Nav4All chiude i battenti

Nav4All, famoso software di navigazione GPS totalmente gratuito chiude i battenti. Lo comunica l'azienda con una e-mail a tutti quelli che almeno una volta hanno fatto uso di questo software. Il software era praticamente l'unica vera alternativa ai navigatori a pagamento in quanto (sfruttando la connessione internet) offriva mappe e voci totalmente gratis.

Adesso però l'azienda deve chiudere i battenti a causa della licenza non rinnovata da parte di Navteq che è totalmente nelle mani di Nokia.

Nokia aveva davvero bisogno di questo colpo basso? C'era bisogno di far chiudere Nav4All per far decollare il suo sistema di navigazione che sarà comunque incluso in tutti i prossimi Nokia e sarà a sua volta gratuito?

E' un vero peccato. Riportiamo qua sotto il testo integrale della mail:

Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 28-01-2010 16:30 GMT+1

Subject: Nav4All navigation shut down by Navteq

Letter to 27,625,631 Nav4All navigation customers

Dear Customers,

It is with the deepest regret that we hereby notify you that the

global navigation of Nav4All and the Tracking & Tracing will go

offline in 3 days.

The reason for the same is that the data licence

agreement with Navteq (a 100% Nokia subsidiary) was not extended, in

a totally unexpected manner. It is not possible to implement data

from another supplier in our Nav4All systems within the short term.

The Nav4All navigation system was developed for Navteq data. Nav4All

has therefore been constrained to stop.

We greatly regret the fact that we have to suspend the operation of

our service. With your help, we have developed Nav4All into a global

product with 27.5 million users in 56 languages, in 5 years. This has

made Nav4All the largest navigation supplier. This large number of

users also has to do with the fact that Nav4All works on hundreds of

different mobile telephones of many makes such as Blackberry, Sony

Ericsson, Samsung, Motorola, Android, HTC, Nokia, LG, Iphone, Ipod

etc.

After 5 years of testing and market development, we witnessed rapid -

in fact, exponential - growth during the last two years.

That growth

was reported in the licence reports to Navteq. In mid-December 2009,

the global coverage was extended to include the Philippines, Morocco

and Kenya.

Please contact the Nav4All support desk in case you have any

questions: www.nav4all.com/support. If there is any further

information from Nav4All concerning the subject of this letter, the

same will be published on our website: www.nav4all.com. For reasons

of privacy, Nav4All does not have the email addresses of all its

customers, and we therefore request you to forward this email to the

maximum extent possible, in order to ensure that everyone is

informed.

Kind Regards,

Hennie J.M. Groot Koerkamp (CEO)

Nav4All BV

Keizersgracht 62-64

1015 CS Amsterdam NL

The text of this e-mail will be available on our website as soon as

possible in the following languages: Dutch, French, German, Italian,

Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Arabic, Russian, and Indonesian.