Wayfinder

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

~ the goodbye ~

By the time phone navigation reached me it was already free, and free is not a market condition you can walk back from. That is the whole reason this grave exists. Wayfinder built a good business out of charging people every month to be told where to turn, and the business ended not because the product got worse but because the price of the same thing went to zero in the space of one winter.

The company started in Malmö in 1995 as Itinerary Systems IS AB and took the Wayfinder name in 2002. Its founder was David Svensson. What it wrote was navigation software for phones that were not designed for it. Symbian and Windows Mobile were the good case. The rest were Java handsets with a bluetooth GPS puck paired to them, because the phone itself had no receiver in it. Getting turn-by-turn directions onto that hardware at all was the achievement.

The main product was Wayfinder Navigator, sold as a subscription with maps you downloaded per region. Around it sat Wayfinder Earth, a 3D globe with over three million points of interest, and SpeedAlert, which warned you about speed cameras across Europe. It listed on the Nordic Growth Market in 2005 at a market value of six hundred million kronor, which for a Swedish software house selling to European carriers was a real number.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was ~

Selling navigation as a subscription made sense for exactly one reason: maps cost money. The road data came from the two companies that surveyed it, and both of them charged per user per year. Anyone shipping a navigation product in 2007 was paying rent on the underlying map, which is why nobody gave it away and why the pricing looked like insurance rather than software.

Wayfinder's route to customers was the operator. Vodafone put it in front of subscribers, which is how a company in Malmö reached phones across Europe without ever building a consumer brand. That worked well enough that in december 2008 Vodafone stopped reselling it and bought the whole thing, offering 239 million kronor, about 33 million dollars, and closing in early 2009. Ninety-seven people came with it.

~ the day it died ~

On 28 october 2009 Google announced free turn-by-turn navigation as part of Google Maps on Android. On 21 january 2010 Nokia made Ovi Maps navigation free on its own handsets. Two of the largest companies in the industry had decided within three months of each other that directions were a feature of the phone rather than a product sold on it, and both of them had the map licenses to make it stick.

Vodafone announced on 12 march 2010 that it was closing Wayfinder and letting the whole staff go, fifteen months after buying it. The Swedish press covered it as an acquisition that had been overtaken before it was digested. Nothing was wrong with the software. The thing it charged for had simply stopped being something anyone would pay for.

~ what came after ~

On 13 july 2010 the code went out under a BSD 3-clause license, server and clients both, with builds covering Symbian and Android among others, and map data importable from OpenStreetMap. That was an unusually decent ending for a corporate shutdown, and it happened because somebody inside decided the work should not be deleted along with the payroll.

The pattern repeated across the category. Navteq disappeared into Nokia, and the standalone satnav suckered to the windshield became a thing you noticed in older cars. wayfinder.com now belongs to a venture capital firm with no connection to any of it.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »