Nokia's Christof Hellmis on Ovi Maps and location strategy

Published by Rafe Blandford at 21:36 GMT, March 8th 2010

In this interview, recorded in Barcelona at MWC 2010, we talk to Christof Hellmis, Director Navigation & Routing Solutions at Nokia, about Ovi Maps and Nokia's location strategy. It is clear that location has an enormously important role to play as a key enabler in the future of mobile - and this piece will give you an insight to Nokia's viewpoints and attitudes. We cover the story behind the recent release of the Ovi Maps 3.3 with free navigation, potential future improvements to Ovi Maps, the Ovi Developer SDK, future directions and much more.

Christof Hellmis is responsible for the development of Nokia's location products, the most prominent of which is Ovi Maps. His previous position was COO of Gate5, which was the mapping company Nokia acquired in 2006 and whose Smart2Go product was the direct ancestor of today's Ovi Maps.
 

Key points

• Free mapping and navigation has been a long term vision, but it is only the first step. "It was always with the intention of making location, mapping and, eventually, navigation for free on Nokia devices to the end consumer. So for us it was chapter one of the location story closed - new book, white piece of paper, next step."
   
  
• Ovi Maps 3.3 was downloaded 3 million times in the first four weeks. It is used in nearly every country in the world and has very high active user rates. From March it will be embedded in all new Symbian handsets from Nokia. For older devices it is an open question - it's a question of resources - supporting old devices versus implementing new features in the roadmap.
   
  
• Improving PoIs / locations listings is an on-going process. Working with partners is important to provide complete and accurate data. Similarly working with DigiGlobe and Navteq for improvements in satellite and mapping visualisations respectively. User generated data will play a role (primarily in correct and updating), but it is not an "either or" question - it is a combination of both.
    
  
• Ovi Developer SDK ('apps on maps') will be productised in the second half of 2010. It is based on web technologies and addresses both the mobile and desktop (anything W3C complaint).
    
  
• There is so much more to come: "Nokia is about connecting people - it always was and I hope, in the future, it always will be. The way people connect will be raised to new dimensions. If you really look at what matters for people in their daily lives there are three dimensional matters. There are three things - time, location and other people. Combining these three dimensions cleverly in your life in something that supports you - this is what we are after."

Video - part 1

Video - part 2

Rough Transcript

Christof Hellmis [Nokia], on Ovi Maps going free:

This is what we have been dreaming of for the last five years. Being a small company called gate5, being bought by Nokia, going through the Navteq acquisition... it was always with the intention of making location, mapping and, eventually, navigation for free on Nokia devices to the end consumer. So for us it was chapter one of the location story closed - new book, white piece of paper, next step.

Now the success speaks for itself. Within less than 4 week we have more than 3 million downloads of the application. And it is not only downloads, we have a very high active user rate. People use maps everyday for multiple contexts. Simple orientation, drive, walk. A new function that we bought, called Lifecasting, where people their location to social networks, in this case Facebook. We see users being very active and addicted to this topic. So we are very happy and pleased with the uptake of the service.

Rafe Blandford [All About Symbian]:

When can we expect to see the free Navigation embedded into handsets?

Christof Hellmis:

As of March all new handset being shipped will have the client pre-installed.

Rafe Blandford:

And in terms of current device support we have S60 3.2 and S60 5.0 (Symbian^1) - can we expect to see this extended?

Christof Hellmis:

We haven't decided yet. Going forward it is obvious - all new devices including Maemo / MeeGo platform will get the client. For others we haven't made a final decision yet, for us it is mainly a resource problem - we have scarce resources - we have roadmaps that burst with new innovation which we want to do - so it is a question what do we do first - and we haven't decided yet.

Rafe Blandford:

Ovi Maps as a product has strengths and weakness. A common comparison is the location / points of information database tied in with Google Maps versus Ovi Maps. Is there something we can expect to see in the future where this will improve?

Christof Hellmis:

Yes, we will improve a lot. We do not crawl the web for information because it is not so reliable. You see us being very active in the partner space - a few weeks ago Navteq announced a partnership with a Turkish yellow pages provider - so you will see us partnering with a lot of PoI and content providers that provide more accurate and more complete data. But clearly this is something we are absolutely aware of, something we would like to improve, but we do it with our partners because we believe a purely web based crawling approach does not make so much sense for us.

Rafe Blandford:

Do you think user generated PoIs could play a role here? Looking at Google, they have their GoogleBase, a lot of their strategy is based around user generated data.

Christof Hellmis:

It will be. But it will not be an either or. As always in life it will be a combination. The same way we don't believe in purely community generated maps, we believe it is very good to have a high quality base, maybe on mapping, maybe on PoI and use the community to correct, update or add missing information. This makes much more sense than just relying on the community approach - which we believe it is difficult to get a holistic and complete picture.

Rafe Blandford:

And similarly can we expect to improvements in the satellite view etc.?

Christof Hellmis:

Yes, we are working a lot [on this] and our partner DigiGlobe - they just launched a new satellite, so you will see this improving. If you follow Navteq closely they are equipping their new cars to make more imagery, richer imagery, move towards 3D imagery, photo realistic objects and point clouds. There is a lot of innovation to happen - this is why I said new chapter started - by far it is not done.

Rafe Blandford:

Traditionally Navteq has been on a six month update cycle - have you asked them to impove that. so you can have continuous updates, given that Ovi Maps is delivered over the air.

Christof Hellmis:

Navteq delivers roughly four releases a year, but it is obvious that the way maps have been delivered in the past - as DVD sets - this will change in the future. A live service will have the ability to update much quicker, and , yes, this is one of the key areas where we work with Navteq very closely together to have some sort of incremental updating of map data available and enabled.

Rafe Blandford:

And talking about Map coverage, on of the key areas is the wide range of coverage. Can you tell us how many countries people are using Ovi Maps in?

Christof Hellmis:

I think it is easier to count how many countries people are not using Ovi Maps. I think it is Korea - where we don't have maps, Japan - there we don’t have maps, Israel - we don’t have maps. We see users of Maps in every other country - there is not a single country where Maps is not being used. Of course the intensity varies - and that goes along with our strengths in the device business, but I think that is natural.

Rafe Blandford:

What is the timeline for Ovi Developer SDK ('apps on maps')?

Christof Hellmis:

That's an interesting question. We are working very hard to mature it and productise it and our plan is something in the second half, to give something out on real devices. And from day one have some compelling apps running on top of the Ovi Developer SDK running.

Rafe Blandford:

Do you see that as the way to add compelling features. For example one of the number one consumer desires is to have accurate public transport information - multi-modal transport information?

Christof Hellmis:

Yes, you will see multiple roles. Probably you will find more static information, like a basic Tube Planner, being part of a map. But as you already saw in September at Nokia World when we launched the closed Beta, we had Deutsche Bahn as one partner - they do public transport for all over Germany - and you could see in real time where the trains and buses are.

But you can also go round user cases where you say 'I am arriving at a station and I want to rent a bike' (because Deutsche Bahn also provide a bike and car rental service). So it is really about enablement of a multi-modal use case, but it is provided and operated by Deutsche Bahn, it is their look and feel, their use case - they know how best to do it on top of the Ovi SDK.

Rafe Blandford:

And can you tell us about the technology that this is built on top of?

Christof Hellmis:

It is standard web technology. So it scripting not coding we say. Our players have JavaScript APIs. So if you use HTML, CSS and JavaScript you are done.

Rafe Blandford:

And that also ties into the web version of Ovi Maps?

Christof Hellmis:

That's the true promise of our Ovi SDK that uses web technologies and spans across everything that is W3C comatible will be able to run Ovi applications.

Jeb Brilliant [A Brilliant Blog]:

Are we going to see more services in addition to Facebook on Lifecasting?

Christof Hellmis:

Yes, definetely, we will see other social networks. We can add networks without major upgrades.

Rafe Blandford:

What does it feel like to be part of this mapping revolution?

Christof Hellmis:

For us it is the ride of our lives, to be very honest. January 21st would have been a good time to retire, if the next phase wasn't even more interesting that the first phase! Because again Navigation is the base case, it is the obvious one, but it is the commoditized one. You don't get excited by turn by turn anymore. It needs to work and work reasonably well, yes there will be innovation, but is evolution not revolution.

Now the really interesting game starts. All the hyper-social, hyper-local - the combination of those on top - this is where it gets exciting and 3 dimensional stuff, where you really start to get eye candy.

For a lot of people a map is map - its is just 2D - just colorful lines on a display. But for us mapping in context is really 3D - the digitized globe - this is why it is getting really exciting. Nokia is about connecting people - it always was and I hope, in the future, it always will be. The way people connect will be raised to new dimensions. If you really look at what matters for people in their daily lives there are three dimensional matters. There are three things - time, location and other people. Combining these three dimensions cleverly in your life in something that supports you - this is what we are after.

Categories: Software, Developer, Industry, Editorial Thoughts, Events
Platforms: General, S60 3rd Edition, S60 5th Edition

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jimmy1 Good interview, though I wish you had asked him about integrating Ovi Maps on a Nokia handset with all the other functions and applications.

This level of integration is on the roadmap. However it will not happen overnight or all at once (the latest version of Ovi Maps has address lookup in Contacts from within Ovi Maps (but not vice versa yet). The integration of Ovi Maps into third party apps is theoretically possible now, but not many applications choose to use it. The Ovi Developer SDK will clearly make things a lot easier here too.

But yes I agree this is exactly the sort of thing we need to see more of. A good example of your music one is for Shazam and Midomi, which both do link into the Music Store (especially good if you're on CwM).

Quote:

Originally Posted by Pawlee Why hasn't the N86 been officially supported yet?

I imagine there is a technical reason for this. As other have noted, if your desperate for free, you can download another S60 3.2 version and it seems to work.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Unregistered I think Ovi Maps is getting there. It keeps improving slowly and steadily. But the way Nokia handled this free navigation thing could have been a lot better. On Nokia's home page there's a big banner that says "Navigation on your Nokia. For free. Forever". But nowhere it says that if you have any but one of the latest handset, it's not free at all. If I select the Maps version for my N82 it doesn't tell me that free navigation isn't available. And if I happen to know that I do have to pay and I want to check how much it'll cost me (which I do, I'm traveling in 2 weeks), the Pricing page redirects me to the Download page. I have to say that customer support is still Nokia's weakest link. -Nico

I think people under-estimate the difficulty in doing something like this for multiple older handsets across many different product families. Ovi Maps is actually the best I've seen from Nokia in terms of supporting older handsets (in general).

But I do agree there's defintely room for extra clarity on the website (thanks for your observations on this). I suspect it may be a resource issue (i.e. how many people fall into each segment - I suspect the number of onwers of older devices trying to download this are relatively small compared to more recent handset owners).

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rafe I think people under-estimate the difficulty in doing something like this for multiple older handsets across many different product families.

They underestimated it too. From http://events.nokia.com/ovimaps/index.html :

Until today, Navigation has been kept in the hands of the few. Today that changes. We realised that billions of people around the world already have mobile phones that are perfectly suited to delivering Navigation. So we’re going to let them do that. From this day on, Navigation on your Nokia, with Ovi Maps, will be free for everyone, everywhere, to get people to the places they love. Now, and forever.

It looks to me like they bit off more than they could chew. Same old Nokia that releases a billion handsets with a billion product codes each and then can't keep up with software upgrades.

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