Location Based Systems

GPS Insight, a provider of GPS fleet tracking solutions for commercial and municipal fleets, has announced a joint-marketing agreement with SpeedGauge, in which select SpeedGauge services, such as speeding event analysis, will be made available to GPS Insight customers. GPS Insight has also licensed certain SpeedGauge patent rights and will make this functionality available to customers in the near future.

Google has released Google Maps 5.7 for Android and added Transit Navigation (Beta), which currently provides over 12 billion miles of GPS-guided driving and walking directions per year. According to the company GPS turn-by-turn (or in this case, stop-by-stop) navigation is now available for public transit directions in 400+ cities around the globe.

Agnik, a US-based data analytics company for distributed, mobile and embedded environments, has selected Kore Telematics to power its MineDrive usage-based automobile insurance application. This provides insurance carriers with detailed intelligence about driver and automobile performance, enabling more accurate adjustment of their offerings.

In a new ABI Research connected car consumer survey, 1,500 respondents in the US, UK, France, Germany, Japan, and China were asked about their use (and non-use) of several services available to the ‘connected car.’ Among those who do not currently use any infotainment services, connected navigation was named as the most desired infotainment service by between 59 per cent and 72 per cent (extremely/very interested) in all countries except China, where the greatest interest was in concierge services.

TomTom has launched Custom Area Analysis, a historical traffic product which gives customers access to highly granular speed and bottleneck information for road networks around the world. The product supports traffic modelling and analysis of road conditions and traffic performance. By providing a complete view of what is happening across the global road network, TomTom claims that Custom Area Analysis enables enterprises and governments to better understand and more efficiently manage their local areas.

Trimble has signed an agreement to acquire privately-held PeopleNet, a leading provider of integrated onboard computing and mobile communications systems for fleet management. The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2011.

Google has announced that it is making road traffic conditions available in 13 countries in Europe. The new traffic information is in the traffic layer on Google Maps, Google Maps for mobile, and Google Maps Navigation (Beta). Coverage includes all freeways and highways, as well as large roads in major cities in Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia, Spain and Switzerland. Users in the UK will also benefit from a finer grain of street

Nokia has announced that Michael Halbherr has been appointed executive vice president to spearhead the company’s revised mission in mobile and location-based services. He will lead a new location and commerce business unit, which will be formed by integrating the Navteq business with Nokia's social location services operations. Nokia says the unit will develop a new class of integrated social location products and services for consumers, as well as platform services and local commerce services for device ma

Zetes has acquired ProScan, a leading South African company in the field of supply chain, automatic data entry and mobility solutions. Explaining the background to the acquisition, Alain Wirtz, CEO of Zetes, said, “ProScan offers a solid foothold in Africa for Zetes’ Goods ID solutions. There is a high demand on this continent for traceability solutions, particularly to track raw materials. This is a region of burgeoning growth, offering important potential for the Group. Africa represents a natural expansi

TomTom has announced the availability of its latest map product update for automotive, government, and enterprise customers. Some of the enhancements include continued expansion in India with the addition of over 2,000 km of roads in 47 cities, the addition of 64,000km of roads with navigable coverage in Brazil, improvements in Mexico, the Mega Manila area of the Philippines, full coverage of Croatia, and the introduction of a MultiNet map for Namibia and Botswana in Africa. TomTom claims its maps now cover