The navigation systems industry is going miles. Companies are innovating to offer simpler solutions to find our way through the myriad lanes in our cities eavery other day. Right from personal digital assistants and mobile phones loaded with global positioning solutions, this industry has been evolving rapidly during the past five years.
The recent one which is scaling up its offerings is Bangalore-based Onze Technologies, which gives you directions on your normal mobile phone just the way you would ask a roadside vendor. The product — ‘latlong’ (latitude - longitude) — operates through the geographic information system and maps. According to the Onze’s CEO H S Sudarshan, they seek to help people on the move by empowering them with the information to locate destinations and obtain driving directions through text messages on their mobile phones. “All one has to do is just type in the place from where you are to where you have to go and send the SMS to 90088-90088, and you will get back a message explaining the route along with the landmarks along the way,” Sudarshan said.
This offering comes after few other providers announced their solutions wherein you have to send the request to a five digital mobile number.
“The difference with our services is that the SMS is a basic cost unlike few others wherein the SMS will be charged a premium. We do not want to burden the customers,” he noted. The SMS to special 5 digit numbers are billed Rs 5-6 per message.
Onze is offering services in Bangalore and is ready to launch in Chennai and is looking to pan out on a national basis. The company has received some angel funding and may look at raising investment further after six months.
But, how does the company earn revenues? “We follow the model adopted by Google. When you search for a topic on Google, in addition to the search result it throws up small links wherein there are some related services. Similarly, if any customer asks the route to go a wedding or a party, we provide them the route and along with it we tell them that near that party hall there is a florist or a gift shop. We earn revenues from that florist or the gift shop,” noted Sudarshan.
Company officials further added that they are in active discussion with retail store chains, consumer electronic dealers and original equipment manufacturers and a host of others for them to be on board.
