Heike Roettgers is a freelance internet and mobile consultant, helping agencies and start-ups with product strategy and roadmap planning, product concepts, product management and project management.
Skobbler is a free navigation app for the iPhone – it offers turn-by-turn voice navigation for your smartphone, without the hefty price tag others ask for. Yesterday, at the Navigation and Location Summit Europe in Berlin, Skobbler CMO & CFO Markus Thielking explained why they believe the market is going freemium, and high upfront costs will be a thing of the past.
Who is Skobbler?
Skobbler is a completely free-to-download navigation app for iPhone. There’s also a paid version that provides speed camera warnings, but it only costs around €2. In Germany it is the No. 1 paid iPhone app overall, and in the UK it is the No.1 paid navigation app. Skobbler attributes a lot of this success to the unusual route it has taken in the navigation world – more by force than by choice, Skobbler decided to switch maps providers in 2009 and opted for the Wikipedia equivalent for maps – OpenStreetMap. You can see our full report on OpenStreetMap, but the brief version is this: it is a completely open-source digital map, where anyone can register, add and edit maps.
Dedication to free, open source mapping
Thielking explained that Skobbler now fully supports the OSM concept – and has even added a bug reporting feature to their app to improve the tools that the OSM editors use. This was a particularly difficult move by the company. While it does make the service more mainstream, it also benefit its competitors. Anyone who uses OSM for their maps will benefit from the changes that Skobbler contributors make. Thielking pointed out that when you’re dealing with “freemium” it’s not always clear to define where COMMUNITY ends and COMPETITION begins. But Skobbler remains committed to the free and open source option, based around a single, simple rule: it has to add value for consumers, and capture them immediately. While maps are a ubiquitous element in mobile navigation apps (and, increasingly, mobile apps in general) it is the company with the best services who will win the customers.
Skobbler’s bet is on smartphones to win the “navigation war” rather than than Personal Navigation Devices like you get from Garmin or TomTom. It claims that with a clear focus on intra-app connectivity; offline and roaming access; and the freemium model, high-cost navigation apps and PNDs will be a thing of the past.
To get a better insight into the developing world of how mobile is changing the way people interact with the world, check out the People Tracking and Location USA conference, June 22-23, 2010 – Chicago from TheWhereBusiness
