SatGuide goes mass mkt, now in 8 Indian languages

SatNav Technologies, the pioneer in the GPS products space, known for its innovative line of products is now making another remarkable progress by introducing voice prompts in 8 Indian languages. Introduced for the first time in this country, this could be one of the major factors for mass market expansion of the GPS Navigation space, which is fast growing in India. SatGuide has also made another major technology enhancement in maps; they are available in HLG (High Level Graph) mode which offers a host of benefits to users.

Users can drive listening to the voice prompted directions in the language of their choice. Language options available are: Bengali, English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Oriya, Tamil and Telugu. Many more languages will be introduced soon. This move will bring into the navigation fold a large number of users who are not familiar with English, but who can be handed over the unit to navigate to any given place after feeding in the details. They just need to listen to it and follow the path advised, thus enabling SatGuide to tap the huge vernacular market in the country.

Apart from selling this to the new customers, SatGuide will offer the same free to all customers who are under their existing upgrade plans. The language options will be available through all it's platforms, PDAs, PNDs, Phones, Laptops and Desktops too.

HLG maps ensure that the performance of SatGuide is much faster than the original version. For example, the generation of routes between two points is 3 times faster; when searching for a particular POI, the POIs are displayed now at a significantly faster rate. When you take a wrong turn, SatGuide re-calculates your route for you. In HLG maps, the route re-calculation is within a matter of seconds. SatGuide is making all this possible while keeping the memory consumption extremely low; down to 1/5^th, so that all other applications on the device are left untouched and can run with ease.

SatGuide is on a rapid growth plan to ramp up its product offerings in the current year. On the anvil are new products to be launched, more depth to be added to its maps etc. SatNav's focus with GPS offerings has always been to take these technologies to the masses and increase the consumer base as well as the overall market in India. With the earlier product being available for phones and PNDs, recently ported to laptops and desktops and with the new current addition of the vernacular market the company is well on its way to achieve the goals it has set out for itself.

In this context, Mr. Amit Prasad, CEO & MD of SatNav Technologies, speaking at the Canalys Navigation Forum in Bangalore, said, "We now have our product in 8 languages, opening up a huge market hitherto untapped. As a pioneer, we have always led the way in defining new markets and launching new products first, best in quality and at the most cost effective prices. We will also be raising up to 5mn US$ through a private equity placement soon which will further aid our current objectives." 

Sourced From: Perfect Relations Limited