Company Name : NAVITIME JAPAN CO.,LTD. Address : Minami-aoyama Tokyu Bldg.3-8-38 Minami-Aoyama,Minato-ku,Tokyo 107-0062 Japan Founded on : March 1, 2000 President : Keisuke Onishi, Ph.D. Capital : 178 Million Yen URL : http://corporate.navitime.co.jp/en/ Line of business : Development and license business of route search engine and engine of drawing in map Development and license business of data and drawing site chart data format for route search Construction business of position information processing system which makes our company engine and data format core Corporate mission : Serve the industries throughout the world with the know-how in pathfinder engines History : Sep. 1996 Started software development as a new venture business by Ohnishi Netsugaku Co., Ltd. Mar. 2000 NAVITIME JAPAN CO.,LTD. founded as an independent company. TEL : +81-3-3402-0701 MAIL : contact@navitime.com NAVITIME!! NAVITIME is making news for establishing a new global standard time. Time is measured in the same units around the world. But time has another sort of measure: the finite time allotted to each life. This "personal" time is central to the IT industry. Focusing on this sort of time, NAVITIME is defined as the accurate measure of all the time it takes to navigate from one location to the next. Our target is to develop this new measure of time in order to establish it as a global standard. NAVITIME is a solution for true navigation. It keeps maps and time tables from around the world at hand at all times, instantly displaying your optimum total travel time whenever you set a destination, using any combination of means of travel you like - including train, airplane, bus, car, and walking. And NAVITIME is not just a guide for human travel: NAVITIME will make it possible to instantaneously calculate the time required for all sorts of travel, including goods and information. We are the only company in the world with the know-how to accurately calculate all sorts of travel time, supporting all means of travel. The first NAVITIME product went on sale back in 1996, and development is now reaching its peak as we aim to make it the de facto standard in the rapidly growing IT market. NAVITIME JAPAN CO., LTD. ("NAVITIME") president Keisuke Ohnishi and vice president Shin Kikuchi had been researching path-finding algorithms for about 20 years when they launched the business in September 1996 as an in-house venture of Ohnishi Netsugaku. NAVITIME was established as an independent company on 1 March 2000. NAVITIME's vision is for the optimal routes and times calculated by NAVITIME to drive the creation of the next generation of industry. We remain committed to improving development. Our goal is to contribute to society by helping to bring people and networks closer together from a technical perspective, and using the expertise we build up in doing this to further expand our business into the ASP/LBS fields. NAVITIME has the only technology of its kind in the world, and it continues to evolve. Mobile phones have become an indispensable tool in our lives. In Japan, more than 70% of the population owns a mobile phone. Some of the standard features people demand of mobile phones for day-to-day use include telephone and mail. Surveys in various countries around the world, however, show that about 50% of people also want a navigation feature for their phone. Whenever we take action, we are always thinking about how to get where we are going, and how long it will take. Even so, however, there is a chance we will get lost or be late, and this is a constant source of stress in our lives. Think of how much more enjoyable and stress-free our lives would be if the mobile phones we carry around with us could reliably guide us to where we wanted to go, in the time we wanted to get there. In the past, things like car navigation systems, train transfer display services, and electronic street guides for foot travel could only be used for single means of travel. NAVITIME, however, finds all routes to your desired destination, and offers the optimum guidance based on real-time information - all from a single mobile phone. NAVITIME is the only product in the world that offers this type of total navigation, instantaneously combining all possible means of transportation - from trains, to airplanes, to cars, buses, and walking - to get you where you are going on schedule, without any lost time. Why is this? The algorithms for finding optimum paths differ greatly for databases based on train, airplane, and bus schedules, and for databases based on road distances and characteristics, such as for driving or walking. For this reason, it was considered extremely difficult to calculate the optimum route for all means of travel. For example, consider the case where total navigation is performed by combining independent walking-route and train-route search engines. The optimum route is calculated by finding the closest stations from the starting point and the destination, finding a walking route to the station closest to the starting point, finding stations at which to transfer trains, then finding the walking route from the station closest to the destination - three searches in all. But since the closest station is not always the best one, a reliable route cannot be calculated using this logic. For example, in the case where there is more than one station near the starting point, taking a train from a station 1 minute's walk farther than the closest station could dramatically reduce your travel time. This further changes depending on the time, destination, stations you get on and off at, and even where the exits and entrances are located. NAVITIME is the world's first navigation system that achieves total navigation, calculating the optimum means of travel and route using a single path-finding engine for all means of travel. NAVITIME is the world's first navigation engine provided standard on mobile phones. A navigation engine is a vital piece of software that is essential for navigation. It includes features for drawing maps, voice guidance, and map matching to correct GPS errors. KDDI's Ez NaviWalk includes the full specifications for all these features. EzNaviWalk is a revolutionary new service that locates your current position as you walk about every second, providing you with voice guidance to your destination via your mobile phone with instructions like "Turn right 50 meters ahead." Developing a navigation feature for a mobile phone involves some extremely difficult technical issues. Mobile phones have much more limited CPU speeds and memory capacities than PCs and car navigation systems; combined with interruptions from the GPS system, electronic compass, and other hardware, as well as interrupts particular to mobile phones, such as incoming calls and mail, it is extremely difficult to maintain navigation functionality without sacrificing the ability of the device to function as a mobile phone. The fast, lightweight NAVITIME is designed perfectly even for environments like these. The NAVITIME development team also succeeded at developing the world's first software technology for sending vector map data to a mobile device. Recently, NAVITIME's Mviewer map-rendering engine has achieved map-drawing times of less than 0.1 seconds, and the Vformat packet-delivery vector map-data format developed for NAVITIME is more than 10 times smaller than PNG, the conventional map-image data format. These features make it possible to smoothly scroll through maps from around the world right on the screen of the mobile phone. Additionally, navigation via 3-D maps has started on April 2006. 3-D maps contain a great deal of data because they include many photo elements of signs, windows, and the like, but we have developed a new V3D format for NAVITIME that makes map files about 1/50th the size of maps used in ordinary car navigation systems. This makes it possible to smoothly send them to mobile phones and render them on the mobile phone screen. Two-dimensional (2-D) and three-dimensional (3-D) maps each have their good points. With 2-D maps, it is possible to display the route on the map and get an overall feel for the route, while 3-D maps show at a glance what direction you should walk in after you get off the train, what the corner where you should turn looks like, what your destination building looks like, and so on. Since KDDI launched sales of the C3003P in March 2002, the NAVITIME navigation engine has been installed on more than 150 mobile-phone models worldwide, and we remain completely committed to improving NAVITIME and developing versions for more models. Thus, we continue to build NAVITIME's track record as a navigation application for the mobile phone in partnership with mobile-phone makers from around the world, including field testing. And as mobile info-communications devices continue to evolve, we will continue to develop even more sophisticated and polished technologies. NAVITIME for the PC Now NAVITIME is more convenient than ever. Link your mobile phone and PC to use NAVITIME from your PC when you are at home or the office, and from your mobile phone when you are out. When you subscribe to NAVITIME on your mobile phones, you are issued a user name and password. You can then use this to log onto PC-NAVITIME, where the server maintains a common history of your use. For example, you could register the place you plan to visit today from your office PC, and then look up a route to that location from your mobile phone using your history instead of entering a destination on your phone. You could also create a travel plan on your PC, make travel and lodging reservations, and use many other features, and NAVITIME is gathering a great deal of attention as a new business. Our aim is to make NAVITIME the de facto global standard for navigation services. NAVITIME is steadily gaining recognition as an added value for mobile phones, capable of removing the headache from traveling. Every year, more and more telecommunications carriers introducing GPS are introducing NAVITIME. We are currently working to improve services as the official sites for Japan's big telecoms carriers - KDDI, DoCoMo, SoftBank and Willcom - as well as US-based Verizon and ALLTEL, China's China Unicom and China Mobile, E-Plus of Germany, and Taiwan's Chunghwa Telecom. Of the carriers that have introduced the NAVITIME engine, KDDI's Ez NaviWalk (Japan), China Unicom's VoiceNavi (China), and Hutchison's NaviByHutch (Thailand) feature mobile phones equipped standard with GPS functionality, and offer the engine as a native service on the same level as mail and Internet. In each case, NAVITIME is highly popular. Since the NAVITIME navigation engine is used both on the mobile-phone side and server side, our market share is 95%. In Japan, demand has been booming since packet communications service began. The number of people using packet communications has far outstripped initial predictions: Today, 80 million mobile phones are equipped with browsers. Unlike ordinary systems that charge as long as the user is connected, users of packet communications are charged only for the amount of data they send or receive. This makes communications charges cheaper, and the greater the amount of text, images, or other data, the better suited this method of content delivery is. Infrastructure for high-speed packet communications, such as CDMA WIN and FOMA, is now beginning to come online. This will speed data delivery even further. In November 2003, KDDI introduced a flat rate for packet communications, and DoCoMo did the same in June 2004. Since then, content utilization has skyrocketed. Among the many different types of content, positioning services are grabbing attention as one of the most important types of content on the mobile phone. For this reason, as high-speed packet communications infrastructure expands, mobile phones are being equipped standard with GPS chips and electronic compasses, and technologies to easily acquire positioning information are being developed at a lightning pace. This has made it easy to send map data containing large amounts of information to the mobile phone. Whereas before, people would have to give instructions over the phone, now they can check the location of the other party and their own location on a map, plus quickly display the optimum route to their destination and other information. As typified by the fact that Japan owns about 70% of the worldwide market for car navigation systems, Japan is the worldwide leader in the development of this type of positioning service. Around the world, expectations are high that mobile phones will offer leading-edge technologies and content. NAVITIME aims to play a vital role in leading technology development and trends in the global market. NAVITIME is also grabbing attention because the day is approaching when every mobile phone in the world will be equipped with GPS. On 17 May 2004, the Telecommunications Council of the Ministry of Public Management, Home Affairs, Posts and Telecommunications announced that starting in April 2007, as a rule all new third-generation mobile phones offered by mobile-phone carriers will support position notification functionality using GPS. Mobile-phone carriers responded with policies to equip their devices with features to identify location using GPS during emergencies, and notify police, fire department, and other services as needed. One of the reasons behind this policy is that despite that fact that most emergency calls (police and fire department) are made directly from the scene via mobile phone, many emergencies cannot be resolved due to the large amount of time required to pinpoint the caller's location. Back when there were only fixed phones, the nationwide average time required for police and fire departments to respond on-scene to an emergency call was about 5 minutes and 50 seconds. By fiscal 2003, however, this time had risen to 7 minutes and 17 seconds. In the case of public phones and other fixed phones, the address is printed clearly on the phone. This made is easy for callers to identify their locations. But since they were fixed phones, they were often far away from the scene of the emergency, and it often required a considerable amount of time to make the emergency call in the first place. In this respect, mobile phones have the advantage of enabling emergency calls to be made directly from the scene of the emergency. But there was a major problem: if the mobile phone itself is not equipped with a feature to identify the current location, the caller cannot immediately tell where he or she is calling from, thus requiring a large amount of time for emergency services to identify where they need to respond to. This led to the view that the network systems of mobile phone carriers needed to introduce a mechanism to identify and notify emergency services of the caller's location. The trend toward equipping mobile phones with GPS is growing rapidly in Japan as well as the rest of the world. In 1999, E911 was adopted in the United States, making it mandatory for mobile phones to notify emergency services of their positions during emergency calls. In Europe, the EU member countries adopted a decision to support functionality to notify caller position in 2000. Thus, the goal of emergency call notifications has created a worldwide push to equip mobile phones with GPS, and the market for positioning and navigation services is expected to reliably grow as an indispensable tool for both facilitating travel and protecting safety. As mobile phones around the world are equipped with GPS, our goal is to continue to develop our navigation engine, making it the de facto standard based on improving people's lives.