a predetermined route at roughly the same time every day, it’s likely you’re in the middle of your commute.” All of this information could be used to automatically update a private profile on any number of social and business networking sites, Guest said.