Navteq

» see navteq.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Nobody was a navteq customer. That is the first thing to say about it, and it is most of the reason the name went away without anyone noticing. You bought a car with a screen in the dashboard, or you bought a Garmin unit off a shelf, and somewhere in the corner of that screen there was a line of small type crediting whoever supplied the map. For a very long stretch that line said navteq, and that line was the entire product.

It began in 1985 in Sunnyvale as Karlin & Collins, named for Barry Karlin and Galen Collins, and became Navigation Technologies Corporation in 1987. The work was as literal as it sounds. People drove roads in vehicles and recorded what was actually there, including which turns were legal, which lanes went where, and what the speed limit said, because none of that existed as data anywhere. Philips came in during the early nineties and put close to $600 million into the company across years in which it was not a business so much as a very long survey.

i build computer vision for aerial platforms now, which means geospatial data is something i think about during working hours. That is a professional relationship to a map supplier rather than a personal one, and it is the only kind of relationship anyone outside the industry ever had with navteq. This grave is for a brand that lived its whole life one layer below the surface people touched.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rise ~

The company took the Navteq name in 2004 and went public on the NYSE that February under the ticker NVT, which was the first point at which the survey started looking like an asset. By then the road database was deep enough that it had become genuinely hard to replicate, and the whole automotive navigation industry was built on top of two suppliers: navteq and Tele Atlas.

That duopoly is what set the price. In October 2007 Nokia announced it was buying navteq for $8.1 billion, and within weeks TomTom moved on Tele Atlas for roughly €2.9 billion. Two handset and device companies had concluded at the same moment that owning the map was strategically necessary, and between them they spent something near eleven billion dollars acting on it. The Nokia deal closed on 10 July 2008. At its widest the company ran around 5,500 people across 53 countries out of a Chicago headquarters.

~ the funny part ~

Google shipped free turn-by-turn navigation on Android in October 2009, roughly fifteen months after the Nokia deal closed, using map data it had gone and built for itself. The thing both buyers had decided was too expensive to replicate got replicated by a third party who then gave the result away. Neither eleven-billion-dollar bet ever recovered from that.

Nokia held on, merged navteq into its own operations in 2011 as Location & Commerce, and on 13 November 2012 announced that the whole business was now called HERE. On 3 August 2015 it sold HERE to a consortium of German carmakers for €2.8 billion, which is around a third of what it had paid seven years earlier. The map was still excellent the entire time. That was never the problem.

~ what it became ~

This is a brand grave rather than a company grave, and it is worth being straight about the difference. HERE Technologies is still there, still supplying the data that goes into dashboards, now owned by the carmakers who were its biggest customers. The road survey navteq started in 1985 has never stopped running.

What actually died on 13 November 2012 was the last name in that chain that belonged to the people who did the original work. Karlin & Collins became Navigation Technologies became Navteq became a business unit inside Nokia became a word Nokia chose to stop using. The database has outlived four names and three owners, which is the usual fate of infrastructure. It gets kept and the credit line gets repainted.

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